7 years gone in a moment

SammyKhajit

Would be nice if the mods reach out to the OP….

Amottica

Wow. I am surprised Zenimax is not able (or maybe willing) to make you whole. Assuming this is due to their systems and/or programing causing the issue vs bad password protocols leading to being hacked.

I do hope someone at Zenimax with authority sees this thread and takes a look at the ticket history for you.

Soulshine

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.

Tenthirty2

I am so sorry that happened to you, how absolutely terrible.

Gods, I've only been playing a little over a year and now with 2 characters, but feel I've accomplished and built so much I can't imagine all that just going poof.
Had that happened I'd likely cancel my ESO+ and uninstall the game. I wouldn't want to try and start over with a constant worry in the back of my mind that I might lose it all again.

I've been seeing a huge decline in customer service in general and in a few "AAA" titles I won't name it's pretty awful.
It's a shame that it took them THAT long only to end up destroying your account, 9 months should be beyond any SLA period.
After a month, which is already too long, they should have opted to try a restore.

But dragging it on for as long as they did with you, that's disgusting. Again, I am so sorry.

EnjiroKitsune

7 years with a character means it's quite a part of yourself... I can feel that... that's damn hard to even immagine. But the char is still there, so they could try to fix him/her, that's the only thing I see as appropriate here.

Aertew

Genuinely don't understand how they can just accidently do this and not even cooperate with you on a fix. Such as manually reinstatting the achievments and such. Disapointed in ZOS with this.

spartaxoxo

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Adrikoth

Alurria

Well you have the support of your fellow players for what it's worth. I was so hoping someone at ZOS would take a look at this thread and have a heart.

Elusiin

dotme wrote: »

This sounds awful. I don't understand why there isn't a restore option, nor - if I'm honest - do I understand why paying (subscribing) customers don't get phone or live chat support.

If anything needs to be escalated, it's things like this. I hope you get it worked out.

Think about a nuclear reactor in the real world. There's 3 if not more fail-safes in place to prevent irreversible damage.
ZoS needs to do the same about our accounts!

At the very least, the moment someone contacts support and support begins to address the problem, a backup copy of said person's account should be immediately generated before any changes are made, and this should be automated, as humans make mistakes.

Elusiin

SirAndy wrote: »

Maybe they still have a copy of your character on the PTS?

That's actually a 180 iq thought! I'd request them investigate this possibility!

Sarannah

Since this thread is quite negative versus the ZOS customer support, I just wanted to add all my interactions with ZOS's customer support have been nothing short of fantastic!

PS: Doubt they make back-ups of the PTS characters, as those backups are the live characters. Which should already be backed up.

ApoAlaia

SammyKhajit wrote: »

Would be nice if the mods reach out to the OP….

This ^.

I don't need (or want, or even expect) anyone to 'come clean', 'address the gathered crowds', 'tell their side of the story' or anything along those lines.

However If the mods could reach out to this person and help sort out the situation in whatever capacity they can that would be amazing.

Togal

I've also have sets deleted before, took alot of hours to grind and gold out but its nothing compared to the loss you faced. Zos really needs to get their stuff fixed or at least compensate for it. We want zos to be held accountable!

agegarton

Assuming this is all accurate, it’s appalling. As others have said, if I lost my main through a problem with customer support I would not play again. That’s a character I have nurtured since 2014, hunted down achievements, developed skills, and yes even built a bit of an emotional connection.

Surely that’s what this game is all about?

@ZOS_MattFiror the usual issues about game performance aside, it is true to say that ZoS support is infamous for its lack of empathy. I hope you read this. I hope you can do something about it. No-one should have to lose 7 years of progress in an MMO and even if there are no backups available, the character can be recreated with its progress and stuff can be restored.

FlamingMeat

Different departments I'm sure but still a relevant anecdote: I've been trying for months now to get ONE square of water added to Lakemire Xanmeer. A missing asset that has been present since it's release. It's a $150+ piece of *content* that has only really needed one tile to be placed where it is missing for years. Every avenue to contact is shut down. Even pushing tickets through to actual humans has them say:

NO OTHER MMO I've played has ever had their support staff actively refuse to comment on simple issues so heavily to someone who spends as much money on the game as I do and has done so little to try and keep high-paying consumers playing when confronted with issues.

Also to compare apples to weird, spherical blobs of despair, this video may make you feel better about your situation in a 'could be even worse/dumber' kind of way: https://youtu.be/Pjt_6C2rapQ

Leia98

This is bad, I cannot even imagine being in your situation. Please fix this.

Brrrofski

Something similar happened to someone I know on xbox.

They "lost" his account. When trying to log in, the game would not progress past main screen under that profile.

This was like 3 years ago. Over 1k champ points, 6 or 7 fully levelled characters, plenty of gear, gold and mats, a lot of crown store items that was before gifting so he'd spent his real money on.

