Character rolled back - 3 months worth of inventory lost

[rotf]

I find this extremely fishy and OP isn't probably not telling the whole truth. First of all, the OF really isn't the best place to try and it should be worked through with customer support.
Second, if a rollback really happened the whole character should be reverted, not only their inventory. But OP has 6 (or 7 if you count Scholar and Summoner separate) jobs at max level. He also has the Innocence mount and Eden Minor minion.
Either his account was compromised AGAIN, for one reason or another, or he's straight out lying trying to create mistrust to SE.

As I said, I did try reaching out to them, with no success. Anyone from the inside can research their records and see the history of the case. Not sure what else I can provide here not to sound "fishy"?
Also as I said, the rollback in question affects inventory and gil. My levels and classes were not affected. Looks like mount doesn't count as inventory as that remained.

I play the game since ARR, even though I don't use the forums (but you can see from my char)...
Never had issues with SE before, but this one was so grotesque and so soul crushing for me that I had to see if anyone else went through the same, and possibly find an alternative

[MrKusakabe]

This sucks so much! For some reason, I can really feel with you.. But, one thing I am curious about: Why did you open a "compromised account" ticket - and then play on that account again? If Square Enix' automated systems find a suspicious activity, they usually lock you out and contact you, not the other way around. So you were taking the step in fear of your account being hacked/abused by someone else, but then happily play and buy expansions with it? That is weird. Can you please add the least puzzle piece to the whole picture or correct me train of thought?


You had summoned a huge Damocles sword over your account by opening that ticket - and it just dropped today. But you put your account into that limbo state yourself. That is like going to the doctor because you think you broke your hand, then you can't wait for the x-ray results of your fractured hand and still do sports, finally cracking your bones - just to be shocked the doctors says no: "You should have not played yet."

Sincerely,

[rotf]

This sucks so much! For some reason, I can really feel with you.. But, one thing I am curious about: Why did you open a "compromised account" ticket - and then play on that account again? If Square Enix' automated systems find a suspicious activity, they usually lock you out and contact you, not the other way around. So you were taking the step in fear of your account being hacked/abused by someone else, but then happily play and buy expansions with it? That is weird. Can you please add the least puzzle piece to the whole picture or correct me train of thought?


You had summoned a huge Damocles sword over your account by opening that ticket - and it just dropped today. But you put your account into that limbo state yourself. That is like going to the doctor because you think you broke your hand, then you can't wait for the x-ray results and still do sports - just to be shocked the doctors says no: "You should have not played yet".

Sincerely,

I was one of the first victims of the identity stealing links from Twitch. Some million Gil was taken from my account.
Some days later, the official notice about those links was posted to lodestone. So once I knew what it was about, it was just a matter of changing the password.

I wasn't that worried about recovering the gil as it is not of utmost importance in this game. But while looking into it, I found that there was a way to possibly restore, so I thought might as well use it.
If it works, great, if not it would be a matter of "oh well, I tried but I will survive without it"... which is one of the reasons that after a while I even forgot that ticket was opened.
And since no one ever gave me any indication that that was being worked on, I guess my brain saw it as a process that doesn't really work, since it takes some digging to even find that page.

[Dustytome]

If you search for "rollback" on the ffxiv subreddit, you'll see a few similar tales. Apparently once you submit to have it done, you can't have it cancelled either.

[Shougun]

If you search for "rollback" on the ffxiv subreddit, you'll see a few similar tales. Apparently once you submit to have it done, you can't have it cancelled either.

I remember at one point I was checking out my blizzard account, as I learned I could put my old cd keys (wc/diablo/etc) into the account so I could download it and not worry the cds were going to die lol.

Anyway I was in my account and noticed my like three year old "frozen" (not subscribed) WoW character had a warning/note on him saying he was banned for RMT. That wasn't right, of course, hadn't played and if I would obviously it'd not be RMT lol. So I called, waited like one minute on hold, talked to the customer agent who looked into it's log- noticed that someone in India had logged into my account, so they reset my character before that login point and also unbanned the character.

The conversation took like 3 minutes total (including wait time) and my character was restored within that conversation, and while I had no intention of playing WoW again they even informed me about a sort of welcome back campaign they were running in case I was interested. Mostly I just wanted it unbanned because it was like a red flag on my account that shouldn't have been there lol, but the whole thing was easy and quick.

Not that I've had any problems with the CS / GMs for FFXIV, they've all seemed nice to me, but it does seem like there is rope, third party, or something that stops them from being able to do some heavy lifting. At least unfettering for the purpose of doing helpful things lol, they can be careful still about account bans :P. Although I'd also add that a lot of these stories have an element of fog.. so maybe the CS was like "I can't help, because you just threatened to sue us and worse" and of course we'll never get that part of the story. So hopefully if these stories are real SE can work to make things smoother and if not.. uh.. carry on XD.

[MrKusakabe]

Alright, thanks for the clarification. You just cleared up any doubts I had. The amount of time it took Square Enix to do that is unacceptable.

As some outsider, just observing this, it is apparently an unfortunate combinations of policies and circumstances going on here.


