7 years gone in a moment

starkerealm

dem0n1k wrote: »

@Yormula is paying 15 bucks a month (at most.) Your average coder at ZOS is making roughly 120k a year. So, if you took a programmer from the database team, told them to reconstruct this account, and it took them two weeks, that's a cost of $2500. Now, it's possible Yormula has spent more than that on ESO, but it's extremely likely that, even over seven years, they have not. Meaning reconstruction would be more expensive than @Yormula is worth as a customer. (No offense, man.)

I see what you are saying & it's true that any company must do a cost analysis for any job to see if it's worth doing. However, at this stage, it's not just Yormula's character that is at stake. It is now a pretty serious PR issue if the player base loses confidence in the company's ability to have data integrity. Perhaps that customer confidence is worth justifying the work required... I hope so for all player's sakes.

It's not a serious PR issue.

I'm sorry, like, I get what you're thinking, where you're coming from, and you're not wrong to have that approach, the problem is, nobody will remember.

Outriders had an issue where players were losing their inventory (and in some cases) their characters. That was a serious PR issue because it affected a significant number of players.

You may already know about this because it was covered in games media, and by influencers. It was widesperad enough that people could see this happening, and there were many affected accounts.

Yormula is one person. And, I say this with respect for them, they're pretty a pretty minor figure in the community. It's not a "major," PR issue. You aren't reading about Yormula's character being corrupted on IGN, Polygon, or Kotaku, you're seeing it here, in the forums.

This pales in comparison to the storage chest bug from when those were first implemented, that was more widespread, and still didn't get attention.

So, unfortunately, this is not really a PR issue. It's not news, and as a result, no PR needed.

It also appears to be a one-off event. We're not seeing reports of this popping up elsewhere. So, while I hope Yormula can get something worked out, I don't think there's much we can do, and just riling ourselves up on their behalf isn't particularly constructive.

GenjiraX

starkerealm wrote: »

dem0n1k wrote: »

@Yormula is paying 15 bucks a month (at most.) Your average coder at ZOS is making roughly 120k a year. So, if you took a programmer from the database team, told them to reconstruct this account, and it took them two weeks, that's a cost of $2500. Now, it's possible Yormula has spent more than that on ESO, but it's extremely likely that, even over seven years, they have not. Meaning reconstruction would be more expensive than @Yormula is worth as a customer. (No offense, man.)

I see what you are saying & it's true that any company must do a cost analysis for any job to see if it's worth doing. However, at this stage, it's not just Yormula's character that is at stake. It is now a pretty serious PR issue if the player base loses confidence in the company's ability to have data integrity. Perhaps that customer confidence is worth justifying the work required... I hope so for all player's sakes.

Yormula is one person....

It also appears to be a one-off event. We're not seeing reports of this popping up elsewhere. So, while I hope Yormula can get something worked out, I don't think there's much we can do, and just riling ourselves up on their behalf isn't particularly constructive.

Soulshine wrote: »

This is not as rare as it sounds, which is really concerning. Your are the third person now I have seen with an issue like this, reported in a year's time.

The other two are former guild-mates of former guilds. One lost his original NB character in pretty much the manner OP described. They never recouped his char and just gave him gold and a new char. The second person had his original DK char just mysteriously vanish from server, no explanation ever as to why. Also told here's some gold and move on. The first person is still playing afaik, the second one is no longer playing ESO having left the game fairly upset over the whole situation. Says he's not coming back.

It does give one pause for sure, and when you are someone with a very old account especially, since we do have a lot invested at this point. Those of us here since beta have achievements and items that simply are not possible to recover if we lose our chars from server. Really awful that there is so little in place to address this kind of issue.

“This is not as rare as it sounds...”

If it it can happen to one, it can happen to any of us. That’s what some of us are riled up about.

RevJJ

Yesterday, my game crashed three times in a row when I tried to log into a specific character. Tried other characters, no problem. But this one, my main, made the game crash three times in a row.

Because of this thread, my first thought was “if I need to raise a ticket for this there is a chance they completely mess up my character. I’d rather quit the game than go through that whole process”.

The fact that this can happen sucks, but the way ZOS is dealing with it is the real issue. I love this game but if something like this happened to me I would be out and it seems more people feel that way. Do better ZOS, if you want to keep your customers.

starkerealm

GenjiraX wrote: »

“This is not as rare as it sounds...”

