Thank you, @Laskoradova , this pretty much sums up the situation.
Just to add some points:
I actually never wanted the fragments back. I did not feel that i'd lost them. I was 8/15 with something, and then it changed to 1/1, that was a pure gain! Those fragments fulfilled their goal, made a whole, thus are not lost, but contributed to placing an image.
This is how this whole fragment overhaul should have been communicated. We didn't lose, instead we won fragments, as now we need no more to place the image. Going forward, we will need less fragments for better rewards, so it is a pure win.
And then it was promised we will get those lost fragments back. Ok, nice to have free books, but that's all. Wasnt really excited.
And then when we supposedly got them back, during a fix, and all I saw that hundredsomething (dunno the exact number, somewhere between 110 and 140)green star went missing, all my grinded and gold placed challenge foundables, many of fortress and rare foundables, upsetting the balance of pages* , and throwing out time and resources that were dedicated to return these and place these.
I was furious. A fix, that was to fix something I didn't ask for, took away stuff that I put time and resources to get.
*: this is important, as if you have one star taken away and the other not from a page where you have 2 fortress foundables, now you are forced to use those runestones to place the "gone" image, while you inevitably will reach the limit for the other one. So not only you lost the fragments that were taken away with the star removal, but indirectly you'll lose fragments of the other one as well. If you place it, your fragments in prep for next level prestige are gone. If you dont place it, all consecutrive fragments are wasted,. This is quite a big problem, and very frustrating, given that you are very carefuk about what stones you use to best prep for next prestige levels and coming events.
So yes, @hpwulola , thank you very much for this update. Can you please confirm that we cannot count on getting the green stars back, and we should move on and continue to tray and place those images again?
Also, given that the magnitude of star loss is over a hundred, a conservative estimate of lost resources are
1/ to place ~ 50 challenge foundable images with the nerfed runestones : 25 fragments (sometimes less, but you will also have duplicates., getting fragments you already placed, so probably it will be a lot more than 25/foundable) / 1.5 (you'll use lvl1 stones mostly in rune+tower, level 3 in fortress) fragment for a stone, about 20 spell energy on the average:
800 runestones
16 000 spell energy
2/ to place ~70 exploration foundable images
2 energy per fragment for 50 fragments for 50 images in your "easy page" : 5000 spell energy
3 energy per fragment + 1/2 strong exstimulo for 20 fragments for 10 high foundables : 600 spell energy and 100 strong exstimulos
4 energy per fragment + 1 strong exstimulo + 1 dwadle for 10 fragments for 7 severe foundables: 280 spell energy + 70 strong + 70 dwadle
5 energy per fragment + 1 potent exstimulo + 1 dwadle for 5 fragments for 3 emergency foundables: 75 spell energy + 15 potent and dwadle
Total is about 22 000 spell energy, and about 250 potions brewed over 1.5 months. Plus other goodies such as Dark Detectors, Silver Keys, time sent in fortresses and in KB worrying that you get team mates that know how to cooperate, etc. And this calculation is conservative, and only includes the lost green stars.
edit: Sorry for venting at you. Obviously not mad at you, @hpwulola . I know it is not easy for you-
I am mad, however, for the executives who decided that they should return the "lost fragments", as they missed an opportunity there to make this fragment loss a fragment gain, as explained above. I am also mad with the release manager that released the server update before forcing the client update, and also mad at both of them when they tried to compensate and failed miserably, thereby even deepening the difference between those that gained a lot of free books and those that lost many thousand fragments during this "fix" that didn't return a single fragment for them. I cannot even begin to imagine that spaghetti code and those quality assurance processes the developing company may have in place that allows for such terrible mistakes. If yu had tested the fix in a vacuum on an offline db copy, you should have applied the fix on an offline db, not on an online db. everyone would have understood that you closed the fortresses for a few hours, or even the whole game for maintenance and the fix.
I really can't imagine what kind of compensation you can come up with that can even by a long shot to not letting us feeling disheartened, demotivated and with no confidence It won't happen again.
I mean, we were even waiting until a few hours ago to know if it was safe to play.
So, all hard players that lost a huge amount of prestiged fragments, that weren't able to really profit from last weekend event, will also not profit from the next ones. Just like players that started to play now and have not even the common fragments placed.
It really is like saying you don't have a backup or you have no idea how to implement that backup without making another mess.
I can't even begin to comprehend that.
The feeling of catching a foundable for a fragment I now miss but that was fully prestiged months ago, is a really bitter one, instead of the moment you find something you are still working on and be happy about it.
