Excelsior

I'm going to say my piece and then you'll probably delete the post cause it's easier just to make snide dismissive comments, condescend, or placate and then censor any sort of response.

my account was ~90 days old, in that time I made a net worth of ~18mil (rough guess).

losing all the gear I was carrying, considering the amount of time it took to work up to that estimated 18mil net worth, would have taken weeks to recover from. If I spend every dime I had in gold (~13 mil) I MIGHT be able to replace all my losses with comparable equivalents, but then I'd have to work on raising that 13 mil to be back where I was before this internet outage. Now if you read this and think of making some comment like "well insure your stuff" or "bless it" or "you're playing outside your skill level" or "oh well it's just a game" then you're just pivoting the point away from the fact that a loss like this will take WEEKS to recover from. those are nothing but blanket statements to avoid the issue and switch the subject so as to make me look like an incompetent idiot, basically adding insult to injury. insurance is a high maintenance fix that can easily be messed up, if I sold everything I own to buy bless items, I couldn't bless my armor alone, if I only made it this far playing aggressively as I have been so far then 3 months of fighting headless ones would get me nowhere at all, and game or no 100+ hours of work toward a goal is a detrimental loss. The point being, these losses can happen, they're detrimental when they do, and I had reason to be mad about it but everybody started out being rude, derogatory, and condescending when I spoke up, those were attacks and the GM's egged on the crowd.

For a player that has spent 3 months to work up to 18 mill and lose half or more of that work to be offered to spend 13mil to get back the half he lost still be set back all the time it would take to recover that cost is blatantly insulting. You barely even acknowledge the issue. you just say "not our fault" and move on. you say "well you could have insured" or some of those other lines you kept repeating, the whole time you're letting 20+ others chime in and sling insult after insult without a word and say that cause you didn't CAUSE the internet outage, it's not your fault. there's dozens of simple fixes that could have been implemented on the server side. How about letting insurance pull from exex since you suggest storing gold there on your site? How about setting the decay for players bodies longer than 10 minutes in case of such an event as this? how about restoring from one of those numerous backup points in the event of catastrophic outages like this as a policy? what about a method of recovery that doesn't take "hours of your time" so that it's a more simple option that you can actually offer players (a recovery voucher system comes to mind)? X number of players are supposed to spend how many combined hours cause you're volunteers and shouldn't have to spend a night recovering from a failure at your data center. And I know the first thing you're going to say "you don't know how the internet works" or "it wasn't the server it was the connection" or some other BS like that. first off, "you don't know how the internet works" is a very condescending and insulting response, you said it to somebody other than me but you should still own up and admit you were getting out of line. Secondly, this issue wasn't with the players either, and of the two people involved YOU'RE the one providing the service and expecting others to participate. You can talk about hops and the technicalities of a router in india, junction in new england, a DNS company or even the electric company that powers any of them, a data center should have redundancies and alternate routes and by chosing WHICH data center you trust with your server, what services they offer and you pay for, and even it's location is ALL on you. If you use a center that's cheap then you should expect to get what you pay for.

I get it, free shard, shouldn't expect much and I should give myself the same advise and expect to get what I paid for too. The difference is, you have the shard up cause you WANT people to come and play, and if I came on world chat and said "man you really get what you pay for out of this free server" then you'd probably consider that insulting too.

From my point of view the admins enjoy the game and enjoy playing it so they have a server up to play and the game administration is how they enjoy it, the coding to add the new stuff and set up the events is all part of the fun for them. I'm sure it's a lot of work, but they wouldn't do it if they didn't enjoy it, and it wouldn't be any fun if they were playing alone so of course they want to encourage other players to join. but the less fun stuff like the "you expect us to spend time recovering your stuff that isn't our fault" they don't want to bother with, cause it's SOOO much fun to lose all that work for all the players. Maybe take responsibility for the position that you put yourself into, take the good with the bad? You're fine putting a system in place to give big rewards for voting (soliciting for the shard) or donating cash (pay to win), but if you don't pay to jump ahead you're going to have a lot tougher time.

now I want to acknowledge that some players PM'd with offers to help or found me and tried to hand me weapons, and
those are appreciated thoughts, Thank you to everybody that tried to help instead of just pouring more on. While the help was appreciated, it wouldn't resolve the underlying issue I'd like to go further than that and let some of the players that I was able to get to know over my course on this server that I appreciated all their time answering questions and joining me in laying and everything they had shown me to help me advance.

