Items worth 26m+ missing - ESO support refused to clear things up

BansheeVT

Hi all!
Today I would like to pass on a request from a friend and guild member that lost 26 million gold. His name is @Zinpix, understandably he is very frustrated at the moment and wants to put as little time and energy into this game as possible. He has played for many years with ESO+ and has now been left hanging by ZOS when he had an urgent request. I am passing his problem on to you guys, so you can make up your mind and maybe help us out by drawing some attention to this.


What is this about anyway?
Items worth more than 26 million gold are gone. Why? How? What now? We don't know anything.

What is gone?
We are talking about 1300 Iridium Platings, 3000 Turpen, 4000 Elegant Lining, 1000 Grain Solvent and 4000 Terne Platings. According to my MM/ATT, they are worth around 26.425m gold.

How? Just gone?
Just gone. He noticed the loss of the Iridium Platings on 10.12, which happened probably sometime between 7 - 10.12. On 10.12 Zinpix contacted me to ask for advice and then wrote a detailed support ticket (ID: 211210-003355). After that, on 11.12, I got his next Discord message saying that Turpen, Elegant Lining, Grain Solvent and Terne Platings were now missing too. The materials were all bought over months in different guild stores and from different players.

Zinpix himself went through everything and I also made sure again that nothing was forgotten. After checking the Crafting Bag, Inventory, Bank, Guildbank, House Chests, all Characters, Re-purchase Tab at Merchant, Guild Store, Mailbox and Junk we updated the support ticket. He changed his password, double checked his Email for any notifications and made sure that no one else had access to his account.

What did ESO support say?
ESO support answer was "We are unable to restore the items to your account.". Which first of all.. ???? I lost 200k once: tried to deposit it in our guild bank, it left my inventory, never appeared in the bank. Asked support, the next time I logged on I had a mail telling me it was added to my account again. A friend of mine lost materials and monster sets from his house chests, wrote a support ticket, got them back. But 26 MILLION worth of items cannot be restored because they are not crown items? No compensation either? Not even an explanation?


We don't know what happened. We ran out of ideas. And we don't even get to know where these items allegedly went if it's not ZOS's fault either? Why don't we get an explanation? Why does he not get help? This seems to be a fault of the system. And if we do not get an explanation on what happened, it can happen to any of us. One more reason for me to be the voice of my friend and guild member Zinpix and demand an explanation.

Just imagine losing 26m worth of items (or even more) and ZOS tells you "Sorry, it isn't a crown item, we can't restore it.". That's not fair and you know it, ZOS. Please, at least give Zinpix an explanation or compensation.

AJones43865

I'm pretty certain that I am having to learn a bunch of items more than once for the stickerbook. But I don't keep track exactly. I'm having to learn items I feel certain I've learned before because they are common to the zones I frequent.

Muttsmutt

i'm pretty sure i lost a thousand breton style materials recently too, but i may just be airheaded.
not a big loss but, if there's some hole in the crafting bag zos should address this immediately.
@ZOS_Kevin
this is a severe issue that should be treated as such.

LeandraC

Crossing my fingers that the support will finally really look into it!

Caehn

Judging from the answer ZOS gave, it almost feels as if they think its too much trouble to deal with as they did return gold and items from other players.

I hope very much that this is not the case and they will pick this up ASAP

BeckieMA

I definitely had random items dispear before and never come back and I was mad enough when it was one piece of light armour golden. This much going missing is ridiculous

etchedpixels

They restored stuff to players that they wrongly punished for a mistake on their part so they clearly can.

Other question though - are they on PC and has anyone taken a hard look at the addons they are running and if any of those addons could be quietly stealing items ? Would also be good to open a ticket and ask them where it went and what theirr logs show ?

Kessra

What I find strange about this story is that your friend exactly knew what was in his inventory/crafting bag and therefore could tell which items and how much of these were missing. My crafting-bags are filled with plenty of stuff and I really really rarely look into that bag and count how much of which item I have. So if all of a sudden plenty of items are now missing or reduced in quantity I more or less barely would notice it honestly.

