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Character Lost - Mega Thread


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Friend of mine lost his 2 days ago, I lost mine last night, another friend lost theirs this morning. Welcome to Studio Wildcard and their failure to do what a billion other game companies have done well in the past. Secure player save files.  Just wait until some idiot in Customer Service asks you for screenshots of all your dinos, gear and unlocks. That'll really make your night.. Because yeah, we all do that every single time we transfer..  

 

Not to stand on the soap box but yeah I'm gonna for a sec.

#1 Wildcard: 

Screenshots? No. How about you guys put on your big boy pants and backup pfiles more securely? There's this thing called the cloud, it might be a good idea to use it.

 

#2 Wildcard: 

Fact: your bad programming is in no way our fault, so asking us to provide you proof of our characters is just a sad, unprofessional and mediocre way of dodging any responsibility.

 

#3 Wildcard:

This title has been live for 4+ years, and in that 4+ years, this random deletion of player files has existed. Fire your lead dev, quality assurance manager, and all your senior staff, replace them with real developers, not sure where you've been recruiting dev help, but I'm fairly certain it's from local community colleges under the guise of intern.

 

Don't know about you folks, but i'm done being nice about this, I paid for a product, and so far I still haven't gotten what was promised.  Tired of herd mentality of "you got arked, it happens" when it should be "Wildcard needs to answer for this crap."  I don't expect perfection, but something as foundational and important as character save data? Thats a fail on levels I can't even begin to describe.  Penalizing players for their poor coding and because they didn't take screenshots as "proof" of their items/engrams.. Priceless.

 

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Atm i wait 3 days and support no answer me, 3 days where i lost my imprint with dinos, and can't play because i wait my answer , after sended ticket..... So i want know who give me back all... I lost in my inventory my wyvern in cryopod, that i grew up in 5 days, because i hadn't cryopods during this period, and many structures in my bag... Now who give me back my wyvern, i need do screenshots of what?? So me like an idiot everytimes need make screenshot because a day i will need if something will be wrong with servers??? DILO?? this ruin game experience.. And this slowness of answer me, make discomfort because i can't do nothing in game, because if i'm solo i already lost all my dinos, my base, ecc....

 

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15 hours ago, Rio4201 said:

#2 Wildcard: 

Fact: your bad programming is in no way our fault, so asking us to provide you proof of our characters is just a sad, unprofessional and mediocre way of dodging any responsibility.

this one i have to argue, sorry, there are people who would just submit a support ticket saying 'my lvl 135 got wiped!' just to get a high level character.  Without any proof that you did level your character up, wildcard can't know if you actually earned those levels or are just one of those people who would attempt to take advantage of the system. 

A simple method of proof of character, learn the taxidermy tool, and occasionally kill yourself, then taxidermy your character. that gives a visual record in game of your characters level, and is linked to the player id.  likewise its not that hard to open your inventory once in awhile and press that F12 key for a screenshot to have further proof.

When my character got wiped I brought another over from a different server, and my tribe mate added me back into the tribe, I then submitted the support ticket and included screenshots of my characters inventory screen, as well as a fresh screenshot of the most recently taxidermy character.  We left the other character as a tribe member till the GM was able to join in and do his magic, they got all my babies imprints reassigned to my current character, and even gave me the missing levels. honestly it wasn't that bad of a process.

during the time the ticket was submitted they were having a high flux of tickets coming in due to others having the same problem as me, and it took awhile for them to get to me to do the restoration, but it did get done, and had a nice little conv with the GM afterwards.   I only lost one baby, a baby yuty, but it was a glitch that caused the problem, and i didn't bother to submit another ticket on it as it was just one baby out of 30 various dino's i had.

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On 10/15/2019 at 10:40 AM, caleb68 said:

this one i have to argue, sorry, there are people who would just submit a support ticket saying 'my lvl 135 got wiped!' just to get a high level character.  Without any proof that you did level your character up, wildcard can't know if you actually earned those levels or are just one of those people who would attempt to take advantage of the system. 

A simple method of proof of character, learn the taxidermy tool, and occasionally kill yourself, then taxidermy your character. that gives a visual record in game of your characters level, and is linked to the player id.  likewise its not that hard to open your inventory once in awhile and press that F12 key for a screenshot to have further proof.