If it it can happen to one, it can happen to any of us. That’s what some of us are riled up about.

That's actually the problem, it is as rare as it sounds. Bonus points in that we don't know, for a fact, that it's the same issue.

You're correct that it could, hypothetically, happen to anyone, but it's rare enough that you don't hear about this frequently. We've got one first hand example, but after that, it's "a friend of my friend's former roommate's dog sitter said..."

We've got three characters that are locked to prevent login. Right? Well, do we? No, we don't. We know that one of Soulshine's examples was a character just flat out vanishing. Which could be as simple as the ex-guildie's mother yanking them away from the keyboard, and then their younger brother deleting said character. It wouldn't be the first time that something like that happened.

We've got one that was locked, "pretty much the manner OP described," so, does that mean they had an achievement fail to fire, contacted customer support, and had their character bjorked, leading to customer support locking the character?

If that's true, then it supports the idea that someone in Customer Support was removing achievements when they really shouldn't have, and, in the process, breaking characters.

Which, kinda suggests, if you have a problem with an achievement breaking... don't contact customer support during last year's pandemic.

This is the problem, it's not widespread. In this thread, we've had, maybe, three examples, and one of those is definitely something else entirely.

Zhaedri

What a terrible situation. I hope it gets sorted out. Seven months is a long time to wait for a decent resolution though.

Jaraal

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

And ZoS cannot reassure that nothing will ever happen to anyone ever again because unforseen things sometimes just happen.

Based on what can be seen in this thread yes ZOS can reassure that this would not happen again.

I'm way more critical of ZOS than the majority of players, however, I'm curious why anyone would think a multi-billion dollar corporation would ever dream of setting themselves up for a lawsuit like that.


*ZOS: We're sorry, lost characters will never happen again!

*Characters somehow get lost again.

*ZOS gets sued for making promises they couldn't keep.


I totally think the OP should receive overly generous compensation for their issue. But if you're expecting ZOS to set themselves up by making potentially litigious statements predicting the future, I think you'll be in for a very long wait.

Sephyr

starkerealm wrote: »

GenjiraX wrote: »

“This is not as rare as it sounds...”

If it it can happen to one, it can happen to any of us. That’s what some of us are riled up about.

That's actually the problem, it is as rare as it sounds. Bonus points in that we don't know, for a fact, that it's the same issue.

You're correct that it could, hypothetically, happen to anyone, but it's rare enough that you don't hear about this frequently. We've got one first hand example, but after that, it's "a friend of my friend's former roommate's dog sitter said..."

We've got three characters that are locked to prevent login. Right? Well, do we? No, we don't. We know that one of Soulshine's examples was a character just flat out vanishing. Which could be as simple as the ex-guildie's mother yanking them away from the keyboard, and then their younger brother deleting said character. It wouldn't be the first time that something like that happened.

We've got one that was locked, "pretty much the manner OP described," so, does that mean they had an achievement fail to fire, contacted customer support, and had their character bjorked, leading to customer support locking the character?

If that's true, then it supports the idea that someone in Customer Support was removing achievements when they really shouldn't have, and, in the process, breaking characters.

Which, kinda suggests, if you have a problem with an achievement breaking... don't contact customer support during last year's pandemic.

This is the problem, it's not widespread. In this thread, we've had, maybe, three examples, and one of those is definitely something else entirely.

There's several good points on all sides, honestly. It's a messy situation and while rare — I think people are rightfully worried that there is this potential it could happen to them.

At the same time, there's nothing we can do to protect ourselves nor do I expect ZoS to say anything about it. I was really surprised that they offered that template though. I've never heard of them doing that at all, so this was a first for me to see it actually being offered.

Galadan

@starkerealm

At least, not, user editable.

Of course, i talk about editing by developers, not user and not even client support)

A customer support rep did get in there and modify the database, and the end result was that they destroyed the character.

I haven't noticed a statement, that atempt to restore character was made by developers and crashed everithing.

Who keeps comprehensive logs going back over 9 months on every record update

As far as i understood, Yormula claimed his issue a lot earlier than 9 month after incident. For 9 month they keep dialog with 9 circles of client support hell.

Do you even bother to log everything? (And, the answer to this one, in this case, is, "no.")

