Bank Bug Recovery Suggestion For Zenimax

UrQuan

I posted this in the Missing Bank Items, Bank Slots, & Skill Points thread, but as that thread has well over 1000 posts in it, it's highly likely that it would just get lost in the chatter.

Anyway, once the underlying cause of the bank bug is determined and patched, here's my suggestion for how Zenimax should go about making things right for those affected by it.

I don't know what type of DB you guys use, but assuming it's SQL or something with similar capabilities, and assuming that some sort of identifiable transaction shows up in the DB (that can be related to a user ID) when the bank glitch occurs, it should be possible to create a script to do the following:
1) Look for whatever transaction shows in the database when this glitch happens
2) Compare the number of bank slots prior to the glitch transaction to the number of slots after the glitch transaction.
3) Takes the difference between those numbers and adds that to the current number of bank slots.
4) Compare the amount of gold in the bank prior to the glitch transaction to the amount of gold after the glitch transaction.
5)Takes the difference between those numbers and adds that to the current amount of gold in the bank.
6) Compare the items held in the bank prior to the glitch transaction to the items held in the bank after the glitch transaction.
7) Uses that to provide a list of the items lost by that user, so that automated in-game emails can be sent to all those users with the lost items as an attachment (automatically putting them back in the banks could be problematic).

If it's not possible to write a script that will do that, then I don't see any way that it's possible to "make everyone whole" without a whole lot of manual intervention, which will likely take months.

Should that be the case, then I think the best solution would be to give everyone affected the option of taking the max number of bank slots (whatever that is) and 5,000 gold or so. That should effectively reimburse the majority of affected people. At the same time, they should allow people affected to opt out of that blanket solution and submit a ticket to be manually made whole by returning exactly what was lost. This should reduce the number of manual interventions required by a lot, and as such it would take less time to fix everyone.

Oh, and giving those affected some free time added to their subscription would be a good idea too, just to wash away some of the bad taste left in people's mouths.

Just my suggestion for dealing with the aftermath of this. Also some better communication with the Customer Service team on what exactly the messaging should be to the people submitting tickets would have been nice in order to keep those messages consistent - and also to ensure that they don't mark the tickets as "solved" when nothing has yet been solved.

starkerealm

Honestly, once they know the cause, they'll probably just query for that, and then give everyone a pet for not getting pitchforks and torches.

kunquatb16_ESO

starkerealm wrote: »

Honestly, once they know the cause, they'll probably just query for that, and then give everyone a pet for not getting pitchforks and torches.

As long as that pet wears a backpack and carries stuff I'm in.

Imryll

Items are going to be difficult to gauge--for both the player and ZOS--because so many have appeared in character inventories after the player logs in on another character. I'd prefer they did an initial pass for lost bank slots and then one for gold.

Then respond to requests from players who believe they're still missing items. There's no need to send me duplicates of items that later reappeared. Or to delay restoration of slots because it's hard to be sure whether I lost a couple blue entoloma. Players who believe they've lost items should have recourse, but triage is good.

Mujuro

Those are good ideas; I'm worried, however, that ZOS lacks the ability to handle such a DB query or the DB tables are set up in a way that would make such queries impracticable. Let's hope I'm wrong.

UrQuan

Imryll wrote: »

Items are going to be difficult to gauge--for both the player and ZOS--because so many have appeared in character inventories after the player logs in on another character. I'd prefer they did an initial pass for lost bank slots and then one for gold.

Depending on the type of DB and the table setup (ie. how the different tables are related to each other, what attributes are where, how the transactions are entered, etc) it could be really easy to have a script find what items are missing, or it could be virtually impossible. If it's the latter, then I'd agree with you.