sarahthes wrote: »

They would lose more paying customers by rolling back the entire server to 9:30AM yesterday morning.

As another person said, the number of people who logged into the pts is small, especially given it was still during the work day for western North America. The number who abused the exploit is going to be even smaller.

If only 2-3 people get away with having that extra billion gold or whatever... the economy isn't even going to notice in a couple weeks. I know people who already have that kind of gold, and already mess with the economy on purpose periodically (by systematically buying the entire market out of a specific resource). I bet you've never even noticed.

Yeah, I have no dog in this fight, as I haven't logged into the PTS in years. But to be honest, there are already thousands, if not tens of thousands of ESO billionaires and multi-billionaires in the game. A few "bad actors" dropping a couple billion into the economy probably wouldn't register more than a blip on the economic scene.

I don't know the deets on what ZOS tracks and doesn't track, but I'm pretty confident that they have access to records of any large gold transactions that take place, and that they can match PTS logins to currency transfers. I'm not too worried about any "destroyed economy," and I don't think others should be, either.

Imo they probably should have done a rollback last night (depending, of course, on how far back they would actually have to go...) but they went with another solution and the ship has sailed now.

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

The economy will balance itself out eventually. It will suck for a good while, but it’s not potentially permanent like people losing style pages they spent hours grinding for. Judging by the responses on the forum, a complete rollback would’ve pissed off a lot more people.

The economy has already been bad. Things aren’t selling anymore. Then we got the anniversary event so motif and material prices are dropping. There’s no massive gold sink to cause things to balance out. PC/NA economy only ever gets worse overall.

ADarklore wrote: »

I'm going to assume here that some of the people asking for rollbacks are those with suspended accounts trying to get out of the temp-ban quicker. The fact that only a tiny segment of the gaming population were logging into PTS on a weekday afternoon in less than a two hour span, could create such havoc seems a bit far-fetched. Also, ZOS has the information to track transactions on these accounts, and HOPEFULLY will be issuing perma-bans to any found to have abused the situation.

I really don't think the 'economy' issue is going to be impacted, but I believe those creating the hyperbole around it certainly have an agenda in making it appear so.

This is a fair perspective though, if people were given illicit gold they may quit anyways which would take it back out of the system. The infinite boxes/geodes will 100% be removed and a couple people exploiting the situation won’t make enough materials to crash the market.

I still think a full rollback would’ve been smarter but as others have said, its too late now. We’ll see what happens.

Sakiri wrote: »

AlbertoRenan wrote: »

I don't understand why people are so afraid of a Rollback, doesn't Zenimax create a Database backup before launching the PTS? I saw people saying she had done it earlier in the day. So no one would lose that much, no one would lose days of progress or anything like that. I'd rather waste hours of "farming" than see the game destroyed.

I personally wasn't online when PTS went live and I only had like, an hour of play before it went down, however, today I have:

Bought a house
Spend a few hundred crowns on furniture
Bought a costume on the crown store
Spent 500,000 gold on vendor furnishings
Spent 250,000 gold on guild trader furnishings
And spent 4 hours decorating Humblemud.

Ill be ever so slightly peeved.

I already have the style pages and mount, and have for days, but dang, I dislike wasting my dang time.

Just curious but would losing that work be worth the trade off of you losing access to your account for 3 days?

Let's say that you decorating your house for a few hours was vaguely linked to a major exploit so anyone that accessed that particular house was targeted. Now would you rather lose 3 days of account access or lose the work you did on your home?

I have a solution! ZOS should send everyone a billion gold. Then we can all be billionaires!

(Still working out the details. 😋)

sarahthes wrote: »

Seraphayel wrote: »

KS_Amt38 wrote: »

Whats the Source of Ppl with PTS Gold on live? Trust me bro?

Yeah, all I've seen in this regard was just comments in the forum where people supposedly laundered billions of gold...

I mean, people definitely had it. Their pts character creations and deletions got transferred to live. But I don't know how much gold actually made it out of their character inventories.

Probably not as much as some people seem to think. ZOS has a better idea of what happened than anyone here. They took the information they have (which we do not) and chose a course of action that they felt was best. If they didn't think a global rollback was necessary, it probably wasn't.

(I hope anyway.)

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

While ZOS is at it maybe remove the whole 1 billion gold on each template character.

In their newest post they basically confirmed doing that.

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Title. Stuff was distributed - unless you can be 100% sure that you can track where all those went and roll back THOSE accounts too, a full server roll back needs to happen.

People now have PTS items and billions of gold on live. That's not okay.

If rollback was feasible, that would have been done.
So far, in previous incident many years ago when billions of gold appeared due to a bug, ZOS tracked the transactions. Probably, they could do it again

Obviously people care about the economy, because people want to buy stuff once in a while to use without going bankrupt. Anyway, I don't really think ZOS has good options to pick from in this case.

manukartofanu wrote: »

I've dealt with such an issue in another game. There's nothing worse than having to prove to support that you bought something during the rollback period. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, anywhere, ever.

