A technical issue cropped the day the auction houses went offline, where characters gear failed to load and/or became unequipped during play. For hardcore players who were affected when these issues cropped up, it resulted in the death of their character.
The specific details as to what caused the issue was never mentioned; however, it is most definitely related to the shutdown of the auction houses since it’s a system that was tied to stash, character inventory, and a characters equipped items.
And it was a huge bug at that. Which leads into the whole issue of dealing with the whole hardcore rollback policy that Blizzard instituted back during patch 1.0.7 (on top of the permanent death disclaimer when creating a hardcore hero). Hardcore play is already subjected to unfair deaths in terms of lag/disconnect due to the lack of proper server side handling.
So how do I feel about the above where they are making a case-by-case exception?
I’m personally fine with it because this was clearly a severe bug in their database code which should have never happened. While there will no doubt be some D3 hardcore players who will feel this goes against the “spirit” of hardcore, this sort of case where there is clearly buggy code causing what amounts to an unfair death, isn’t black and white to where one should just suck it up and re-roll. Blizzard is rightfully taking responsibility because they know it was a HUGE error in their code. There is absolutely nothing hardcore, about losing ones character when they suddenly become unequipped.
And in the majority of all legitimate cases, it will be relatively trivial to make that determination (the biggest “problem” is Blizzard side where they need to waste precious support and engineering resources to handle and verify claims). The game currently has ZERO competition to begin with (plus with patch 2.0.x, most items being soul bound), so it doesn’t really matter. There are times when exceptions to the rule have to be made, especially when the screw up was clearly caused by major faulty code.
Does this set a precedent for future faulty code causing unfair deaths? It depends. When brawling went live, there were issues reported during the PTR about DoT effects still persisting after leaving the Scorched Chapter. That issue was not fixed and caused some hardcore deaths; in that case, there was no rollback even though it was clearly a bug that had been reported before the patch went live. This particular issue (an inventory database problem) cannot even be compared to brawling one though in terms of severity though. Like so many of their authentication server issues (where only certain accounts are affected), only certain accounts were affected by this inventory problem (we’re talking about a distributed database problem). Like I experienced no issues with my inventory, auction house items, shared stash, etc. But I can understand how these backend issues can affect different accounts in a non-minor way. And this is why I’m personally okay with them looking into tickets on case-by-case basis.
There was a period when the hardcore community in general was great; but in recent times, there has been an attitude shift amongst many of these players when it came to sticky topics like lag/disconnect deaths and ones like this; where the attitude is to just suck it up because you knew what you signed up for (that’s a really narrow minded view IMHO). Again, severe buggy/faulty code is something that I believe should be addressed in a game that is designed to be online only, and have exceptions made when handled on a case-by-case basis. If a hardcore player feels that when a rollback exception is made for someone where it makes that rolled back player less hardcore, all I can say is “get a life”. I’m not talking about the pre-1.0.7 rollback abuse that some used for duping and/or to get a character revived; I’m talking about legitimate cases like the above. In the grander scheme of things, it does not matter until the game actually has an actual competitive element to it (and that currently is not the case).
Hardcore is no different than softcore except the permanent death angle (and that’s the biggest one because I still play softcore like I do hardcore where I learn the limits of my characters gear, and play to avoid dying – it’s hard to break that habit). Plus I personally felt that hardcore lost a lot of its value with the new Paragon system, given that you no longer lose any of that experience, and can keep accruing them no matter how many deaths. Leveling is also a whole lot faster, and there is also no longer a need to mule away leveling gear (I salvaged most all of it), because the loot system works well enough through the leveling process now. The loss of gear is still the main focal point, but that aspect is also muted when the loot system provides a decent starter base at level cap (then there is crafting, Kadala, and the Mystic). That’s about the main challenge with the current system in terms of gearing back up again to do higher difficulties.
What it boils down to is that I don’t like the elitist and holier than thou attitude that some hardcore players have, when the reality is that it is all meaningless to begin with. It’s totally idiotic though to let bad code and the unfair deaths they cause, to even be considered hardcore (it’s not, it is total stupidity to even believe that to begin with). Hardcore death should be something that is fair; where my characters death is due to my own mistakes in terms of play and decision making; not because of external factors outside of my control.