As an example, a large insurance company stores any previous versions of it's client's and policies for several years. And stores any operational log of changing/sending information between it's systems for a year and a few months. It's dozens of millions of records too, and of course it costs alot, but this is not an impossible case...

If the user's account was corrupted entirely, it's likely they could restore the entire account from a backup (or at least clone a new one from a backup), but it would mean wiping away the last 9 months of progress on the account.

I wuold try to clone an account from backup immediately when ticket was raised (and i beleive it was made earlier than 9 month after incident). Anyway, "wiping away the last 9 months of progress on the account" is much better than wiping away 7 years.

@Yormula is paying 15 bucks a month (at most.) Your average coder at ZOS is making roughly 120k a year. So, if you took a programmer from the database team, told them to reconstruct this account, and it took them two weeks, that's a cost of $2500. Now, it's possible Yormula has spent more than that on ESO, but it's extremely likely that, even over seven years, they have not. Meaning reconstruction would be more expensive than @Yormula is worth as a customer. (No offense, man.)

Your math is cruel, but sadly seems to be true and close to my vision.
My only hope, that ZOS knows about such thing as "reputational risks" and cares about it.

starkerealm

Galadan wrote: »

@starkerealm

At least, not, user editable.

Of course, i talk about editing by developers, not user and not even client support)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the database team has some capacity to mess around with the content directly. That said, while I'm not sure what the process would be, I suspect getting a CS ticket moved out of customer support and to that team would be a Herculean effort.

Galadan wrote: »

A customer support rep did get in there and modify the database, and the end result was that they destroyed the character.

I haven't noticed a statement, that atempt to restore character was made by developers and crashed everithing.

This is coming out of Yormula's explanation of events.

Yormula wrote: »

what_the wrote: »

...as in "fix an achievement issue" what's that about?...

Meta'-achievement for one of the DLC dungeons that I was missing. Did a few runs, got them all eventually, looked at the meta - it said I didn't have completion and hardmode, which I did. After all, hard to get the speedrun one without completion, one would think.

Now, I could re-run it, except that it would not help. As I already had completion and hardmode, they would not trigger again, and it's them and not the underlying condition that triggers the meta. You don't get meta progress for killing the boss, you get it for acquiring the relevant achievement.

In this case removing completion and hardmode achievements from me would allow me to try again. Simple bunny-resurrection.

That's a little more detail than needed, but, I've referencing that the Hard Mode complete achieve was derped somehow, so, it's worth finding that reference.

Galadan wrote: »

Who keeps comprehensive logs going back over 9 months on every record update

As far as i understood, Yormula claimed his issue a lot earlier than 9 month after incident. For 9 month they keep dialog with 9 circles of client support hell.

Do you even bother to log everything? (And, the answer to this one, in this case, is, "no.")

As an example, a large insurance company stores any previous versions of it's client's and policies for several years. And stores any operational log of changing/sending information between it's systems for a year and a few months. It's dozens of millions of records too, and of course it costs alot, but this is not an impossible case...

The sheer volume of data updates is a bit different here, which is why an insurance company is simultaneously, a poor comparison, and excellent example.

So, going from my own auto insurance, on the average month, there's going to be a single update. I paid my premiums. Now, if I get rear ended by a DUI in the middle of the night, that's going to create a lot of paperwork, if I buy a car, that will affect my records. Basically, if I do something, that update has to be logged. In the worst possible cases, you might see three or four updates to my account on a single day, but that's likely to be the extent of my activities for that month. Also, I could be wrong here, but I suspect I'm fairly typical in this respect.

As you said, it is possible to maintain complete change logs of those records. Also, my insurer has roughly 13 million customers.

If we assume the average is, let's say, 5 changes to your policy each month (and, yeah that number could be higher), we're looking at a monthly update log of roughly 65 million data points. Like you said, doable, but difficult.

Now, let's look at ESO. If you run a dungeon, you're going to fight multiple enemies. Your gear will be damaged from every kill and every death, so each thing you kill provokes, at a minimum 8 updates to your record. Each loot event will generate at least one record update, and some would require multiple updates. Each skill point, attribute point, and champion point spent, has to be logged (though you could bundle multiple CP and attribute points spent into a single log update), and each time you reset your CP, you'd need to add at least two events to the log.