You killed a lot of the joy for this game, and as for me, i'm still going with the motions, not knowing for how long. A collection game is built on the confidence you grow your collection, never on the thought that the team responsible for the game will delete it all.
So, I really wonder what compensation will be and if it will be one that will compensate all players equal. And no, I don't think a bundle of coins, or books, or whatever even comes close to loosing our collection - the main goal of this game.
I'm really hoping you put some serious effort in trying to fix at least something. But my hopes and confidence in that are pretty low.
I see all the pain here and I still can't believe this company's attitude.
I wasn't affected by this ****-up, or at least I believe I haven't lost any fragments at all. But there is one thing that I lost and it's gone forever: Confidence to keep playing this collecting game where collections get lost, and Trust in the team to provide that Confidence.
There is another thing that gives me the creeps as an IT engineer, and I could not find an answer neither here nor in the previous threads that were pulled under the rug:
There are NO BACKUPS to the game database???
Your database of all the efforts achievements everyone has put into this game has no backups???
@hpwulola does not seem to be saying that HPWU cannot ever give back lost green stars and fragment. rather, she seems to be saying that HPWU cannot do so the quick and dirty way via some quick fix that applies to the entire database in one fell swoop. but HPWU can ... and should ... still fix things, even if it means doing so by brute force, manually and one player at a time.
why doesn’t @HPWUTeam hire as many extra personnel (plenty of available, out of work people due to business closures as part of social lockdown requirements) as it takes to manually add back green stars and fragments for each affected player? if the backup database is not available, then @HPWUTeam should accept the player’s best guess as gospel, and restore green stars and fragments accordingly.
most if not all of us are not looking to get what we did not earn ... we just want back what we earned (or would have earned) but lost due to the broken game and bad company communication. so trust the player’s accounting and don’t waste time arguing over a number.
frankly, with a game like HPWU whose assets are just digital bits and bytes, should @HPWUTeam really care if a player’s request is for more fragments or green stars than whatever records @HPWUTeam might be using? the difference in fragments and green stars is not costing HPWU real money to give out, except the cost of labour to manually restore the player’s registry ... and since HPWU broke it, it is HPWU’s obligation — moral, financial, legal — to fix it notwithstanding whatever weasel language in the legal fine print that HPWU might try to hide behind.
My sympathies to everyone hit by this. I was hit by the first bug but mercifully the 'fix' that caused the second bug mostly worked for me (as I wasn't playing actively due to the first bug!), to a degree where I can personally accept the partially recovered losses as 'as good as it's going to get'.
However, I can't even imagine how people hit by both bugs must be feeling right now. This company is failing dismally on:
- Quality control
- Customer service
- Bug fixing
- Communication
- Goodwill
Anyone who spends money on this game going forward, without a change of management and a serious re-organisation, ought to do so with the assumption that they will lose progress and the matter will not be resolved to their satisfaction, as that is what has happened this time, so why would they do any different in future if they continue to receive money?
Don't be optimistic about getting any money back from web stores. The terms for this type of game usually state that you agree that they can take your money and burn it in front of your face before dancing in the ashes, and you revoke any rights to do anything about it.
I can only agree with all players saying it will be very difficult to compensate for all that is lost for many of us. Getting back all fragments and stars that now aren't there, will take a lot of time, energy, potions, runestones and keys. And I don't see it as very likely, that you will actually give the players affected, a good enough compensation, if you don't return the missing fragments and stars. I'm still playing, but feel very demotivated trying to replace images I've placed before, trying to get prestiging of pages I've already should have been able to prestige, and trying to get back all my missing green stars.
just one note @kiheikid: "how to offset with other make good solutions" is actually saying we won't get stars and placed fragments back, just other make good solutions.
The first thing that WB needs to learn from this series of mistakes that corrupted our registry data was these changes should have been tested through actual players under NDA where you could monitor their data and easily backup/restore their data if they hit issues. I don't doubt this was tested by WB but clearly your test users either don't play much or you had too few testers or the issues didn't seem important enough to stop the rollout.
Second, our registries were unequally modified so fragments we "should" have already placed are no longer. With that in mind, all future events should do the following:
1) announce the rares that will be available in the wild/trace tonics (quidditch fan hermione/captain harry for this past event)
2) At least a week prior to the event, you should increase the spawn rate of the other foundables on that page so people can get them placed prior to the event. (quidditch fan neville, goblet of fire, qf luna, seamus, nimbus (was already boosted))
In this past event, I've heard of people who didn't have qf neville, goblet, qf luna, and/or seamus (I was missing neville and goblet which were lost from failed rollout) so the event was quite bad and could have been so much more enjoyable if you boosted these other foundables before qf hermione and captain harry became boosted.