ZOS couldn't do anything about it apparently. They told him to make a new profile and they'd gift 15k crown to that account. Not only had he spent a LOT more than that on crowns already, how does that replace years of work?

Pretty bad if you ask me. Surely they could have worked with him and given him levelled characters and the gear he had?

JamieAubrey

If this happened to me I wouldn't even bother getting my char back, I'd just leave the game

Parasaurolophus

A very frightening story. OP, words cannot convey how I sympathize with you. If this happened to me, I probably would not have quit the game, but I would not have played the way I play now. I would just go through the quests and complete the normal content. I hope this thread will stay on the first page of the forum for a long time. But unfortunately, this is for sure a difficult technical problem. I don’t think that support doesn’t help you for some other reason.

tgrippa

ZOS being ZOS as usual, no one should be surprised.

Idinuse

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.



7 years of progress (all quests, almost all motifs, 32+k achievements, alliance rank) – gone, not fixed.

All crafting bag contents account-wide – gone, not fixed.

Account-wide glitches (no incoming whispers, invisible status) – added, not fixed.



To give you a sense of scale – the original ticket is over 9 months old, result feels rather definitive by now. I ain’t no Brad’s wife to turn it around.

Offer of an empty template character with some gear that came up was not exactly sensible at this point. Character may be leveled completely with all skills, reputations and enough skill points for 3 roles in under 50 hours – been there, done that. 7 years of progress might take just a tiny bit longer to cover.

Now, while nothing is perfect, ESO is imo a great game, combining some unique features not seen in competing titles and decades of noteworthy lore. Hence, from my perspective, the worst thing about the situation is that I am not at all surprised by the outcome. Sure, catastrophic failure events like this one are in all likelihood extremely rare, yet with the accumulation of potential points of failure over the years smth along these lines was just begging to happen.

Offline titles we could manage and mod ourselves. Massive online projects depend on publisher’s infrastructure and support system, and this is where it feels like systemic deterioration brought us to the point where the whole customer relations system is, imo, plain detrimental to an otherwise great game.

Just think about it: craft bag is pretty much the only selling point for ESO+, and, turns out, it is not secure, can vanish just like that, and noone cares.

Automated responses taking weeks and missing the point, tickets getting closed without replying, tickets set to “read answer provided” without replying and hence auto-closing, support asking to resubmit data as they cannot access ticket history – that’s the spirit that brought us the iconic canvas bag. That stuff was and sadly is systemic, just look around these very forums, and resulted in a nonsensical lose-lose situation: players less content than prior to addressing support, finding answers elsewhere while waiting on auto-responses or remaining with a unsolved issue and a series of replies perceived at best as condescending, and the company actually spending funds to make the customer less content.

I guess this here is a somewhat desperate plea to consider altering customer support policies in any of the multiple available ways, as in the current state it's support that's dragging down an otherwise very solid product.

Anyway, thanks for listening in and remember that it might be wise exercising moderation in your emotional attachments.

fjord55b14_ESO

It is absolutely unacceptable that no one has responded to you thus far. I’m really sorry this happened to you op. Hopefully it’ll be made right.

TairenSoul

I have never been happy with customer service. I've only ever received blanket response emails. The last one I put in was on the day of the Blackwood release about the house and still haven't heard anything. Customer service should respond to every ticket. It feels like they look at some and just say "nah", which is bad business. I'm really sorry you lost everything. I'm sure I'd be inconsolable.

Alurria

It still remains that the OP lost seven years of gaming progress on a character. While I do understand sometime unforseen things happen. What I don't understand is not making it right for the customer. You know I went to a local buffet resturant in my city, got my drink for my food. I got some chicken etc and the food was always good at this restaurant. I took a nice bite out of my chicken leg and wait I feel hair in my mouth, so I reach up and start pulling a hair out of my mouth it was really long and black. I had short blonde hair. I show it to my eating companions. Immediately I can not eat anything on my plate I feel a little sick and I am disgusted. So we call the manager over after showing him and him looking us over to see if any of us have long dark hair he reluctantly refined our dinner bill but not the drinks. Can you believe it he charged us for the sodas we had. I have never returned to that resturan. Not because of the hair but because of the poor interaction we had with the manager. Who somehow thought it was my fault that hair was cooked into the food. I looked around and realized most of the staff handling the food didn't have hair nets on of course there will be hair in the food. People shed hair. My point is that resturant lost a customer because a manager couldn't bring himself to do the right thing.

DaveMoeDee

Wolfenbelle wrote: »

How terrible, Yormula. Something like what you experienced should NEVER happen. Surely ZOS backs up its systems, right? Or am I being too naive? But if they did back up their systems nightly, it should be fairly simple for them to restore your entire character

Restore it to what point in time? Yesterday at 04:27? Last Monday at 09:22?

