https://forums.enmasse.com/tera/discussion/31083/emergency-maintenance-4-10-9-45-am-pdt/
This emergency maintenance is due to the Entropic Emblem exploit as well as to drastically reduce the vendor price of reset scrolls which caused the economy to inflate in a short amount of time.
For EME, this was the easiest solution given the fact that they failed to quickly bring the servers down (instead, leaving them up to allow continued progression, transactions, etc). As noted in my op-ed, they needed to fix this one way or another. So good on EME for taking ownership of this and dealing with the exploit.
With that said, the way they handled it has been nothing short of poor (all beginning with the lack of paying proper attention to the changes; something that the other regional publishers put out to their player base in advance). These things with proper internal vetting, would have and should have been caught by their QA team; especially whether or not the vendor pricing of reset scrolls was appropriate for the NA economy. That is all on EME for not properly vetting and performing their QA due diligence on (the pricing will likely be nerfed by 70-75% similar to what it is on EU).
What about contingencies and worst case scenario planning? In this case, the exploit was so easy to deal with (short time frame and the effects easily seen) where a prior plan of action would’ve called for quickly bringing the servers down (to contain the amount of player progression that would happen) and making the decision to rollback. They instead decided to leave the servers up while they were obviously deciding what course of action to take (in other words, there probably was no contingency plan in place beforehand).
As I noted in my op-ed, the other alternative would’ve been to pull data and to deal with the Entropic Emblem issue that way. But that takes personnel familiar with being able to properly pull that data and to create much more granular reports in order to track down everything resulting from that (it’s like an exploding parts problem the longer the server has been up due to transactions, trading, etc). Even Trion Worlds did this several times with ArcheAge and Devilian for some (not all) exploitive issues (but they had at least two IT personnel who were versed in dealing with backend data systems). You then need to spend hours manually going over that data and having multiple people vet that information before making the actual changes.
Simply put, EME had to bite the bullet with fixing this issue, but are handling it worse than some of the most incompetent publishers that I’ve personally experienced. The initial compensation mentioned (24 hours of 20% bonus XP for all level 65 dungeons and open world content) was a total joke because it excluded any player not level 65. That was followed up 1.5 hours later with 5 days of Elite time added to all players account (which is much fairer compensation). I’m normally not a huge compensation person but even Trion Worlds threw their players a few bones here and there during periods of scheduled maintenance when they ran well over or tried to at least think out compensation packs for more serious issues (to be honest, they often went overboard to appease the crybabies in ArcheAge that were spoiled by overcompensation). EME in my experience, has done piss poor in this area.
Sure, there were players who made significant day one progress (some folks were already level 67) but losing a day of progress is better compared to the lasting effects this exploit would have had (the reset scrolls caused immediate inflation due to the amount of gold injected). Myself, I didn’t get far because I didn’t put much time into the patch to begin with since I wanted to see how they would address this. I do feel very bad for new players who happened to be leveling though; they are the ones whose first impressions are going to be forever tainted by seeing all their progression rolled back.
As for those who exploited and did it hard? It would not surprise me if EME just lets it slide (because they lack the personnel to go through that data to begin with). All too often, publishers hide behind the “we do not comment on account actions such as suspensions or bannings”. I mean they had to backtrack on the whole XIGNCODE and proxy thing (including blanket unbanning accounts that had been banned for years) which already sends the wrong signals out (which is why those in the know continue exploiting the holes that exist because they know how weak EME is in this area).
UPDATE: and unsurprisingly, some of the hardcore “veteran” grinders are complaining about their lost progression (from around page 3 in the thread), failing to see how damaging the impact of the exploit (and to a degree, the injection of gold that has occurred with the vendor pricing for reset scrolls) is on the game. Lot of these folks are of the selfish/greedy types who don’t give a rats ass about the bigger picture. I’m not excusing EME’s poor handling of this as per the above. But it needed to be fixed one way or the other.
As I noted in my op-ed, I sold only a portion of the reset scrolls I had and made at least 14 million (while having no more than 3 million across all of my characters before that). And there were folks that were getting quadruple that amount. Everything that can be traded is going to be impacted (inflated) essentially pricing everyone else who did not see any benefit, priced out. I’m fine with losing this gold (even though I know it would’ve helped with the expensive skill advancement costs across several characters) because the impact of the exploit along with this, would have a more lasting impact on the entire game. The folks crying about the rollback however are trying to paint it like the ones stating this needed to fixed (resulting in the rollback) somehow missed out and are therefore crying sour grapes. To which I say bull. The following is my character selling a portion of those scrolls to show that I am not lying.