So, you log on for 30 minutes, run a dungeon, and at the end of it, you've probably generated something north of 600 record updates before you started looting enemies. That's just, XP earned, and gear decay. (Obviously, this number will vary depending on the dungeon, and some will go much higher.)

Now, when you're thinking about that, if every active player in the game only logged in once a month for 30 minutes, and ran a dungeon, you're looking at, AT LEAST, ten times the amount of updates being generated as my insurance company. But, when it comes to MMO players in general, they're going to hang around playing the game for much longer.

Now, the numbers above are all napkin math, and the MMO numbers are unrealistically low in the extreme. But, I think that might illustrate just how significantly more data intensive MMOs are (and, really any form of gaming) in comparison to an insurance company.

So, it's probably not possible (from a data retention standpoint) to maintain full logs. Now, you can cherry pick things to log, so, not logging damage to gear would probably be one of the first things to cut, but, I also remember when they said PCNA's Aetherial dust supply wasn't statistically implausible, which suggests they don't actually have logs for that stuff getting looted or used.

I've also learned not to underestimate what they do keep track of.

Galadan wrote: »

If the user's account was corrupted entirely, it's likely they could restore the entire account from a backup (or at least clone a new one from a backup), but it would mean wiping away the last 9 months of progress on the account.

I wuold try to clone an account from backup immediately when ticket was raised (and i beleive it was made earlier than 9 month after incident). Anyway, "wiping away the last 9 months of progress on the account" is much better than wiping away 7 years.

I'm inclined to agree. I could understand why someone would balk at being told they're losing the last 10-12 months from their account. I can also understand why their first recourse wasn't to immediately go, "okay, we'll roll back your account by a month," especially when it wasn't apparent how severe this was.

Also, given it has the potential to be incredibly destructive, it wouldn't surprise me if the customer service team does not have the authority to execute an account rollback.

Galadan wrote: »

@Yormula is paying 15 bucks a month (at most.) Your average coder at ZOS is making roughly 120k a year. So, if you took a programmer from the database team, told them to reconstruct this account, and it took them two weeks, that's a cost of $2500. Now, it's possible Yormula has spent more than that on ESO, but it's extremely likely that, even over seven years, they have not. Meaning reconstruction would be more expensive than @Yormula is worth as a customer. (No offense, man.)

Your math is cruel, but sadly seems to be true and close to my vision.
My only hope, that ZOS knows about such thing as "reputational risks" and cares about it.

Well, the cruel math is going to get worse. We have, maybe, two isolated cases here. (And a third one that is unrelated.) Right now, from a public relations position, it's more damaging for ZOS to comment on it publicly, than to allow it to simply die off over time.

Right now, the story is just a user saying, "hey, somethin' broke." If ZOS stepped in, it would be an official acknowledgement that their game has a serious (however rare) problem. Ironically, the thing that would make it news would be them commenting on it, not the event itself.

It doesn't matter how friendly their tone would be, or how much effort they went through to, "make it right," because by now Yormula has been left swinging in the breeze for nine months. The only way you'd see ZOS actually respond to this, is if there was already media attention on the subject, or, if it was wide spread enough that it was reaching a critical mass.

It's a weird thing with PR and damage control, but there are times when it is actually safer to leave someone out to burn, because you know if you wade in, you'll make this mess into a story and it will reflect poorly on you.

Again, what I think happened is a customer service rep used command line instructions to remove the achievements from Yormula's account (also, one of Soulshine's ex-guildies, if that's what happened there.) This broke their account. So, no matter what ZOS does from here on out, any formal acknowledgement of the events would include that, "yeah, one of our employees botched your account up," no matter how much they tried to downplay that element.

It gets even worse. Because, if Yormula is in a country with decent consumer protections, it's entirely possible that they have cause of action against ZOS. However, getting ZOS to admit one of their employees derped up would just put a bow on the whole thing. Which means, it's entirely possible there's a standing edict from Bethesda Softwork's Legal department to not discuss either of these tickets at all. (Which does remind me of the blank ticket updates Yormula received.)

starkerealm

Sephyr wrote: »

I was really surprised that they offered that template though. I've never heard of them doing that at all, so this was a first for me to see it actually being offered.

I've seen templates offered before, but it's extremely rare.