Sure, loosing that many items is strange and definitely should be looked into by ZOS, but for some reason this sounds like the whole story wasn't told here either.

From a technical perspective all items we have in our bags/crafting bags/guild bank and so on are just entries in a DB that are added or removed via transactions, at least it should be this way. Transactions guarantee that the DB will never be in an inconsistent state and therefore avoid unintended data loss/altering. Via a transaction log one could also trace back the history of events that led to the current state. Therefore if the issue is somehow related to a DB issue, ZOS has the possibility to trace that back and take further actions upon the outcome. However, such a procedure requires manual investigation, probably restoring a previous backup of the DB and stuff like that that takes up some time.

If this issue is related to DB issues then we would probably read plenty more threads/comments about suddenly loosing items here in this forum. As the claim here seems to target only certain items of particular quantity and for the most parts seem to affect only a single player (for now) I somehow doubt a problem with DBs here but more of an individual issue. Either your friend got hacked, he shared his account with somebody or he isn't telling the truth.

For the former two cases a connection log in your account-settings would for sure be benefitial to quickly see at which timepoints which IP connected to your account (either the account page or logged into the game). While IP spoofing isn't that complicated and therefore the log doesn't give you 100% guarantee, most people will not be in a position to do that easily. In addition it also requires the "attacker" to know some details about your system which s/he only has when somehow connected to your network. What is more likely though is that some family member used that account in the absence of that guy and did something to those items.

The latter case of making up a story might be a case where your friend maybe just wants some attention for some unknown reasons. He of course might also have auctioned the items previously and forgotten about those, or some recently installed addon listed those items for way to few gold in one of the guild store. At least I have heared about such a thing in WoW where an addon called WeakAura was able to sell certain items automatically to vendors, post items to the auction house or even send the author of that WeakAura your gold before the player affected even realized what just had happened. The basic intention of this addon was to actually monitor your character and hint you about certain cooldowns on abilities or certain enemy abilities and the like, but it was that powerful that it basically could do things to your character without you even noticing something. Having read that certain players got banned recently probably for the usage of certain addons here in ESO might hint someone in a similar direction eventually.

In the end, we as players can just guess what might be the case here. To me, as mentioned, something about this story doesn't feel right and we don't have access to the full story somehow.

wolfie1.0.

Your not going to get an answer or resolution here. First, you are not the one that lost the items. Second, ZOS does not discuss support tickets in the forums. They only address issues if it's global.

Honestly it sounds like your friend either needs to accept the response or escalate to a support manager.

ZOS_Kevin

Hi BansheeVT. Thanks for reaching out on behalf of the player. As mentioned in our guidelines and also noted in this thread, we do not discuss tickets and actions outside of the player involved.

If the player involved would like to reach out to me via DM, I can let them know what Customer Service noted, take what issues they may have and how they should proceed.

Muttsmutt

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

get an answer or resolution here

to this, and kevin's reply, i think at this point there's also the concern that the issue itself, and how it could have happened, warrants acknowledgement. the amount of in-game items&gold lost is very severe, and at this point it stands to reason that players should be given some sort of explanation, rather than be left with a sense of paranoia over what it could be that causes this.

Fennwitty

If high-value items were specifically removed from my craft bag, I'd have to assume my password was compromised.

wolfie1.0.

Muttsmutt wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

get an answer or resolution here

to this, and kevin's reply, i think at this point there's also the concern that the issue itself, and how it could have happened, warrants acknowledgement. the amount of in-game items&gold lost is very severe, and at this point it stands to reason that players should be given some sort of explanation, rather than be left with a sense of paranoia over what it could be that causes this.

Unless a lot larger portion of the population comes forward and indicates a loss of items during the same period we can't assume it's anything except an isolated incident. We are also getting this information second hand without supporting evidence.

As you noted there may be concerns or paranoia over this now and that is precisely why they don't respond to tickets in the forums.

BansheeVT

Kessra wrote: »

What I find strange about this story is that your friend exactly knew what was in his inventory/crafting bag and therefore could tell which items and how much of these were missing.