When my character got wiped I brought another over from a different server, and my tribe mate added me back into the tribe, I then submitted the support ticket and included screenshots of my characters inventory screen, as well as a fresh screenshot of the most recently taxidermy character.  We left the other character as a tribe member till the GM was able to join in and do his magic, they got all my babies imprints reassigned to my current character, and even gave me the missing levels. honestly it wasn't that bad of a process.

during the time the ticket was submitted they were having a high flux of tickets coming in due to others having the same problem as me, and it took awhile for them to get to me to do the restoration, but it did get done, and had a nice little conv with the GM afterwards.   I only lost one baby, a baby yuty, but it was a glitch that caused the problem, and i didn't bother to submit another ticket on it as it was just one baby out of 30 various dino's i had.

Here's my problem with that:

Fundamentally, at NO time should a company put it on their playerbase to do things that the company by all rights should be doing.  It's the point behind this that I'm trying to make, because they can't manage their code and back up player saves properly, why should the end user suddenly be responsible for something that the development team is clearly responsible for? I could see if i were buying a vehicle from them and they required me to have the oil changed and tires rotated in it, but we're dealing with software and that's a whole different ballgame. 

Imagine what would happen if Blizzard suddenly lost their entire player database and they responded with, "Well unless you can provide screenshots of everything you owned in the game, the character level and achievements, and anything else pertinent to the character and possessions we can't help you."  Their company would immediately be turned inside out, the players would massively walk away and never look back, the title would fail and the lawsuits would come rolling out.

It is by industry standard, the responsibility of the game studio to save/store/update and maintain their own player database, not by legal standard, but by industry standards. Any game studio worth their salt makes that a top priority, no players = no income = no game.  To be asked to provide proof that clearly should have been backed up, save/stored and accessible by their customer service team is an asinine, responsibility dodging tactic that anyone serious about the industry would find lazy and completely unacceptable. Sadly, this conversation wouldn't even need to be had, if they had simply put a failsafein, an exported save routine prior transfer, or hell, a number of them.. Back it up to cloud storage, encrypt and write  a local save file to the client side, do all of the above, but do something instead of "oh we need screenshots because we don't wanna do our jobs." (Which is what this feels like.)

 

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55 minutes ago, Rio4201 said:

Here's my problem with that:

Fundamentally, at NO time should a company put it on their playerbase to do things that the company by all rights should be doing.  It's the point behind this that I'm trying to make, because they can't manage their code and back up player saves properly, why should the end user suddenly be responsible for something that the development team is clearly responsible for? I could see if i were buying a vehicle from them and they required me to have the oil changed and tires rotated in it, but we're dealing with software and that's a whole different ballgame. 

It happens, not everything can be looked out for during server transfers.  Your basically wanting wildcard to setup a system to backup 1mil. plus files for the sole purpose of the possibility of your character being lost.  Digital media is by no way able to be compared to physical products so your comparison to a oil change is null and void.

55 minutes ago, Rio4201 said:

Imagine what would happen if Blizzard suddenly lost their entire player database and they responded with, "Well unless you can provide screenshots of everything you owned in the game, the character level and achievements, and anything else pertinent to the character and possessions we can't help you."  Their company would immediately be turned inside out, the players would massively walk away and never look back, the title would fail and the lawsuits would come rolling out.

Actually it does happen, characters do get lost and guess what?  Blizzard, Bethesdia, and the other companies require you to provide proof if your character IF they are willing to even restore it.  Many MMo / RPG style games aren't.  Sorry to disappoint you, but players do have the same issue on other game platforms.  I know because I've lost my characters on two different ones and same, had to provide proof of character to get it restored.

56 minutes ago, Rio4201 said:

It is by industry standard, the responsibility of the game studio to save/store/update and maintain their own player database, not by legal standard, but by industry standards. Any game studio worth their salt makes that a top priority, no players = no income = no game.  To be asked to provide proof that clearly should have been backed up, save/stored and accessible by their customer service team is an asinine, responsibility dodging tactic that anyone serious about the industry would find lazy and completely unacceptable. Sadly, this conversation wouldn't even need to be had, if they had simply put a failsafein, an exported save routine prior transfer, or hell, a number of them.. Back it up to cloud storage, encrypt and write  a local save file to the client side, do all of the above, but do something instead of "oh we need screenshots because we don't wanna do our jobs." (Which is what this feels like.)

The problem is, and isn't really a direct cause of said company at any said point, that the internet itself isn't stable.  People will get disconnected due to multiple reasons from the internet, causing loss of data,  many of those reasons that you seem to think the gaming company is responsible for they are not, and in no means are required by industry standards to replace data lost due to such events. 

Your grasping for straws here.

