In the MMORPG Guild Wars 2, there was an accidental rollback of the European servers. This has now been reversed, but problems and criticism continue to persist.
What happened? On Monday, May 11, there was a server rollback in Europe. Around 11:50 AM our time, there was a crash, and after the players logged back in, their accounts were reverted to the state of Saturday morning. Nearly 48 hours of progress was lost.
On Monday evening, the servers were shut down, and the developers attempted to reverse the accidental rollback. They succeeded.
Since Tuesday afternoon, players have been able to continue their adventures in Guild Wars 2. Only the hours between the rollback and the server shutdown that evening were lost.
ArenaNet even distributed gifts as compensation for the lost time on Monday and the nearly 20-hour server downtime. However, these gifts are now causing frustration.
Players are angry and demand mounts for all
Why is there now criticism? The developers of Guild Wars 2 decided to distribute compensation for the lost time:
- All players who logged in during the last 30 days received a communal bonfire, which normally costs 300 gems.
- All players who logged in on Monday between 11:40 AM and 6:10 PM will receive a “Strange Creatures” mount adoption license worth 1,200 gems. This just freshly entered the game on May 12.
However, this is exactly where the problem lies. Many players deliberately chose not to log in during that time because they anticipated issues and a potential rollback. Consequently, they have been excluded from the reward.
What do the players say? In a reddit thread, some players vent their frustrations:
- chuffingpenguin: “Damn, I should have logged in instead of trying to be sensible and waiting, it seems.”
- toomanycharr: “Honestly, I’m upset that it is penalizing being sensible and not logging in to make Anet’s work harder. Why isn’t it given to everyone affected? We all couldn’t play for a day.”
- Rapturos: “So, the important takeaway here is that, if there is a server issue next time and you want rewards, everyone should definitely log in and play during the problems. I can’t see what could go wrong /s.”
The user Nyth even goes so far as to say that no one really needed the licenses:
I don’t think Anet should really distribute mount licenses to a select group here. That seems disproportionate to me, as everyone had inconveniences one way or another.
Give everyone a bonfire and be done with it. It’s an online game, server problems happen. Apologizing and giving a small token seems enough to me.
However, it’s not just the rewards that are causing a bad mood. Players who have consciously exploited the rollback are also being criticized.
Players are upset about exploiters
Where are there still issues? Besides the “drama” surrounding the mount licenses, there is another problem: exploiters.
In Guild Wars 2, it is known that the guild bank and trading post operate on different servers than the rest of the game. Clever players have exploited this to benefit from the rollback reversal.
They anticipated that this would happen and placed items in the trading post or guild bank on Monday. Players then received these items back due to the rollback reversal, and they could similarly access them from the bank. Thus, many items were duplicated.
Is ArenaNet taking action? According to users on reddit, it should be easy to identify cheaters through logs at the banks and trading post.
However, there is still no statement from ArenaNet regarding possible sanctions against exploiters.
Aside from the issues, ArenaNet announced the new episode “No Mercy” last week. This looks particularly interesting due to the new map.