When Zinpix told me his story I thought the same at first and asked him about it.
Me: "1. You said it's around 1300 Iridium, 3000 Turpen, 4000 Elegant Lining, 1000 Grain Solvent, 4000 Terne Platings. Is that correct and everything? (...)
2. How do you know that those are the approx values that you lost? Barely anyone keeps track of what they have in their bag and I don't want people to get suspicious when reading these values. (...)"
Zinpix: "1/2. Every week I go through my stuff to make my sales quota, normally tuesday afternoon. Its been some time, since so the best estimates would be in my post. But for the last 6-8 weeks I have been buying Iridium platings, and I know the MM said 17+ M at some point and I havent sold any, just kept buying when i saw them. So thats what i noticed and reported first, then I just checked MM and made upo the number 1300. As for the other stuff I have noticed the approximate amount since I sell off every week, since they are easy to sell u remember approximate amounts. So in the cases of the other stuff I just nopticed that they were close to zero when I remember I posted some and the approximate ammount I should have left."


And I can promise you that my guildie didn't just make it up for attention and I think it's even quite rude to assume that. I'm also not quite sure what else I should tell here, I forwarded this story for Zinpix and it is the whole story. I don't even know what I should hide here.

We also made sure that all these items were not sold or listed in any store with AddOns. Even though the sheer amount of items already makes clear that one can't accidentally list them.

BansheeVT

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

If the player involved would like to reach out to me via DM, I can let them know what Customer Service noted, take what issues they may have and how they should proceed.

Thanks for the super quick response, Kevin!
Zinpix currently does not have access to the forums, he already submitted a ticket for that and is waiting for his invitation now. After that I will direct him to your PMs so you two can hopefully solve the issue that I was asked to post. Thanks in advance on behalf of Zinpix, he will get back to you!

Sylvermynx

@BansheeVT - if Zinpix would give you his ticket number you could list it here so Kevin can check to make sure the ticket is in the right queue.

SilverBride

Kessra wrote: »

What I find strange about this story is that your friend exactly knew what was in his inventory/crafting bag and therefore could tell which items and how much of these were missing. My crafting-bags are filled with plenty of stuff and I really really rarely look into that bag and count how much of which item I have. So if all of a sudden plenty of items are now missing or reduced in quantity I more or less barely would notice it honestly.

If this player uses Lazy Writ Crafter this may have been what drew his attention to the missing items. When you get an item from turning in a writ it tells you what item you received and how many of these you already have in your bank or crafting bag. Seeing a small number listed when you know you had more would alert you to check into what was going on.

BansheeVT

Thanks @Sylvermynx but Zinpix got the standard "you will get a new forum invitiation within 48hrs" kinda mail, so I believe this is getting sorted already! Leaving the ticket ID for that here too anyway in case my assumption is wrong: ID 211217-002234

SeaGtGruff

The only time I've ever "lost" anything from the game, I figured out that it was taken by doing crafting writs. For example, once I thought I'd lost a bunch of Cornflower because I suddenly had less than 100, whereas at one time I'd had many thousands. But then I realized that on all of my alts the Alchemy writs were asking for 3 Cornflower every few days. I promptly bumped up all of my alts in Alchemy so the daily writs wouldn't call for 3 Cornflower, and now my stack is growing again.

Same with Enchanting runes; I was losing certain runes at an alarming pace so I started keeping a watch on them as I did my writs from character to character. I swore that I could see extra runes going poof for no reason-- except then I realized that they were being taken by writs that called for making a specific glyph and turning in a specific rune as well; it was the last part I'd completely forgotten about.

Considering the types of materials involved, my first guess-- if this was not theft or some kind of rollback-- is that the player is reconstructing gear which is using the materials; perhaps they're using reconstruction as a way to store excess Transmute Crystals or whatever? I'm not saying that that's what's happening, but that would be my first guess.

Aluna

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Considering the types of materials involved, my first guess-- if this was not theft or some kind of rollback-- is that the player is reconstructing gear which is using the materials; perhaps they're using reconstruction as a way to store excess Transmute Crystals or whatever? I'm not saying that that's what's happening, but that would be my first guess.