Just an FYI: That's what the billing history is for.

Soarora wrote: »

Rolling back individual people is messing up cores and trial runs too. People already having to drop because they don’t have access to their accounts despite being innocent.

The economy is more important of course but that’s another problem with this strategy.

People may be innocent of any intentional exploitation but still have things from PTS that need to be resolved on their accounts.
For instance.... if they logged on just to see the new house, and bought that house for 1 gold, as we all usually do on the PTS, that would mean that on the regular server they would now own that house. They likely don't even realize it yet because the house isn't yet released, but its a ramification of the problem that existed.

They are totally innocent of any wrongdoing but yet their account would still need to be locked until they reverse that house purchase carrying over to the regular server.

And for the record, I totally do not agree with rolling back the far greater percentage of accounts that did not go on the PTS server OR receive funds, or goods that came from the PTS server. Why anger the larger population and create problems and a zillion tickets from them, trying to recover what they say they have lost? That makes no sense at all. They have enough on their plates to deal with rather than an overload of tickets - even if most of them would be denied in the long run anyway.

They have stated they will track down all the gold trails and purchases of everything that came from the PTS, so while perhaps maybe there is still goods or gold on the regular server from this exploit I'm pretty sure they will track it all down and it will disappear from those people's accounts.

What's done is done. Unfortunate - 100% and the ones who had no knowledge of the exploit but maybe got caught up in it should absolutely be angry. However, their problem is not the problem of all the players who didn't go on PTS - who also paid a price for this debacle in lost tickets, endeavor dailies, playing time, event boxes, etc. Everyone lost something.

Wanting them to roll back everyones account and then unlock the locked ones just sounds more like being a bit selfish and only wanting to get theirs unlocked faster without caring about all those that will lose who didn't go on the PTS server.

I'd like the see the event extended a bit... perhaps to the Thursday, instead of the current Tuesday - or even a whole week (Thank you @Cruxanero for the correction! ).
That would repair some of the damage at least. Since they have said that accounts should be unlocked in 2-3 days for most, that adds another 2 days on to the event for them as well.

The amount of gold that entered the game is probably less than will exit it paying for guild traders in two weeks.

Sounds like perhaps a thousand people are locked out: everyone who visited the PTS.

Of those thousand, some percentage will not have logged back into PC-NA before their accounts got locked; next easiest will be those who logged into PC-NA, but not into the affected characters; then those that logged into the affected characters, but did no transfers to other accounts.

So that will leave the hard cases: the few dozen who DID log into PC-NA, into the affected character, and laundered their ill-gotten gains to their bank, guild bank, etc, in an effort to launder it.

For those... I very much doubt they will be getting their accounts back, and it's going to be a giant pain in the ass for the engineers tasked with tracking down all the transfers they made.

That kind of laundering is the big problem, but it's not a new problem. MMOs deal with this problem constantly, because kids get their parents' creditcards, go nuts, buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff, then a few weeks later, there's a chargeback.

They never need to do a sever rollback when a creditcard chargeback happens, even in the really egregious cases, so they don't need to in this case either.

Every single item and gold transfer is going to be recorded. They just need to manually go through them all, and that job sucks, no matter how well you automate it.

Some trades are easy enough to reverse, because both sides of the trade are recorded, and both sides still have the traded items. In other cases, one side or the other has used up or passed on the traded item, and someone's going to lose out. Then they have to decide whether that was a legitimate trade, or whether both sides were laundering-mules, and need to be banned.

The suckiest cases are where the perp scammed people, giving them stuff they thought was real. For most MMOs, the policy is "anything gained through an exploit will be clawed back". The scammed loser will lose out on the stuff they were "gifted" or "traded", and depending how the trade was done, they might not get their part of the trade back.

In another MMO, I was gifted a dragon avatar by a friend, who had earned it by spending weeks on an art commission just so she could give me something lovely. Turned out that dragon purchase was charged back, so the dragon disappeared. I lost my avatar, my friend felt bad, and the kid who commissioned her art using his parents' card got banned. We all lost out. It sucked, ...but it was sadly the right thing to do.

Even worse, some of the scam victims will likely get banned, because it's sometimes very hard to distinguish between legit players who are scam-victims, and laundering mules. Especially with new players, who lack legitimate gameplaying history, and are naive about the game's scams so are sadly also the easiest fodder for scammers

So right now is probably the worst time to go to any of those sites that sell ESO stuff for real-world cash. You don't want any dotted lines connecting you to the exploiters. If they offload their millions on you for real cash, then you could well get treated as a laundering mule.

Cruxanero wrote: »

I'd like the see the event extended a bit... perhaps to the Thursday like events usually end, instead of the current Tuesday

Events usually start on thursday and end on tuesday.
So you see, the only possible solution is extending by whole weeks.

Eeep... you are correct
Thank you for the correction!