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It happens, not everything can be looked out for during server transfers.  Your basically wanting wildcard to setup a system to backup 1mil. plus files for the sole purpose of the possibility of your character being lost.  Digital media is by no way able to be compared to physical products so your comparison to a oil change is null and void.

Caleb, have you ever been in development or worked for any larger game companies? I have.  I'm not saying your opinions aren't valid however, so I'll respond as appropriately as I can to what you said.  First off, yes, it happens.  As for if things can be looked out for during server transfers, actually it can. Many and i do mean, MANY, game companies have fail safes in place and do incorporate a backup routine before allowing transfers to other clusters, instances, however you wish to describe a machine to machine transfer. This goes back to my finger pointing to poor design, Wildcard could and should have put the necessary effort into making this a much less likely case, yet in the past week alone i've seen 20 posts on people who've lost their characters during transfers.  This clearly shows the lack thereof of effort on the development team's part to fix the problem.

Quote

Actually it does happen, characters do get lost and guess what?  Blizzard, Bethesdia, and the other companies require you to provide proof if your character IF they are willing to even restore it.  Many MMo / RPG style games aren't.  Sorry to disappoint you, but players do have the same issue on other game platforms.  I know because I've lost my characters on two different ones and same, had to provide proof of character to get it restored.

It isn't a point on if it happens or not, it's the point that it happens way too much on this title to be anything other than a matter of poor programming and irrefutable evidence of bad game design.  Blizzard by the way, hasn't required "proof" regarding a deleted character in almost 7 years. Why? Because they have a backup system for their more than 3 million players that are actively playing. Notice, they can even restore a deleted character?  Bethesda, I can't comment on.  I lean heavily towards PC development and don't delve into the realm of cross platform development nor do I play on console, so I can't really say what their policies are there. What i do know however, is that on a PC platform, this is a complete and utter disappointment and/or joke.

Quote

 

The problem is, and isn't really a direct cause of said company at any said point, that the internet itself isn't stable.  People will get disconnected due to multiple reasons from the internet, causing loss of data,  many of those reasons that you seem to think the gaming company is responsible for they are not, and in no means are required by industry standards to replace data lost due to such events. 

Your grasping for straws here.

 

 I think it goes without saying that the gaming studios can't be held accountable for a bad pipeline or other interruption of internet service that may come up. However, it's a commonality among all gaming studios who present and host multiplayer games that require persistent saves, player tracking, etc, to design and keep the system optimal to avoid data loss. If we're splitting hairs, if I can't play the game because my character keeps being mysteriously deleted due to a bug that could have been fixed but hasn't, how does that become my fault? I purchased the game, I did my part in creating the character and beginning my adventures, I paid for the DLCs, i've done my part as an end user. If I am required to keep a library of screenshots why wasn't this told to me before I purchased said game? Where's the disclaimer? Since this is by your definition a "fair" requirement or approach, then where is my fair disclaimer on the box? This then becomes a legal matter now doesn't it? 

 

Even in my early years programming, I came to a distinct realization that players don't like it when their pfiles disappear. Players also don't like being told to prove something after it's already happen, and being asked to prove it with screenshots that they can no longer get because the damn character is gone. Do you see where I'm going with this? If someone had told me that I had to take screenshots to play this steaming pile of crap, I'd have passed up that whole purchase in favor of a night out with my wife. 

 

I've written several backup functions for several different projects over the years, and with the cloud being such a wonderful thing, there's literally no reasons or excuse not to back that stuff up, period, end of story.   

 

That's why I'm frustrated, and I think that may be why alot of the others are as well. While I don't expect perfection on any level from any game studio, if you are going to put requirements like that up after I've already made my purchase, you've basically breached the ToS and betrayed my trust as a consumer. That, and the 4+ years this has been an issue clearly shows the rest of the community how much of a priority it has been for Wildcard. This shouldn't be happening, of all the things to hold most holy among the online games, the player files which keep your players actually playing should be ironclad backed up at all times.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Rio4201 said:

take screenshots to play this steaming pile of crap, I'd have passed up that whole purchase in favor of a night out with my wife. 

I've written several backup functions for several different projects over the years, and with the cloud being such a wonderful thing, there's literally no reasons or excuse not to back that stuff up, period, end of story.   

That's why I'm frustrated, and I think that may be why alot of the others are as well. While I don't expect perfection on any level from any game studio, if you are going to put requirements like that up after I've already made my purchase, you've basically breached the ToS and betrayed my trust as a consumer. That, and the 4+ years this has been an issue clearly shows the rest of the community how much of a priority it has been for Wildcard. This shouldn't be happening, of all the things to hold most holy among the online games, the player files which keep your players actually playing should be ironclad backed up at all times.