If you store transmutes you obviously make items that don't use upgrade materials. Despite the transmute limit being 1000 and making items costing 25+ so theres literally no way to burn that amount of mats by reconstructions.
Also, Banshee already said that they checked every possibility on where the items could have disappeared to

Muttsmutt

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Muttsmutt wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

get an answer or resolution here

to this, and kevin's reply, i think at this point there's also the concern that the issue itself, and how it could have happened, warrants acknowledgement. the amount of in-game items&gold lost is very severe, and at this point it stands to reason that players should be given some sort of explanation, rather than be left with a sense of paranoia over what it could be that causes this.

Unless a lot larger portion of the population comes forward and indicates a loss of items during the same period we can't assume it's anything except an isolated incident. We are also getting this information second hand without supporting evidence.

As you noted there may be concerns or paranoia over this now and that is precisely why they don't respond to tickets in the forums.

even if it is an isolated incident, the severity alone warrants close inspection from the relevant teams.
otherwise, it just becomes a face-eating-leopards discussion, where we can sit around and say "well, leopards never ate MY face, so why should i be concerned". if it's something that can happen at all, that in itself is a big issue, it doesn't need to happen to a large percentage of the playerbase. even with a small incidence rate, it means there is something wrong somewhere within the game systems, something that needs to be addressed.

i do understand why ZOS is conservative with replying to such matters, or tickets in general, but the cat is out of the bag- pretending there's no cat isn't going to prevent people from reading this topic (which has all rights to exist and be public) and wondering if THEIR items will disappear sometime down the line.

the fact that this issue exists is public, and the affected player (and in this case, their peers) has all right to make it public. now it's public, given that it has great potential for creating paranoia and worry within the playerbase, it is reasonable to expect ZOS to acknowledge it more than merely reminding people that tickets aren't going to be resolved on the forums- which is fine, but there's more at play here than just that.

even a simple "we're looking into the possible causes" would do wonders.

BlossomDead

Maybe this was an accidental thing during maintenance or something. Hopefully you can get your stuff back.

SeaGtGruff

Aluna wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Considering the types of materials involved, my first guess-- if this was not theft or some kind of rollback-- is that the player is reconstructing gear which is using the materials; perhaps they're using reconstruction as a way to store excess Transmute Crystals or whatever? I'm not saying that that's what's happening, but that would be my first guess.

If you store transmutes you obviously make items that don't use upgrade materials. Despite the transmute limit being 1000 and making items costing 25+ so theres literally no way to burn that amount of mats by reconstructions.
Also, Banshee already said that they checked every possibility on where the items could have disappeared to

I added the part about storing excess Transmute Crystals as an afterthought; my initial thought was reconstructing gear for characters to use. Sorry if I confused anyone.

"Obviously" is a subjective term, because what is obvious to one person might not be at all obvious to another.

And "checked every possibility" is extremely vague. Unless a detailed list is posted enumerating every specific possibility that was checked, how can anyone know whether or not there were possibilities which were overlooked?

As I said, I'm not saying the missing mats went to reconstructing gear, but it would be my first guess "if this was not theft or some kind of rollback." In my own experience, the crafting bag, storage chests, bank accounts, character inventories, guild stores, and other places that items can be stored, don't "lose" items. As I said, there have been times when I thought something mysteriously went "poof" from my crafting bag, but upon investigating it carefully (in preparation to making a post about it) I discovered that everything was actually 100% correct because I'd been overlooking something simple.

I think the only cases I've read about where something really did go "poof" was when people put things in storage chests and then deleted the characters who'd put them there, or something like that; I'm not clear on the details since it never happened to me (because I've never deleted a character). But I'm pretty sure that bug was fixed a long time ago.

wolfie1.0.

Muttsmutt wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Muttsmutt wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

get an answer or resolution here

to this, and kevin's reply, i think at this point there's also the concern that the issue itself, and how it could have happened, warrants acknowledgement. the amount of in-game items&gold lost is very severe, and at this point it stands to reason that players should be given some sort of explanation, rather than be left with a sense of paranoia over what it could be that causes this.

