Player: Why did the Dev team not immediately revert all UO shards and apply an emergency hot fix?

Why was no warning posted on UO.com and the login screen immediately to only move items around your backpack inside of your house with strictly audited security?

Is it acceptable that they waited and allowed people to lose BILLIONS of gold (10's of thousdans of RL dollars) in items to cheaters and hackers? (some of which were in HAX and were supposed to be banned)

I think these are extremely important questions that so far no one has addressed yet.

Wilki: Since you seem to love fanning flames in this forum day in and day out, allow me to pour some water on this one before you manage to turn it into a 5 alarm blaze.

The fix for this issue was implemented, tested and pushed out to all shards as fast as humanly possible, once we learned that this particular bug was being used to cause harm. That process took about 24 hours, which is not unreasonable.

As for reverting, the reason why we decided not to revert is because while the number of players unaffected by this issue outnumbered those that were by over a factor of 100. For every one person that lost something, there were 100 more that had logged in and played a significant amount of time. Taking into consideration that to revert some shards would have been set back about 24 hours, the decision not to revert was the correct one to make.

While we very much regret that some players lost items due to this, the fact is that we busted butt getting the issue fixed, tested and pushed out to all shards as fast as we could (even taking down all North American shards during prime time, which is not something we do lightly). It is also a fact that reverting all shards for a large chunk of time would have caused far more players to lose items than had lost them due to the issue at hand. Over 100x more players, to be exact.

In a situation like that, you have to choose the lesser of two evils, and considering the numbers involved, we made the correct choice.

Player: I would guess your posts in this thread are deleted because you trash EA

Wilki: Having read those posts myself before they were removed, I'm going to take a wild guess and say they're gone because they personally attacked members of my team. There is a huge difference between expressing your strong displeasure at something we've done and outright insulting specific individuals.

Wilki: Well, you don't have to love us, but maintaining a minimal level of civilized behavior is nice :-P

Player: What you really did by not doing a revert, and what I (hopefully too cynically) think your real motivation was, was to avoid condemnation and responsibility for letting the buggy code into the game in the first place. This bug was so weird that I agree QA could never have caught it, but that doesn't mean it isnt your teams responsibility anyway; you don't have to make a mistake to be responsible for something horrible. You have avoided a great angry outcry by not doing a revert, but you have also shirked your duties to those effected.

Wilki: The reasoning behind not doing a revert is exactly as I described. I sat in the meeting and had a vote on the subject, and I voted no because for every 1 person that was impacted, there were a hundred or more that weren't, many of whom had aquired items just as valuable as those who lost them. Reverting all shards by almost an entire day was the absolute last option. It was a unanimous decision, FWIW.

We don't do/not do things to the service that shouldn't/should be done to avoid condemnation or responsibility. These boards are a tool that we use to gather feedback and deliver information. While we obviously don't want to upset people, we're not going to let a handful of people yelling at us infuence what we believe to be the right choice in a given situation.

Does it suck that good people lost items? Yes. Does it suck that some exploiters managed to profit from the situation? Yes. Is it our responsibility? Of course, as it's our game. But reverting all shards by that amount of time wasn't the right answer for this situation. I wish I had a better answer for the folks that lost stuff other than that we're sorry it happened.

On behalf of those who didn't loose stuff I would like to thank Wilki and his team for not doing a revert. Anyone who can't understand why a revert would have been the wrong choice really has to get past themselves and see that there are thousands of others in this game besides them.

*nods eagerly @ Drak*

I feeeearrrr the reverts! *shudders*

I agree with Drak on this one.

If only 1000 people (lets just say) there are probably 100000 more who didnt lose something and maybe gained something...

People are just ignorant and want everything from themselves

Yup... greed is definately a factor, Eppy.. what these "gimme" people don't stop to consider is the actual progress other folks have made in game whether that be spending hours decoing a home, working on skills, or mindless crafting... all gone in a revert just so a handful of people can get back the rare neon butcher knife they lost while banksitting.

I really think a lot of those posters like to !!!!! and moan just to hear themselves talk big. If they were actually talking to Wilki, or anyone else, in person they would not have the 'courage?' to talk so harshly. The internet does allow for a lot of trash talk and luckily the Dev team recognizes that.

A revert is always the last option. I'm glad they chose not to revert but I am sorry for those that lost valuable items.

Hehe.. I agree! Have you seen the pics of Wilki?? He's not a small man!! *laugh*

To me it just renforces just how picky some players can be. The devs are damned if they do, and damned if they don't I guess.

I agree with Dra'ki as well...I mean, who can argue with that? hehe

I'm glad there wasn't a revert. I would've lost all those skill points that I worked so hard on. So thank you guys.

No he's not. I noticed that when he was looking up at me in DC :-P