Thank you for communicating an update. For me, i have already started putting a lot of effort into replacing all the fragments I lost during the second fix. I think it would be helpful if you were able to give us all a large bundle of runestones. Most of the fragments I lost were from towers, and now i lack the runestones to get them back again.
I am the unpopular opinion on this. THANK YOU for finally realizing you can’t fix it and will stop trying to. Your “fix” only left me losing hundreds to thousands more fragments on top of the thousands I had already lost. Yes please STOP touching my registry and compensate fairly and adequately back my losses. This should include at least 500 runestones, considering most of us lost at least that, 150 red books, considering most of us lost at least that, as well as potions, dark detectors, gold, oh, and our time as well. That’s JUST the losses. There should also be adequate compensation for what we lost AND your apology. Want to make me happy? Here you go:
100 runestones of each family
200 red books
100 green books (your apology)
100 potions of each potion and the increased potion capacity for them
200 dark detectors
10,000 gold
1000 spell energy increased capacity (your apology)
I am a player who was affected by both updates, and had pretty big losses in both. I've lost dozens of green star images in the last "update" which hasn't been fun.
I was joking about it elsewhere before, but perhaps the best way to compensate would be to automatically prestige a number of our pages, but just once (maybe 10 or so prestiges?) E.g. if I have the Magizoology page of Newt at bronze, you can allow me to prestige it to silver (but not to gold) while keeping all of my numbers of fragments on the page the same. You could count up all the spell energy, gold, potions, dark detectors etc. that were lost and try to recompensate all of that, but essentially it boils down to our prestiged pages that were ultimately lost. Perhaps you could even allow us to choose which pages to prestige.
Hopefully there is a way for the team to determine who would deserve the prestiged pages vs. who would not (i.e. who actually lost prestiged pages vs. who did not), but I imagine that may be difficult. But it would certainly seem more fair to me.
@yogalife2good I understand your points about the losses of fragments, runes, potions, and energy. But did you actually lose 150 red books? I hadn't heard of anyone else reporting that.
The fundamental core underlying base mechanic of the game is incrementing counters for each foundable. Computers are really really good at this. They’ve been good at this since the 1960s. They’re so good at this that people have made gameboy emulators in Minecraft.
However, the dev team here is different.
Bungling this fundamental basic math mechanic has:
* overwritten hundreds & thousands of lost foundables *per player*, first the rare ones in early May, then the numerous green starred commons in late May
* regressed numerous hours of focused effort not once but twice for many players like me,
* moved us players into “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” territory
* revealed that it’s broken in enough different underlying ways that there are multiple regressions preventing a one size fits all fix, per Lola today
* demonstrated that a journaled record/player database is not present, and can’t be used to recompile each player’s progress reliably and automagically
* implied that the fix available is some blanket gift to everyone, otherwise they would have applied a real fix
:)
Its kind of funny from a programming perspective when I take a step back from the frustrating lives experience of it.
“You had one job, player database! ONE Job!” shakefist
Then again, it’s true. If Microsoft Word stopped saving changes reliably, MS would move heaven and Earth until customers were made right again. If Gmail stopped archiving and retrieving emails, Google would make it fully right with layered QC / QA defenses.
Heck, even Unity now offers AI automated regression and functional testing right in the IDE!
I feel like this is implying that the HPWU client is authoritative with respect to player data, which is a basic multiplayer 101 no-no. I guess it’s just when we’re on the Knight Bus? How on Earth is the end-user app ever allowed to ignore or overwrite player data updates pushed by the devs to “fix” all this? It needs to be phoning home to WB/Niantic servers for everything—literally every non-cosmetic operation, event, and transaction— to ask for permission to update the game state.
Count me in on being bummed by this "resolution". With gaining 1 fragment on challenges pages per runestone, it will take me forever to regain what I've lost. Had TONS of wands on the higher challenges pages, which means I've lots TONS of red books. @hpwulola , this is a huge dissapointment. Don't get me wrong, I know you're in the middle of poop mountain and are trying to navigate a path through. But after going to Indy for Wizards fest, and thinking that this game has a lot of potential, the update that broke everything as well as Niantic's stance on "recovery" of lost items is pretty insane.
@MtPollux Basically we lost hundreds of red books from the Challenges Registry because the May 7th fiasco. I had several pages already on gold there, and with the original amounts I should have been able to prestige those pages several times over. Same with the pages that I had on silver that I got on gold and the page that I had on bronze that I got to silver (and that should be on some cases be gold by now if the original rollover had worked as it should have). I should’ve been able to prestige those several times, and get those hundreds of red books, like some have.