I lost weeks of work, and that was just the catalyst that showed the problems with this shard but they're going to get ignored. You can say that's cause I'm a bad player, or I'm lying, or whatever you want to make yourself feel superior cause you're a vet player and it wouldn't effect you as much or be as significant of a loss to your fat wallets or the hours in your days, you were just lucky and it didn't happen to you this time, or you're a GM and just don't want to admit there's a problem on your end. I had good reason to be upset at the loss and and it was glossed over and spammed with ridicule as a result.

delete away

the Codex wrote:7. Legal:
a. The rules can change without prior notice. It is the player's duty to stay updated, however we will do our best to let the public know of any major changes made to the rules.
b. All the objects and entities in the game are the property of UO Excelsior Shard.
c. We do not take responsibility for loosing data or for the server being offline, however we will do our best to keep the shard stable and running.
d. We do not replace lost objects in the game. In some circumstances, we may do that if it's due to a technical malfunction. We recommend you to insure your valuable items and bond your pets.

the Codex, Recoveries page wrote:Loss due to a disconnect, downtime or crash, is not considered a bug. These are things that do happen and are out of our control. Spending 3 days recovering people's items if there is a disconnect, if nobody had them insured, is not a really smart use of time. That's why you should insure your items and bond your pets.

You should have had your items insured. Folks telling you this aren't "pivoting the point", they're reminding you of your own responsibility to do what you can to ensure your valuable items are protected. We tried to explain this to you multiple times, politely, and you continued to become more and more belligerent and angry as you went on, finally ending in cussing at me via portal.

+C may well have decided to offer a free recovery, he does that from time to time when there are odd/extenuating circumstances. But if one behaves so poorly before he can even have a chance to look into the issue and decide whether he will offer a special-circumstances service, that's definitely not going to inspire him to spend so much time on that person. +C is exceptionally busy, with literally hundreds of things on his various to-do lists. Recoveries take a long time, they are relatively difficult and not at all fun for him. Demanding that someone else spend hours of their time doing boring, difficult work because *you neglected to do your due diligence* is not only ridiculous, it is offensive and does not in any way inspire feelings of goodwill. You catch more flies with honey, as they say.

Also note that the decay rates and other settings are the way they are for various reasons. Decay rates shouldn't be increased as that also increases lag and causes world saves to take longer, for example.

As for my remarks earlier in world chat, yep, I said them. No, I'm not sorry for them and no they weren't out of line. A refresher:

[22:54] +Nyx: I think maybe you don't know how the internet works and that's totally fine, but
20161025_22:54:37 [22:54] +Nyx: major outages aren't something we handle, manage, control or can fix in any way.
20161025_22:55:07 [22:55] +Nyx: You clearly don't understand that major outages in other areas can cause you to get
20161025_22:55:11 [22:55] +Nyx: disconnected from one thing but nothing else

Someone was making completely incorrect statements - statements they had absolutely no way to base in fact, but that the staff CAN verify - and arguing that they were absolute facts. This person was claiming that because there was a massive internet outage today and that outage was causing lots of players to be unable to connect/stay connected to the shard that it meant that the shard was down and it was our responsibility. This is not how the internet works. If there are outages between you and what you're connecting to, you will experience problems. It doesn't mean that your internet is down, it doesn't mean that the thing you're attempting to reach is down. It means that there's an outage neither of you can control. So, basically, if one doesn't want to have the facts pointed out to them by those who can verify it, one should not become indignant and rude in world chat. Note that the person in question said "that is a lie" to my statement that the server had not crashed today as almost the first thing they said in the conversation. If this person did not want to receive a negative-toned reply, they should not start by being aggressive.

All datacenters will have issues at some time, even excellent ones. My housemate works with one of the most reliable datacenters in the country and even they occasionally have downtime. Let alone when massive amounts of the internet are down for everyone in multiple states and regions. That is not a reflection on the datacenter. It's a reflection on the jerks DDos'ing the crap out of stuff. Perhaps you should find them and demand they pay for your recovery.

I'm happy to take the good with the bad. It's when the "bad" crosses into "extremely bad" where it needs to be addressed. Your behavior and the behavior of the other person you were remarking on crossed into that territory today.


People tried to help you, the staff included. You didn't want that help, you wanted to get something for free. That's on you.

As I told you in world chat, you were well within your rights to be angry. If it happened to me, I would also be angry. I mentioned insurance/blessing as many others did, as these are safeguards built into the game to be used by players to avoid catastrophic losses such as you seem to have suffered. I even mentioned a recovery service we offer, to which you said you couldn't afford. That's fine.

In 3 months, maybe you did acquire some decent gear. Maybe some that can't be replaced from Mistvale. However, we are not responsible for internet outages, or power outages, or anything else for that matter. Stuff happens, and it is not our responsibility to recover it for you, for free, or even at all. Especially since this is "A FREE SHARD". You don't pay anything to be here, and we have no obligation to you to insure your virtual goods. The shard could go down at any time, for any reason, and nobody would owe you (or anyone else), anything.

I think you have a great idea, in letting insurance pull from exex, yet i don't see a feature request suggesting it. I disagree with allowing longer to retrieve a corpse, because this game has a loss factor. 10 minutes (it's actually longer, just seems to go by quicker when you're hurrying trying to get to your stuff), is more than adequate. We have plenty of backups. We just charge to go digging into them, to restore your things. It's very time consuming for +C to do, since each and every item needs to be confirmed by hand. It's a service I don't think we should even offer, and most shards don't.