When you have this much data, backup is not as simple as you might think They aren’t going to be able to afford full backups of everything every day. You can write logs of every event in the game, such as inventory changes, and replay them to figure out state, but that can get really unwieldy. You also get complications as the game changes over time and entries in those enormous historical logs records cease to be compatible. And the volume becomes really slow to navigate. This assumes logging is sufficiently structured to pull out the info you want. And you can have gaps in that logging if you decide it isn’t worth the trade-offs to have 100% consistency.

They might usually have full logs and the ability to restore to a particular point in time. I have no idea. But now and then something might slip through the cracks.

danno8

Alurria wrote: »

It still remains that the OP lost seven years of gaming progress on a character. While I do understand sometime unforseen things happen. What I don't understand is not making it right for the customer. You know I went to a local buffet resturant in my city, got my drink for my food. I got some chicken etc and the food was always good at this restaurant. I took a nice bite out of my chicken leg and wait I feel hair in my mouth, so I reach up and start pulling a hair out of my mouth it was really long and black. I had short blonde hair. I show it to my eating companions. Immediately I can not eat anything on my plate I feel a little sick and I am disgusted. So we call the manager over after showing him and him looking us over to see if any of us have long dark hair he reluctantly refined our dinner bill but not the drinks. Can you believe it he charged us for the sodas we had. I have never returned to that resturan. Not because of the hair but because of the poor interaction we had with the manager. Who somehow thought it was my fault that hair was cooked into the food. I looked around and realized most of the staff handling the food didn't have hair nets on of course there will be hair in the food. People shed hair. My point is that resturant lost a customer because a manager couldn't bring himself to do the right thing.

And when the customer service is great it can completely turn around the situation into something good and have you return to that restaurant over and over.

Years ago my wife and I received a burger from McDonalds that had no toppings on it, just the patty and bun. We were pretty ticked off because there happened to be a huge lineup in the drive-thru that night so we were already sort of irritated. When we came back they not only gave us a new burger, but refreshed our entire order top to bottom so we ended up with twice the order at no extra charge.

We thought it was great and a sign that these guys actually care about their customers and the mistake was easily forgiven. We went home that night with a great opinion of that restaurant, rather than a terrible one. A complete reversal.

Davor

So sorry to read this. Only thing I can think of is, that we never owned anything here. We gave up our rights to give Zenimax/Bethesda money.

So we never have lost anything to begin with since we never owned anything. I guess that is why Zenimax/Bethesda doesn't give a crap. They lost their own ones and zeroes. We on the other hand never lost nothing.

DaveMoeDee

Davor wrote: »

So sorry to read this. Only thing I can think of is, that we never owned anything here. We gave up our rights to give Zenimax/Bethesda money.

So we never have lost anything to begin with since we never owned anything. I guess that is why Zenimax/Bethesda doesn't give a crap. They lost their own ones and zeroes. We on the other hand never lost nothing.

Pretty sure they give a crap. There can be technical errors though. There can also be skepticism because of how many fraudulent claims they likely come across.

scorpius2k1

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

Davor wrote: »

So sorry to read this. Only thing I can think of is, that we never owned anything here. We gave up our rights to give Zenimax/Bethesda money.

So we never have lost anything to begin with since we never owned anything. I guess that is why Zenimax/Bethesda doesn't give a crap. They lost their own ones and zeroes. We on the other hand never lost nothing.

Pretty sure they give a crap. There can be technical errors though. There can also be skepticism because of how many fraudulent claims they likely come across.

I agree but to the point that area ultimately depends on the support person who has your ticket and how they handle it from there. In retrospect, they sure are showing they care further by not reaching out at all on this thread right? Not one single mod/admin comment in over 24h with 4+ pages of responses from the playerbase. Quite concerning in my eyes.

@Yormula - not sure if it would help at this point, but maybe post your ticket # here and tag a few of the @ZOS accounts. Super sorry this happened to you, if something like that happened to me I would never come back, especially with the way it's been handled since inception.

DaveMoeDee

scorpius2k1 wrote: »

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

Davor wrote: »

So sorry to read this. Only thing I can think of is, that we never owned anything here. We gave up our rights to give Zenimax/Bethesda money.

So we never have lost anything to begin with since we never owned anything. I guess that is why Zenimax/Bethesda doesn't give a crap. They lost their own ones and zeroes. We on the other hand never lost nothing.

Pretty sure they give a crap. There can be technical errors though. There can also be skepticism because of how many fraudulent claims they likely come across.

I agree but to the point that area ultimately depends on the support person who has your ticket and how they handle it from there. In retrospect, they sure are showing they care further by not reaching out at all on this thread right? Not one single mod/admin comment in over 24h with 4+ pages of responses from the playerbase. Quite concerning in my eyes.

@Yormula - not sure if it would help at this point, but maybe post your ticket # here and tag a few of the @ZOS accounts. Super sorry this happened to you, if something like that happened to me I would never come back, especially with the way it's been handled since inception.

Maybe wait for Monday afternoon before judging their forum response.