Yes, and while some things in ark I find frustrating, most problems are caused by players.   For instance, there have been cases where people have gone to transfer to another server, then during that transfer got disconnected, then they log back onto the previous server, no character and instantly go "my character got deleted" when their character was sitting on the server they were transferring to, or cases where the same thing has happened, and their character was sitting in the download character list, but rather then downloading their character they click that 'create new character' button and then say their character was deleted.  Its not always the companies fault, an nothing is infallible when it comes to people, after all the computer is only as smart as the person sitting behind the keyboard.

If official frustrates you so much, and you have the skills to do it, perhaps you should start playing unofficial and designing a mod that does the backups how you see they should be done, Once you get it fleshed out and functioning properly, submit it to the wildcard sponsored mods to get their attention drawn to it, and who knows, they may just very well do what you want them to, and use your very mod to do it.

Fact of matter is, and even the moderators have said so, complaining about game core mechanics on the forum is just fruitless, there's like a 1% chance (if even that) that a Wildcard coder will even come on and read what you've written, and think 'hrm maybe that will work'. 

I can say in all the time I've played ark - I've lost a grand total of 5 characters sense 2015.   1 character was due to a patch snafu that effected a lot of people, and wildcard worked hard to get people restored and the game back to its normal state.   The other 4 characters - due to my own mistake. So here we are in a grand total of 4 years, I've lost 1 character because of wildcard and they restored said character.  Honestly, I have to say that's a pretty good track record.

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4 hours ago, caleb68 said:

Yes, and while some things in ark I find frustrating, most problems are caused by players.   For instance, there have been cases where people have gone to transfer to another server, then during that transfer got disconnected, then they log back onto the previous server, no character and instantly go "my character got deleted" when their character was sitting on the server they were transferring to, or cases where the same thing has happened, and their character was sitting in the download character list, but rather then downloading their character they click that 'create new character' button and then say their character was deleted.  Its not always the companies fault, an nothing is infallible when it comes to people, after all the computer is only as smart as the person sitting behind the keyboard.

If official frustrates you so much, and you have the skills to do it, perhaps you should start playing unofficial and designing a mod that does the backups how you see they should be done, Once you get it fleshed out and functioning properly, submit it to the wildcard sponsored mods to get their attention drawn to it, and who knows, they may just very well do what you want them to, and use your very mod to do it.

Fact of matter is, and even the moderators have said so, complaining about game core mechanics on the forum is just fruitless, there's like a 1% chance (if even that) that a Wildcard coder will even come on and read what you've written, and think 'hrm maybe that will work'. 

I can say in all the time I've played ark - I've lost a grand total of 5 characters sense 2015.   1 character was due to a patch snafu that effected a lot of people, and wildcard worked hard to get people restored and the game back to its normal state.   The other 4 characters - due to my own mistake. So here we are in a grand total of 4 years, I've lost 1 character because of wildcard and they restored said character.  Honestly, I have to say that's a pretty good track record.

I'm sure we all find some things frustrating in Ark, and I genuinely agree with you, most problems are in fact caused by the players themselves.  That transfer situation you described, I can totally relate to that, I've seen friends and tribemates do that very same thing. It is definitely infuriating but it's not my place to correct or otherwise steer them onto the right path. Generally when It try to help, they get defensive and don't listen anyways. *chuckle*  

In my situation, and in the situation of a few of my friends over the past few days, we did the smart thing, we checked the originating server for a downloadable character, checked the target server for the character, once determining it wasn't in either place, restarted steam, re-checked both places. After a second attempt at that, it was uninstall/reinstall of the entire game, rechecked, still nothing. I've probably been coding everything from business solution software to engine / quest / and tool applications for over 20 years, i believe in testing, re-testing, debugging, retesting.. debugging some more, and retesting again. (you get my point)  But, not everyone does. lol I used to tell my boss every time he asked how close we were to finalizing a code project, "When the code tells me it's ready and not the impatient boss."  

Official in itself doesn't frustrate me, there are only a few real issues that genuinely get under my skin, losing a character file, that's a big, no, I rephrase, that's a monumentally huge one for me. I was working for a company and project which I cannot talk about, but we lost a few hundred thousand player files, so it kind of scarred me for life when it comes to that. The project nearly tanked before we ever truly got the title going and out of beta testing.  Thankfully, it did pick up and while we didn't get WoW type player numbers, we had a respectable player base and the title would coincidentally be running even now if it hadn't been for extremely poor leadership, bean counters and market analysts more concerned about the bottom line than a stable, fun game title. 