Using made up points, each letter being a router if your route looks like this:

you - a - b - c - d - e - f - g - shard, and any one of the routers (a, b, c, d, e, f, or g) goes down, and you can't connect to the shard, that doesn't mean the shard crashed. That doesn't mean we are responsible for your loss of "stuff". Any one of those points can go down at any time for any reason, and until your route gets re-reouted (or that router gets fixed), you won't be able to connect to the shard. Saying we were down is inaccurate. Other people using a different route can still play, and the server is still up (in this particular instance). You can blame DNS servers for their lack of re-routing your path to get to the shard, not us. We don't control those DNS servers, and routers.

I'd also like to ask, how much should we charge players to get better hosting at a more expensive data center?

I'd also like to point out that this is one of the only servers (that I've seen) that allows you to get anything in game, with ZERO donations. Many others allow you to get perks only if you donate. Here, you can get EVERYTHING with nothing but time and gold. That's a far cry from having to spend real money to get a relayer. Sure, it allows you to get it quicker, but you can still choose not to go that route.

I'm sorry you lost weeks of work, and don't feel recovery is an option. You have two choices from here. Try something else, or start over. Best of luck whichever you choose.

Hi there, sorry to hear about the loss of your gear. I know you're super frustrated right now but I'd encourage you to rebuild and stick around. Every so often someone losses all their stuff due to not having or not knowing about insurance. Simply put this game cannot be played without insurance (or blessed when too get further along). If you roll like that you WILL lose your stuff. Take some time to cool off, but if you like UO, I hope to see you back around. Hit me up in game if you come back.

what he said .. precisely what he said if it was expensive enuff or valuable enough to cause you this much upset (not specifically to you manduar to anyone in this same circumstance) if it was of that level of value it should be insured or blessed with no exceptions. The internet at any time can completely unravel in chunks its lovely but in many ways its constructed with popsicle sticks, paperclips and duct tape. it is not to be fully trusted ever

You made 18 mil gold in 3 months and you didn't insure anything??? I'm having a harder time feeling sorry for you. That's part of UO losing a ton of stuff from our own mistakes. Just the other day I lost a ton of stuff in Wrong Fel because I forgot to insure scissors... scissors man!!! lost tons of peerless keys ect.. that's just UO man. Get a grip, get back in game and start over like we all have so many times

Last year I blew the one attempt a year Ooga Booga quest due to a 10 minute outage here during the time limited final fight.

I still bitch about it, but I also know in no way is it the shards fault, or the staff's.

Outages happen.

I got drunk once and lost ALL my stuff. Full LRC and medable, to boot. I forgot where my corpse was.

Point is, operator error happens. Sometimes things outside your control (my memory is a lot more reliable than technology) fail. Make do!

If you need any help, lemme know.

Then again, it wouldn't be october without someone complaining about loosing everything.

I had same experience a few days ago while I was running in Blighted Grove... The problem was that I'm not so well geared and totally forgot I'm out of gold inside the bank, so my insurance went off from the first dead. Imagine dying 5 times and trying to get your corpse and run away. I was literally shouting at myself as a reminder how stupid I can be, but at the end I was lucky and managed to get out with my stuff. Yeah, not so big progress like yourself, but I have put some effort (time spent, gold etc..) which make me even more mad of myself...

Yes, you cannot control outages, but you can be on the safe side with applying some basic tactic and making sure the most important stuff are either left at bank (if not used) or blessed/insured. I'm not trying to insult you, this has been implemented inside the game from the very beginning. This means that even on the official shards, it might go bananas and you will still be on the safe side. Imagine if you had hundreds of PK's around and you were constantly being killed, what are you going to do? For sure any of us will be pissed off, but pointing fingers and insulting is way beyond our intentions.

As far as I read, this seems to be due to an network outage which is not even related to the shard itself. Why don't you rise your concerns to your ISP and request more information regarding connectivity points and routes ? Literally, if my ISP couldn't apply common sense and do a few re-routes in order to achieve better connectivity or sort out brief outages, I wouldn't pay at all. People now days think in advance - more redundancy, less downtime etc, so there must be another way

We must learn from our mistakes and correct ourselves : )

I've been caught off guard where I've bought something and it emptied out my bank account. Maybe if vendor purchases took out of [exex before your bankbox?

I've been caught off guard with an empty bank box as well. All my stuff is blessed but I've been worried about loosing my bios from the stables if there isn't gold in there.

Donate $40....less than you will pay for a new game you decide to buy and that will get you 400 ed's if im not mistaken....which is around 20 mil...buy all of your gear back and that will leave you an extra 2 mil to insure future items

Melkor wrote:I've been caught off guard with an empty bank box as well. All my stuff is blessed but I've been worried about loosing my bios from the stables if there isn't gold in there.

As far as i know/remember you need no gold to keep the pets stabled, even though the stable guy says otherwise.

I have just posted a reply that's related to this topic:
http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=63669#p63669

Also, in public chat you mentioned that "your insurance keeps falling off". Try to single-click youself, and in the menu see if there is a "Auto renew inventory insurance", click it.