And don’t get me started on the runestones... I’m irritated by the fact that some players have gained hundreds of runestones, while I got only so few, and have to carefully consider what level runestones to use in the Fortress, because I don’t have so many of those.
@hpwulola I’m a real-life professor and statistics can help you turn this around.
How about this as a fix: in lieu of having a functional logfile from which to restore accurate fragments & foundables & green stars, what about a probabilistic approach based on reliable data you do have:
You reliably know:
[Number Seen] per foundable, displayed clientside and not affected afaik by these multiple catastrophic bugs
[odds of foundable caught in one cast], serverside only, adjust this upward to assume in good faith that players are spending potions to get severe & emergency Foundables
So per player, per foundable: multiply the [Number Seen] x [Odds of foundable caught in one cast, adjusted] to closely approximate [number actually caught].
For each prestiged page starting from Standard, subtract [foundable placement or prestige amount] from [number actually caught] to get [remaining caught count]
Write [remaining caught count] at next login before player has a chance to get into the bus and create the race condition that created all this mess.
Players then green star that number down, eating through the overflowed count using modulo math like usual.
This approach is fair, objective, fast and light on your database, and trustworthy.
Does this approach carry forward old assumed green stars on a lower prestige level upward to the higher prestige level? Yes! But because of the logarithmic expansion of foundables requirements from one prestige level to the next, the impact here is reduced and comes off as a nice gesture for the player inconvenience caused.
The Law of Large Numbers works strongly in your favor here. Source: we use a similar approach with visitor use level monitoring to the tune of hundreds of millions per year at American national parks. Stats can reconstruct holes in basic integer & ratio data like in HPWU really well.
My first thougts: This is fake. But, no, it is true. Are you serious in not refunding our hard work? It took so much time, money, miles, ambition and pain to reach things which are deleted so fast. This game has so few players compared to other Niantic games. That´s the way how to loose players and demotivate them.
My make-good suggestion: 7 of every fortress fragment. It will allow players to place all of them (if they are on the base frame) or at least get a jump if they are higher.
@frasierfonzie Not even close to a reasonable make-good solution. How many total fortress battles have you been in? Pre-lowering of the fragments from fortresses, that could be accomplished in mere hours. The losses caused by the "fixes" were months of losses! Please don't try to make a suggestion, if you have not been playing for long and have no idea about how catastrophic the fixes have been to many of us.
at this point i dont want another gift with coins or red or green books, id like the devs to give everyone who registered even an hour before the update of 7th may 500 challenge frags per image and 100 exploration frags per image, on all families/pages. That'd be a solution, that is the only solution that displays you actually give a flying f....iddle about your customers/clients. just get it done i dont care how.
Lvl 53 player here and for the first time demotivated. Seeing everyone in my community gain countless runestones and red books where as I'm only losing hundreds of hard to obtain fragments due to lost stars is a bitter pill to ****.
@hpwulola One simple question: How are you going to deal with this situation, especially since YOU HAVE NOT POSTPONED THE LAST EVENT?
We've been told NOT to prestige/place images/catch fragments at all AND lost our fragments because of your "fix" (nullifying possibilities to advance pages in many cases), essentially bringing the game to a total halt and discarding the last event. In normal circumstances I would play, advance to silver, earn a good deal of XP.
But I'm actually concerning stopping playing at all because of your changes.
Bonus question (rhetorical): are you happy about the total mess you've done?
Is it just me or is this Event based on our experiences here of lost fragments and broken fixes? ..
I mean it starts with “can you believe it’s been a whole year (month) since Grim Fawley (HPWU devs) created this nightmare” ...
wish I’d taken screen shots of the following dialogue as it all rang true but I was too busy laughing in ironic tones ... 😂😂😂😂
I’m personally in the camp of the ‘if you can’t fix it properly, please do not mess with my registry any further’.
I also don’t envy the suggestions of make good compensations as the staggering extent of some of our losses will make it extremely difficult to appease all (any?) of us.
I’d really just like to enjoy the game again but that really is quite hard at this time 😞
anyway best of luck getting something sorted, let’s hope you manage to create something amazing
Comments
Thank you, @Laskoradova , this pretty much sums up the situation.
Just to add some points:
I actually never wanted the fragments back. I did not feel that i'd lost them. I was 8/15 with something, and then it changed to 1/1, that was a pure gain! Those fragments fulfilled their goal, made a whole, thus are not lost, but contributed to placing an image.