I assume it happened as follows:

1) You opened the ticket and the investigation kicked in.
2) Since contacting support regarding an open case is counted as pushing, they often dismiss the additional requests. You know, not everyone is a reasonable customer and they want a special treatment. To shield the staff from that unncessary workload, they might simply ignored your tries to contact them because your ticket was still open in their system (whatever kind that might be. Maybe Zendesk?)
3) Because it was apparently a huge mass of people affected (so much they had an official message, not just random small-scale phishing), they had a long backlog of reports to investigate.
4) As staff does not happen to be summoned from thin air, other tickets might have had a higher priority. Billing issues are #1, as scummy as that is in that moment.
5) Your report have finally landed on a Square Enix' employee's desk. He noted a weird, far-away IP adress and - rolled your account back as your account was indeed compromized.
6) Scammers want to harm. Levelling a character is the opposite from harming. So they do not roll back levels I guess. Not sure if it might even break things unrecoverably (quests not avialable anymore that have been completed already, e.g. profession quests).
7) The rollback would be useless in your special case as they took Gil, but imagine they cleared your inventory instead and you find it all back from the date of rollback. You'd be very happy.

You know why I can feel for you? As you see, I am a die-hard Red Mage freak, and I love the Duelist attire and the sword and crystal it comes with. I love it, and I came back just for this outfit (the fun the profession brings was secondary back then). When I finally played trough, if I recall correctly, 230 quests from my account's position (2.0 to 3.0s), I put it on and love it. Then, I bought a new pair items and wanted to glamour my beloved Duelist attire over it. I had to lots of my full inventory to get the market board stuff in it. So I start to glamour and - where are my boots? WHERE ARE MY BOOTS? I started to sweat. I became really nervous, checked my inventory and armoire. Nothing. I must have trashed them!! My Duelist boots are gone! I felt so bad, almost sick - until I noted my RDM leather boots were still on my Lalafell's feet.........

So yes, "pixels in a video game" that you "worked" for can mean a lot. Maybe because of that I really feel bad for your situation. And with your properly written and long, calm responses I feel you are actually very reasonable, so it's even worse. Shame that you fell for that phishing link though...

Sincerely,

My signature has now an alpha channel. I hope it does not look funny in quotes now..

[rotf]

If you search for "rollback" on the ffxiv subreddit, you'll see a few similar tales. Apparently once you submit to have it done, you can't have it cancelled either.

indeed, I had not thought of that... just checked and all of them seem to be waiting or waited way over what is described as a "7 to 10 days" process, and none of them had any indication it was being worked on either.
which makes it even worse.. it keeps going back to my previous question "Are players expected to NOT play for an indeterminate amount of time, but keep on paying subscription, until an analyst finally looks into it? even if it takes months? How is that acceptable?"
the url you use to report this type of think is not available as a direct link in the support page. You have to dig through FAQ articles to finally get to it. And once you are done with it, you do not get any email referencing a record number was opened. So, you are left wondering if what you did actually went through or not. Which is another contributing factor for my lack of follow ups.. I wasn't sure if that was only me, but ppl on reddit are saying the same thing.

I spent nearly one hour on the phone with support earlier today and did ask them to improve that process so that ppl in the future won't go thru the same mess I'm in.
I offered several suggestions... but not sure if they will ever reach the people that can actually make it happen though... unlikely I guess.

[ErryK]

EDIT:

If you search for "rollback" on the ffxiv subreddit, you'll see a few similar tales. Apparently once you submit to have it done, you can't have it cancelled either.

Having read this, that's awful.

[Avidria]

If you search for "rollback" on the ffxiv subreddit, you'll see a few similar tales. Apparently once you submit to have it done, you can't have it cancelled either.

What? That's... Okay if that and OP are true, that's some amazingly bad customer service. What on Earth is going on in SE's customer service department???

[Shougun]

Was thinking about this a bit more and obviously three months is a bit silly but even I think 7 to 10 days is pretty bad... As essentially it means you're out of a character for an entire week or more under normal procedure (or game in the case of people who don't like alts). As a monthly fee game that seems.. just not good. I'd be a bit annoyed by that for sure, especially since I've done it with Blizzard / WoW in a few minutes (so it gives me a reference). If someone told me not to play my character for three months but to keep paying them... I love FFXIV, but that'd probably permanently mar the experience for me. Obviously they're not telling people to wait 3 months lol, but if all this is true then.. still pretty bad.

I really hope, if true, that this thread specifically gets translated and taken seriously by the dev team. I started the thread feeling bad for OP and thinking dang.. but now that I've internalized it more, honestly even after all the years I've put into the game that would be "maybe I'm done" inducing experience. Unless they could fix their mistake- if they were like opps and fixed it then I'd be okay lol, which seems like OP is saying they wont/cant. I'm not telling people what to do with their money though, not suggesting a boycott or anything, just that thinking about the situation more and internalizing how I'd feel if I went through that.. how I'd feel If I had to even wait 7-10 days.. I just think something is off here. Probably wouldn't rage with 7 to 10 days, I've got other things I can do, but I'd be mildly annoyed since it'd be basically a third of the month I've paid not to play once lol. Three month un-reversible roll back though. . . I might just be done then.

Not that I come with solutions, unfortunately, I'm sure its not that easy to just say "fix it" and so it is. Just that I hope they really try.

In other news, everyone use dual authentication if you can (also free teleport is awesome), and don't give your information to anyone but your game launcher and official ffxiv store. Also when going to web pages don't use other people's links when you need to put in personal information (can use links for info of course, just not for private information- like logins).