Unless a lot larger portion of the population comes forward and indicates a loss of items during the same period we can't assume it's anything except an isolated incident. We are also getting this information second hand without supporting evidence.

As you noted there may be concerns or paranoia over this now and that is precisely why they don't respond to tickets in the forums.

even if it is an isolated incident, the severity alone warrants close inspection from the relevant teams.
otherwise, it just becomes a face-eating-leopards discussion, where we can sit around and say "well, leopards never ate MY face, so why should i be concerned". if it's something that can happen at all, that in itself is a big issue, it doesn't need to happen to a large percentage of the playerbase. even with a small incidence rate, it means there is something wrong somewhere within the game systems, something that needs to be addressed.

i do understand why ZOS is conservative with replying to such matters, or tickets in general, but the cat is out of the bag- pretending there's no cat isn't going to prevent people from reading this topic (which has all rights to exist and be public) and wondering if THEIR items will disappear sometime down the line.

the fact that this issue exists is public, and the affected player (and in this case, their peers) has all right to make it public. now it's public, given that it has great potential for creating paranoia and worry within the playerbase, it is reasonable to expect ZOS to acknowledge it more than merely reminding people that tickets aren't going to be resolved on the forums- which is fine, but there's more at play here than just that.

even a simple "we're looking into the possible causes" would do wonders.

I won't disagree, but even assuming that this is 100% legit, what do we know? We know stuff went missing from the craft bag. That's it. We don't know anything else and that's not really enough information to issue any kind of warning. There are many many ways that stuff could get zapped and given the circumstances we may actually never know. So it's really just a hey this happened to this one person type of thing and we don't know why situation.

daim

I know these guys too. A big time players from a respected trade alliance. So sorry to hear this happened to Zinpix.

And of course this is very worrying as it's not the first thread I've seen here where something like this has happened. There's was at least one case a few weeks back that I remember reading, maybe someone can find it and check if it got resolved.

Zinpix

Thanks for bringing this to the forums Banshee!

I just got access to the forums and will try to contact Kevin.

The only thing which kept me in the game so far is the friends Ive made in game, my guild(s) and progress group.
I am quite tired, disappointed and disillusioned at the moment, but the support here helped me feel a bit better.

//Zinpix

FeedbackOnly

So once upon...I was a well lost and couldn't find items.

Just ask them to locate items

Also reply to message. I actually long ago got caught is housing trade bug.

They told me something similar.

I told them it truly vanished.

Turns out it did truly.

I got email with another of item from mythical game master later

Tldr it really happens sometimes

Kwoung

Aluna wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Considering the types of materials involved, my first guess-- if this was not theft or some kind of rollback-- is that the player is reconstructing gear which is using the materials; perhaps they're using reconstruction as a way to store excess Transmute Crystals or whatever? I'm not saying that that's what's happening, but that would be my first guess.

If you store transmutes you obviously make items that don't use upgrade materials. Despite the transmute limit being 1000 and making items costing 25+ so theres literally no way to burn that amount of mats by reconstructions.
Also, Banshee already said that they checked every possibility on where the items could have disappeared to

The limit in your craft bag is 1000, I currently have way over 1000 transmute stones when including unopened containers. I have actually burned over 1500 on occasion playing around with builds.

milllaurie

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi BansheeVT. Thanks for reaching out on behalf of the player. As mentioned in our guidelines and also noted in this thread, we do not discuss tickets and actions outside of the player involved.

If the player involved would like to reach out to me via DM, I can let them know what Customer Service noted, take what issues they may have and how they should proceed.

@ZOS_Kevin , wow! This is the communication we are expecting from you! Way to go!

Zinpix

Hey @ZOS_Kevin. I just noticed I can't DM you because I'm still new to the forums and don't have the permission to send direct messages yet. Could you please check in with me?

Sylvermynx

Zinpix wrote: »

Hey @ZOS_Kevin. I just noticed I can't DM you because I'm still new to the forums and don't have the permission to send direct messages yet. Could you please check in with me?

Make the rest of posts you need real quick - the total is 10 in order to PM someone IIRC, so find a few threads of some sort of interest to you and add posts to them.