Now, in fairness, these are not the PTS's "Max level testing templates." Or at least, I assume they're not. Turning one of those loose on the live server would break a great many things. However, while I could be wrong, my understanding is that any custom template would need to be hand generated by a dev (rather than a QA Rep), meaning this probably already landed on their radar, and it does suggest that the entire situation is far more dire than it appears.

Hawco10

So sorry to hear of your issues OP. But in positing, I believe you have just saved me from the same fate. I lost power just as I killed the last boss on vet hollow. Just as I went to the chest, power went. Came back up after about 2 hours. I was going to submit a ticket until I read this. Quite happy to do another run, rather than risk losing everything.
Is this lack of customer service typical of the gaming industry ? Or is just applicable to ZOS?
I’m having a hard time trying to rationalize all this. Just doesn’t make sense. Customer has an issue-communicate and resolve., in this case it’s the opposite-why ? Where is the support from ZOS for the OP?

SilverBride

Yormula wrote: »

I have been involved with ESO since beta, until one fine day while trying to fix an achievement issue ESO support completely fried my primary character.

I don't know if you already mentioned this, but what achievement were you having issue with?

Moloch1514

Hawco10 wrote: »

So sorry to hear of your issues OP. But in positing, I believe you have just saved me from the same fate. I lost power just as I killed the last boss on vet hollow. Just as I went to the chest, power went. Came back up after about 2 hours. I was going to submit a ticket until I read this. Quite happy to do another run, rather than risk losing everything.
Is this lack of customer service typical of the gaming industry ? Or is just applicable to ZOS?
I’m having a hard time trying to rationalize all this. Just doesn’t make sense. Customer has an issue-communicate and resolve., in this case it’s the opposite-why ? Where is the support from ZOS for the OP?

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin you now have customers afraid to enter support tickets due to this issue. Please help!!

James-Wayne

I would just bombard them with tickets till its fixed.

GenjiraX

James-Wayne wrote: »

I would just bombard them with tickets till its fixed.

I have a character who runs in slow motion when she’s supposed to be sneaking but I’m buggered if I’ll open a ticket for it.

SammyKhajit

Come on, ZOS, just do the right thing. How long does this have to go on and how many players have to experience this or similar issues?

OutLaw_Nynx

This thread now has 47k views on it

electriczzz

OutLaw_Nynx wrote: »

This thread now has 47k views on it

Not nearly enough attention as it deserves.

Merlin13KAGL

GenjiraX wrote: »

LohiWarBlade wrote: »

Why can't there be an offsite account backup on our own drives? It could be encrypted so there wouldn't be any funny business.

I doubt ZOS would be comfortable with players storing their own account backups locally, at least not if they were intended for restore. Maybe encrypted files might be ok for evidence of what was in your account so they could manually rebuild the account when this disaster hits another player. I say “when” because, so far, no one has offered any explanation as to why it can’t happen to someone else at any moment.

Khenarthi wrote: »

User side backup would be wonderful, but potentially vulnerable to tampering. That is why one would expect ZOS' database team to have backups

Yormula wrote: »

Suna_Ye_Sunnabe wrote: »

Any updates on this?

Nothing new to report, folks.

krayphysh wrote: »

There should be an option built into the game's launcher to backup account information - something that creates a file we can't access or modify. ...

Community tends to crack any encryption eventually, I am not aware of a single exception, so local backups are not a feasible idea unless you don't care about players modifying their saves (a few titles did go that way, results vary).

Anything is hackable. The trick is to make it tedious and time consuming enough that it ceases to be worth the time and effort.

This is a missed income opportunity for ZoS. You sell backup/restore tokens in the Crown store en lieu of deleting characters. The character, inventory, achievements, and all is properly encrypted and tied to the user account.

The resulting file is then transferred to the user's local drive to allow restoration later and the 'live' character is effectively deleted.

This would allow backups for circumstances such as this (the character would effectively be deleted entirely and rebuilt via the server), and the ability to try out other characters/builds once slots were maxed without completely nuking a character someone actually wanted to keep and play down the line.

As to cracking the encryption, short of the actual source code getting out for the backup/restore, there is little chance someone is going to toggle a bit here or there and deduce some meaningful change without self-corrupting the backup. If source code gets out, all bets are off anyway.

Try to restore too many corrupt backups in a certain amount of time, and a flag gets raised that you're mucking with the file and either a ticket gets opened or the account gets investigated.