This is how this whole fragment overhaul should have been communicated. We didn't lose, instead we won fragments, as now we need no more to place the image. Going forward, we will need less fragments for better rewards, so it is a pure win.
And then it was promised we will get those lost fragments back. Ok, nice to have free books, but that's all. Wasnt really excited.
And then when we supposedly got them back, during a fix, and all I saw that hundredsomething (dunno the exact number, somewhere between 110 and 140)green star went missing, all my grinded and gold placed challenge foundables, many of fortress and rare foundables, upsetting the balance of pages* , and throwing out time and resources that were dedicated to return these and place these.
I was furious. A fix, that was to fix something I didn't ask for, took away stuff that I put time and resources to get.
*: this is important, as if you have one star taken away and the other not from a page where you have 2 fortress foundables, now you are forced to use those runestones to place the "gone" image, while you inevitably will reach the limit for the other one. So not only you lost the fragments that were taken away with the star removal, but indirectly you'll lose fragments of the other one as well. If you place it, your fragments in prep for next level prestige are gone. If you dont place it, all consecutrive fragments are wasted,. This is quite a big problem, and very frustrating, given that you are very carefuk about what stones you use to best prep for next prestige levels and coming events.
So yes, @hpwulola , thank you very much for this update. Can you please confirm that we cannot count on getting the green stars back, and we should move on and continue to tray and place those images again?
Also, given that the magnitude of star loss is over a hundred, a conservative estimate of lost resources are
1/ to place ~ 50 challenge foundable images with the nerfed runestones : 25 fragments (sometimes less, but you will also have duplicates., getting fragments you already placed, so probably it will be a lot more than 25/foundable) / 1.5 (you'll use lvl1 stones mostly in rune+tower, level 3 in fortress) fragment for a stone, about 20 spell energy on the average:
2/ to place ~70 exploration foundable images
Total is about 22 000 spell energy, and about 250 potions brewed over 1.5 months. Plus other goodies such as Dark Detectors, Silver Keys, time sent in fortresses and in KB worrying that you get team mates that know how to cooperate, etc. And this calculation is conservative, and only includes the lost green stars.
edit: Sorry for venting at you. Obviously not mad at you, @hpwulola . I know it is not easy for you-
I am mad, however, for the executives who decided that they should return the "lost fragments", as they missed an opportunity there to make this fragment loss a fragment gain, as explained above. I am also mad with the release manager that released the server update before forcing the client update, and also mad at both of them when they tried to compensate and failed miserably, thereby even deepening the difference between those that gained a lot of free books and those that lost many thousand fragments during this "fix" that didn't return a single fragment for them. I cannot even begin to imagine that spaghetti code and those quality assurance processes the developing company may have in place that allows for such terrible mistakes. If yu had tested the fix in a vacuum on an offline db copy, you should have applied the fix on an offline db, not on an online db. everyone would have understood that you closed the fortresses for a few hours, or even the whole game for maintenance and the fix.
So many mistakes... so little hope...
I really can't imagine what kind of compensation you can come up with that can even by a long shot to not letting us feeling disheartened, demotivated and with no confidence It won't happen again.
I mean, we were even waiting until a few hours ago to know if it was safe to play.
So, all hard players that lost a huge amount of prestiged fragments, that weren't able to really profit from last weekend event, will also not profit from the next ones. Just like players that started to play now and have not even the common fragments placed.
It really is like saying you don't have a backup or you have no idea how to implement that backup without making another mess.
I can't even begin to comprehend that.
The feeling of catching a foundable for a fragment I now miss but that was fully prestiged months ago, is a really bitter one, instead of the moment you find something you are still working on and be happy about it.
You killed a lot of the joy for this game, and as for me, i'm still going with the motions, not knowing for how long. A collection game is built on the confidence you grow your collection, never on the thought that the team responsible for the game will delete it all.
So, I really wonder what compensation will be and if it will be one that will compensate all players equal. And no, I don't think a bundle of coins, or books, or whatever even comes close to loosing our collection - the main goal of this game.
I'm really hoping you put some serious effort in trying to fix at least something. But my hopes and confidence in that are pretty low.
The main fundament of a game like this is: all players have to be treated fair and equally
At moment you have three kind of players:
Now you admit that you can't correct the situation.
I have no idea how you will reestablish the "fair und equally"...
I see all the pain here and I still can't believe this company's attitude.
I wasn't affected by this ****-up, or at least I believe I haven't lost any fragments at all. But there is one thing that I lost and it's gone forever: Confidence to keep playing this collecting game where collections get lost, and Trust in the team to provide that Confidence.