I've been considering modding it up and submitting code to handle it, although as another person pointed out in this thread, in truth it's as simple as a cron job that copies and backs up the player files for the servers, it doesn't even really need to be a mod. I could actually see them putting in, if they haven't already, some playerfile maintenance routines, if the pfile is a year old and there has been no activity, they could clean em out, add in another pulse save only have it be for backups, run that cron job, and bam done deal.  So many possible ways to handle it, I'm sure the WC coding team have sat down and talked about this, but as with any team, concerns for what players are gonna react like get in the way. I know I'm a huge pain in their backside.  Imagine a 15 second save on top of the regular server save, there would be rioting. However an optimization pass, maybe a small push for server upgrades and bringing them up to a more acceptable standard, would help in that whole effort. 

You are in fact correct, I don't think any of the coders are going to generally read these forums, when I originally posted, I did so out of pure frustration and because I honestly felt strongly enough to raise a stink about it. Call me old fashioned, but these days people are scared to say what they mean or what they feel, they give sketchy, vague or sometimes completely misleading reactions to things. I've over the last few years, made it a point not to be fake about it, and to voice my opinions no matter how raw they may be. You can't truly know a player, a customer, a friend or a lover, until you and they are complete relaxed and comfortable with eachother. Then you get to see the reality and truth of things. So, in all reality, I used this thread as a way to express my frustration, knowing nothing may ever come of it, but in doing so, I feel better, I got to meet you and discuss something important with you, and I got to back up the other frustrated players who are also experiencing the same issue. So all in all, moot point or not, it all worked out.

P.S - I'm glad you've been that lucky, some people have all the luck, in my experience, I have very little, but I thank the universe every day for every shred of luck it spares and pushes my way.

 

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15 hours ago, Joebl0w13 said:

Ark. It happens.

And that is why it frustrates me so much. It has become an acceptable standard when it shouldn't have. Oh well, "you got arked. it happens." 

"Oh well, your new car blew up before you got it off the lot.. it happens." 

No offense JoeBl0w13, just pointing out why I find it so frustrating. lol. 

 

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35 minutes ago, Rio4201 said:

And that is why it frustrates me so much. It has become an acceptable standard when it shouldn't have. Oh well, "you got arked. it happens." 

"Oh well, your new car blew up before you got it off the lot.. it happens." 

No offense JoeBl0w13, just pointing out why I find it so frustrating. lol. 

 

No worries. I understand it’s frustrating. Been there have the T-shirt. It just is what it is. 

People have been waiting for 3+ years for certain things to change, it’s not happening. Just have to love it or leave it, as it were. 

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Lost character - HOW IT HAPPEN

I was travelling from Aberration (from 223) to Extinction (NA 500). When you travel between servers your data is saved into destination server (NA 500) and deleted in source server (Abe 223).

AND

I have been thrown into NA 500.. after one ot two minutes there was server crash and rollback so.. data of NA 500 was loaded from last backup save... from the time when my character wasnt there yet...

Finally after restart server from backup, there wasn't my character at NA 500 and Abe 223... no character, no gears, no equipped 2 rock drakes..

And the question is.....

Why traveled character data is not written in another file independent from server backup copy? So that character that will arrive into time between server backup and server crash will  not be erased?

 

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2 hours ago, Aylana314159 said:

That's a good question that's been asked for years. Transfering on the official network is risky.

to be frank about it, transferring to any map except single player is risky.  Single player the file exists in one location.  

the character data is saved separate from the map data on the server, both official and unofficial, the same method is used for saving the character.  If you transfer on to a different unofficial server and the server crashes right after you get there before the map saves, guess what? you've lost you character as well.

Its not where they saves it but WHEN they save it.

Character data, as well as items transferred from Ark data, should be saved the second its done, rather then waiting for a server save.  This would literally cut back the loss of characters and items lost due to server crashes well over 80%. 

Its because nothing gets saved when you do transfer both items and characters, they just get stored in the servers Ram till the server does a map save, and the servers are already having issues with ram because too much data is getting stored and frankly not enough memory is dedicated to each instance they are running on the servers.  I'm guessing the Official instances on the servers have 1gig of ram assigned to them by the way the servers themselves act vs.  structures / number of players actively loaded.

You see it less on Undedicated because frankly, there's a lot less people on those servers and a lot less transferring characters between servers as many don't allow uploads.

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