There would be no inter-account selling, as they'd be tied per account, so that issue is removed. There would be no key access client side at all. All of the magic would happen server side under very precise conditions. The only thing the client would be is the repository for the resulting file. No direct access, no direct database access, about zero chance of someone hacking the system and getting anything other than an account ban and a corrupt file.

It would be worth the Dev effort, as I guarantee people would pay for the option, both for security purposes, nostalgia, and for the altoholics out there.

It could absolutely be done, safely and securely, if it was done right.

SilverBride

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

This is a missed income opportunity for ZoS. You sell backup/restore tokens in the Crown store en lieu of deleting characters. The character, inventory, achievements, and all is properly encrypted and tied to the user account.

The resulting file is then transferred to the user's local drive to allow restoration later and the 'live' character is effectively deleted...

It could absolutely be done, safely and securely, if it was done right.

It couldn't be done securely and it would be a very bad decision to do so.

starkerealm

SilverBride wrote: »

Yormula wrote: »

I have been involved with ESO since beta, until one fine day while trying to fix an achievement issue ESO support completely fried my primary character.

I don't know if you already mentioned this, but what achievement were you having issue with?

They've never specified exactly which achievements were involved. They cleared trifecta on a vet DLC dungeon over multiple runs, but the meta achievement did not track the vet clear, nor the hard mode complete. They asked for those achievements to be reset... and everything went downhill from there.

OutLaw_Nynx

electriczzz wrote: »

OutLaw_Nynx wrote: »

This thread now has 47k views on it

Not nearly enough attention as it deserves.

I very much agree with that.

Mythreindeer

James-Wayne wrote: »

I would just bombard them with tickets till its fixed.

Your account would be deactivated.

Galadan

Back in hoping to get some good news. Is there any good news?)

ApoAlaia

After reading OP's account I can see how some of the players in the achievement HoF would rather list a 'bugged achievement' than have CS [try to] address the bug.

It would seem that the only 'safe' scenario to involve CS would be when one has nothing left to lose. Sort of a 'last resort hail Mary'.

I just wish it wasn't like that and we could rely on CS to help us with slightly more complex problems like the one OP experienced with any degree of confidence.

Aaxc

Oh yeah, a lot of ppl with close to 100% achievment points have bugged achievments that they DO NOT address, becasue support will most likely mess up their characters, so they just go with it.

GenjiraX

Aaxc wrote: »

Oh yeah, a lot of ppl with close to 100% achievment points have bugged achievments that they DO NOT address, becasue support will most likely mess up their characters, so they just go with it.

How would they know if this is the first time it’s come to light? Are you saying this is more common than we suspect, that achievements often stop working correctly as you reach 100%?

Girl_Number8

electriczzz wrote: »

OutLaw_Nynx wrote: »

This thread now has 47k views on it

Not nearly enough attention as it deserves.

^ Very true

This is rather a scary development going on here. I thought it would of been taken care of already. How sad for us players. 🙍🏻‍♀️

If there was ever a time for more communication, to foster goodwill this would be that time....

Ilumia

I really hope for some proper action from ZOS. It's a bit unsettling that there is so little security.
And if the amount of people following this thread is any indication as to how much people care about the issue being fixed - then it's quite fair to say that ZOS are digging a deep hole of distrust for themselves as long as they don't respond better.

Aaaand on another note - now I'm afraid of reporting a bug with the pit bully achievement bugging so it no longer counts kills.

starkerealm

GenjiraX wrote: »

Aaxc wrote: »

Oh yeah, a lot of ppl with close to 100% achievment points have bugged achievments that they DO NOT address, becasue support will most likely mess up their characters, so they just go with it.

How would they know if this is the first time it’s come to light? Are you saying this is more common than we suspect, that achievements often stop working correctly as you reach 100%?

Because, normally, if you go to Customer Support and say, "hey, this achievement's broken on my character," and persist past the automated responses, you'll be told that Customer Support cannot fix broken achievements. It's not that there's a wide range of cases where CS has been breaking people's characters, just cases where CS has either told them that they can't fix it.

This is also true with some other equally irritating glitches, like skill points not being awarded from quest completions. (And this has happened a few times, though it's rare.)

Someone who's actually taken one of these tickets through might have a better idea of exactly how well informed the end user is.