There is another thing that gives me the creeps as an IT engineer, and I could not find an answer neither here nor in the previous threads that were pulled under the rug:
There are NO BACKUPS to the game database???
Your database of all the efforts achievements everyone has put into this game has no backups???
Can somebody please answer this question?
@hpwulola does not seem to be saying that HPWU cannot ever give back lost green stars and fragment. rather, she seems to be saying that HPWU cannot do so the quick and dirty way via some quick fix that applies to the entire database in one fell swoop. but HPWU can ... and should ... still fix things, even if it means doing so by brute force, manually and one player at a time.
why doesn’t @HPWUTeam hire as many extra personnel (plenty of available, out of work people due to business closures as part of social lockdown requirements) as it takes to manually add back green stars and fragments for each affected player? if the backup database is not available, then @HPWUTeam should accept the player’s best guess as gospel, and restore green stars and fragments accordingly.
most if not all of us are not looking to get what we did not earn ... we just want back what we earned (or would have earned) but lost due to the broken game and bad company communication. so trust the player’s accounting and don’t waste time arguing over a number.
frankly, with a game like HPWU whose assets are just digital bits and bytes, should @HPWUTeam really care if a player’s request is for more fragments or green stars than whatever records @HPWUTeam might be using? the difference in fragments and green stars is not costing HPWU real money to give out, except the cost of labour to manually restore the player’s registry ... and since HPWU broke it, it is HPWU’s obligation — moral, financial, legal — to fix it notwithstanding whatever weasel language in the legal fine print that HPWU might try to hide behind.
c’mon HPWU, do the right thing !
thank you.
My sympathies to everyone hit by this. I was hit by the first bug but mercifully the 'fix' that caused the second bug mostly worked for me (as I wasn't playing actively due to the first bug!), to a degree where I can personally accept the partially recovered losses as 'as good as it's going to get'.
However, I can't even imagine how people hit by both bugs must be feeling right now. This company is failing dismally on:
- Quality control
- Customer service
- Bug fixing
- Communication
- Goodwill
Anyone who spends money on this game going forward, without a change of management and a serious re-organisation, ought to do so with the assumption that they will lose progress and the matter will not be resolved to their satisfaction, as that is what has happened this time, so why would they do any different in future if they continue to receive money?
Don't be optimistic about getting any money back from web stores. The terms for this type of game usually state that you agree that they can take your money and burn it in front of your face before dancing in the ashes, and you revoke any rights to do anything about it.
Basically buyer (and player) beware.
I can only agree with all players saying it will be very difficult to compensate for all that is lost for many of us. Getting back all fragments and stars that now aren't there, will take a lot of time, energy, potions, runestones and keys. And I don't see it as very likely, that you will actually give the players affected, a good enough compensation, if you don't return the missing fragments and stars. I'm still playing, but feel very demotivated trying to replace images I've placed before, trying to get prestiging of pages I've already should have been able to prestige, and trying to get back all my missing green stars.
just one note @kiheikid: "how to offset with other make good solutions" is actually saying we won't get stars and placed fragments back, just other make good solutions.
Misery loves company, shut down the game and restore everyone to the May 6th backup.
The first thing that WB needs to learn from this series of mistakes that corrupted our registry data was these changes should have been tested through actual players under NDA where you could monitor their data and easily backup/restore their data if they hit issues. I don't doubt this was tested by WB but clearly your test users either don't play much or you had too few testers or the issues didn't seem important enough to stop the rollout.
Second, our registries were unequally modified so fragments we "should" have already placed are no longer. With that in mind, all future events should do the following:
1) announce the rares that will be available in the wild/trace tonics (quidditch fan hermione/captain harry for this past event)
2) At least a week prior to the event, you should increase the spawn rate of the other foundables on that page so people can get them placed prior to the event. (quidditch fan neville, goblet of fire, qf luna, seamus, nimbus (was already boosted))
In this past event, I've heard of people who didn't have qf neville, goblet, qf luna, and/or seamus (I was missing neville and goblet which were lost from failed rollout) so the event was quite bad and could have been so much more enjoyable if you boosted these other foundables before qf hermione and captain harry became boosted.
@hpwulola
Thank you for communicating an update. For me, i have already started putting a lot of effort into replacing all the fragments I lost during the second fix. I think it would be helpful if you were able to give us all a large bundle of runestones. Most of the fragments I lost were from towers, and now i lack the runestones to get them back again.
Thanks
SoccerDiva
@hpwulola : If you are not able to give some fragment back, will the support be able to restore them (i have a lot of screenshots as proof) ?
As a developer, i really can't understand how you are not able to build a data migration with the financial means that Niantic have..
I am the unpopular opinion on this. THANK YOU for finally realizing you can’t fix it and will stop trying to. Your “fix” only left me losing hundreds to thousands more fragments on top of the thousands I had already lost. Yes please STOP touching my registry and compensate fairly and adequately back my losses. This should include at least 500 runestones, considering most of us lost at least that, 150 red books, considering most of us lost at least that, as well as potions, dark detectors, gold, oh, and our time as well. That’s JUST the losses. There should also be adequate compensation for what we lost AND your apology. Want to make me happy? Here you go:
100 runestones of each family
200 red books
100 green books (your apology)
100 potions of each potion and the increased potion capacity for them
200 dark detectors
10,000 gold
1000 spell energy increased capacity (your apology)
I am a player who was affected by both updates, and had pretty big losses in both. I've lost dozens of green star images in the last "update" which hasn't been fun.
I was joking about it elsewhere before, but perhaps the best way to compensate would be to automatically prestige a number of our pages, but just once (maybe 10 or so prestiges?) E.g. if I have the Magizoology page of Newt at bronze, you can allow me to prestige it to silver (but not to gold) while keeping all of my numbers of fragments on the page the same. You could count up all the spell energy, gold, potions, dark detectors etc. that were lost and try to recompensate all of that, but essentially it boils down to our prestiged pages that were ultimately lost. Perhaps you could even allow us to choose which pages to prestige.
Hopefully there is a way for the team to determine who would deserve the prestiged pages vs. who would not (i.e. who actually lost prestiged pages vs. who did not), but I imagine that may be difficult. But it would certainly seem more fair to me.
Just my two cents.
@yogalife2good I understand your points about the losses of fragments, runes, potions, and energy. But did you actually lose 150 red books? I hadn't heard of anyone else reporting that.
The fundamental core underlying base mechanic of the game is incrementing counters for each foundable. Computers are really really good at this. They’ve been good at this since the 1960s. They’re so good at this that people have made gameboy emulators in Minecraft.
However, the dev team here is different.
Bungling this fundamental basic math mechanic has:
* overwritten hundreds & thousands of lost foundables *per player*, first the rare ones in early May, then the numerous green starred commons in late May
* regressed numerous hours of focused effort not once but twice for many players like me,
* moved us players into “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” territory
* revealed that it’s broken in enough different underlying ways that there are multiple regressions preventing a one size fits all fix, per Lola today
* demonstrated that a journaled record/player database is not present, and can’t be used to recompile each player’s progress reliably and automagically
* implied that the fix available is some blanket gift to everyone, otherwise they would have applied a real fix
:)
Its kind of funny from a programming perspective when I take a step back from the frustrating lives experience of it.
“You had one job, player database! ONE Job!” shakefist
Then again, it’s true. If Microsoft Word stopped saving changes reliably, MS would move heaven and Earth until customers were made right again. If Gmail stopped archiving and retrieving emails, Google would make it fully right with layered QC / QA defenses.
Heck, even Unity now offers AI automated regression and functional testing right in the IDE!
I feel like this is implying that the HPWU client is authoritative with respect to player data, which is a basic multiplayer 101 no-no. I guess it’s just when we’re on the Knight Bus? How on Earth is the end-user app ever allowed to ignore or overwrite player data updates pushed by the devs to “fix” all this? It needs to be phoning home to WB/Niantic servers for everything—literally every non-cosmetic operation, event, and transaction— to ask for permission to update the game state.
Big oof.
Count me in on being bummed by this "resolution". With gaining 1 fragment on challenges pages per runestone, it will take me forever to regain what I've lost. Had TONS of wands on the higher challenges pages, which means I've lots TONS of red books. @hpwulola , this is a huge dissapointment. Don't get me wrong, I know you're in the middle of poop mountain and are trying to navigate a path through. But after going to Indy for Wizards fest, and thinking that this game has a lot of potential, the update that broke everything as well as Niantic's stance on "recovery" of lost items is pretty insane.
@MtPollux Basically we lost hundreds of red books from the Challenges Registry because the May 7th fiasco. I had several pages already on gold there, and with the original amounts I should have been able to prestige those pages several times over. Same with the pages that I had on silver that I got on gold and the page that I had on bronze that I got to silver (and that should be on some cases be gold by now if the original rollover had worked as it should have). I should’ve been able to prestige those several times, and get those hundreds of red books, like some have.
And don’t get me started on the runestones... I’m irritated by the fact that some players have gained hundreds of runestones, while I got only so few, and have to carefully consider what level runestones to use in the Fortress, because I don’t have so many of those.
@hpwulola I’m a real-life professor and statistics can help you turn this around.
How about this as a fix: in lieu of having a functional logfile from which to restore accurate fragments & foundables & green stars, what about a probabilistic approach based on reliable data you do have:
You reliably know:
[Number Seen] per foundable, displayed clientside and not affected afaik by these multiple catastrophic bugs
[Foundable Page Prestige Level] , displayed clientside
[odds of foundable caught in one cast], serverside only, adjust this upward to assume in good faith that players are spending potions to get severe & emergency Foundables
So per player, per foundable: multiply the [Number Seen] x [Odds of foundable caught in one cast, adjusted] to closely approximate [number actually caught].
For each prestiged page starting from Standard, subtract [foundable placement or prestige amount] from [number actually caught] to get [remaining caught count]
Write [remaining caught count] at next login before player has a chance to get into the bus and create the race condition that created all this mess.
Players then green star that number down, eating through the overflowed count using modulo math like usual.
This approach is fair, objective, fast and light on your database, and trustworthy.
Does this approach carry forward old assumed green stars on a lower prestige level upward to the higher prestige level? Yes! But because of the logarithmic expansion of foundables requirements from one prestige level to the next, the impact here is reduced and comes off as a nice gesture for the player inconvenience caused.
The Law of Large Numbers works strongly in your favor here. Source: we use a similar approach with visitor use level monitoring to the tune of hundreds of millions per year at American national parks. Stats can reconstruct holes in basic integer & ratio data like in HPWU really well.
My first thougts: This is fake. But, no, it is true. Are you serious in not refunding our hard work? It took so much time, money, miles, ambition and pain to reach things which are deleted so fast. This game has so few players compared to other Niantic games. That´s the way how to loose players and demotivate them.
My make-good suggestion: 7 of every fortress fragment. It will allow players to place all of them (if they are on the base frame) or at least get a jump if they are higher.
Amid carnage of recent releases how about fixing the combat system?
Might as well get all the moaning over at once, maybe this thread will hit 1000 posts and get a gold badge :)
@frasierfonzie Not even close to a reasonable make-good solution. How many total fortress battles have you been in? Pre-lowering of the fragments from fortresses, that could be accomplished in mere hours. The losses caused by the "fixes" were months of losses! Please don't try to make a suggestion, if you have not been playing for long and have no idea about how catastrophic the fixes have been to many of us.
at this point i dont want another gift with coins or red or green books, id like the devs to give everyone who registered even an hour before the update of 7th may 500 challenge frags per image and 100 exploration frags per image, on all families/pages. That'd be a solution, that is the only solution that displays you actually give a flying f....iddle about your customers/clients. just get it done i dont care how.
Lvl 53 player here and for the first time demotivated. Seeing everyone in my community gain countless runestones and red books where as I'm only losing hundreds of hard to obtain fragments due to lost stars is a bitter pill to ****.
@hpwulola One simple question: How are you going to deal with this situation, especially since YOU HAVE NOT POSTPONED THE LAST EVENT?
We've been told NOT to prestige/place images/catch fragments at all AND lost our fragments because of your "fix" (nullifying possibilities to advance pages in many cases), essentially bringing the game to a total halt and discarding the last event. In normal circumstances I would play, advance to silver, earn a good deal of XP.
But I'm actually concerning stopping playing at all because of your changes.
Bonus question (rhetorical): are you happy about the total mess you've done?
@MtPollux 150 red books mean ~6000 challenge fragments, which is possible with silver wand pages.
Many nice words. But I want my fragments back instead the alternative solution thanks.
I want a refund, gimme back my money Niantic if you can't give me back my fragments.
Is it just me or is this Event based on our experiences here of lost fragments and broken fixes? ..
I mean it starts with “can you believe it’s been a whole year (month) since Grim Fawley (HPWU devs) created this nightmare” ...
wish I’d taken screen shots of the following dialogue as it all rang true but I was too busy laughing in ironic tones ... 😂😂😂😂
I’m personally in the camp of the ‘if you can’t fix it properly, please do not mess with my registry any further’.
I also don’t envy the suggestions of make good compensations as the staggering extent of some of our losses will make it extremely difficult to appease all (any?) of us.
I’d really just like to enjoy the game again but that really is quite hard at this time 😞
anyway best of luck getting something sorted, let’s hope you manage to create something amazing