@BenTiger yeah, I agree. I’m just attempting to be funny now, because it’s better for me than being angry. Apologies if my juvenile sense of humour is missed by some folks.
@HPWUTeam It would take at most a few hours to answer everyone in this thread individually - even just to acknowledge each person’s frustrations individually. That’s probably a worthwhile use of someone’s time right now.
I'am not sure to understand you said you didn't find any perfect solution but you found something right ? I think we all prefer a partial refund than nothing. You said you won't make any changes to registries ? That's mean you won't refund ANYTHING ? i'am not sure to understand ?
I'am also wondering if you also lost green star progression as well ? because for me it was the most impacting (i have lost about 50 green stars)
Finally, i really need a clear answer. Should i have expect to have NOTHING back ? I don't want to invest more time or money in this game if you tell me that i have lost everything. I don't really care about pre 2.13 fragment (i have just lost same severe here) but if i lose my start i don't want to start again. In this case, i hope your support team will ready for giving money refund..
Making mistake is a thing but your lack of communication is not acceptable.
Have any of you native English speakers thought about writing to JK Rowling about this? On the Wizarding World site or some other means. Maybe she would like to know what a bunch of (insert the insult you like here) people are doing with her brand here.
@hpwulola your clarification did not clarify anything. Is this saying that you will NOT be returning any lost fragments/stars? By moving forward, do you mean just leaving all of us with the registries we currently have (after losing so many fragments)?
@hpwulola I don't expect my fragments fixed at this point and I've lost too many to even list but in terms of transparency, I'd like my lost fragments to pay for some brief answers to basic questions:
1) Some explanation on what happened: what mistakes were made and (learned from)? Many games and online services provide postmortems with the outages or failed rollouts as it provides some reassurance to users that the company cares about processes and minimizing problems for their users.
2) Can NDA players be recruited to better exercise changes with staged rollouts so you have a small number of players to inspect/fix/repair?
3) If the repeat-placing of images is optional and in some cases not optimal, such as when you're very close to prestiging a page, why is it so easy to accidentally place an image again? We can't even look at how many foundables we returned or what severity they are if they're ready for placement or repeat placement. It will place them the moment we touch them. I feel like 99.9% of users could have told the team that pretty quickly if they were under NDA, see 2).
There would be one relatively simple solution: set the status of every foundable for every player to “placed” (green star) without touching the fragment number. That way everyone gets to prestige all pages to the next level. This would certainly help those who have fragments missing and ought to be safe as you don’t have to touch the fragment counts. It was stated after the first fix went wrong that the placed status was a separate value from the fragment count.
You could make this even safer by taken the game down for a couple of hours to do this, so player interaction would not interfere at all. We would all understand if this would be done.
Since the beginning of this who fiasco, Niantic and WB has not made any official statement to apologize to all their affected players. I believe that given such a big mistake, the first and foremost action would be to try and appease the players. Apparently not.
Secondly, there is no way Niantic and WB can make it up to the affected players without benefitting the rest of the players. The only possible way is via a compensation.
Thirdly, since Niantic and WB can remove things from us, and return things to us, like returning a potion or a runestone, reinstating our green stars should be made possible. Please figure out how and ensure that all green stars are returned.
Lastly, this is against consumer rights. By taking away game progress and not fixing the problem, this is mis-selling and amounting to cheat. Do the right thing and compensate us accordingly, or return us what was ours to begin with.
"I see there is still confusion/worry surrounding this feature; would people be interested in a guide or more tips on how this feature works?"
I think that would be a good interim solution, but I'd rather see the UI redesigned such that it doesn't need any explaining. I believe Martin LeBlanc said it best: "A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good."
More so than a guide, I'd be interested in an inside look at the feature pipeline:
Who decides which features for the team to prioritize?
Who is making the game design and balance decisions?
What input and feedback are they seeking and utilizing?
Who designs changes to the UI?
What input and feedback are they seeking and utilizing?
Who is implementing the design changes into code?
What's the approval process for code changes?
How are changes tested?
Who signs the 'all clear' to roll out the changes to players?
Fazes spoke with us on Discord a few hours before 2.12.0 rolled out. We identified several shortcomings, and begged her to halt the 2.12.0 rollout, so that the shortcomings could be addressed before players were impacted. Why didn't your team halt the rollout?
There are some things that your team clearly does very well. Rolling out new Brilliant Events? You've got that in the bag. 3D animations? They're all excellent. There are other areas where it's clear that more than one person has dropped the ball, multiple times. I'd like to see a post-mortem, and a list of lessons learned.
One last thing - the game gets lots of new content, in the form of:
Brilliant events
Community day events
New registry pages now and then
I'd like to know if there are any concrete plans for advancing the Calamity / Grim Fowley mystery, and if there are any plans for further Profession development. I don't even need to know what those plans are, just whether or not they exist.
I've actually been fortunate enough to have a partial fix to my losses from the first bug and I still think that this is an absolutely appalling way to treat the playerbase.
Make it up to people through future content?!! If I were one of the affected players who had poured hours of time and more money than they should into this game I'd be spitting feathers and would never trust another Niantic game with my money again - and if the company treats it's customers like this it doesn't deserve any.
Even with most of my fragments back I'm now seriously considering giving up the game because of how badly others are being treated. I can only assume from both the game breaking bugs and the awful customer service that it is a deliberate decision on the part of management to drive the game to a point where they can shut it down, as these are not the actions of a business with any long-term goals for growth or success.
@hpwulola As of yesterday, I have been actively farming challenges, in order to recover some of my lost fragments that are obtained through challenges. In order to recover 10 fragments, it took over 50 challenges. That is 50 runestones, over 800 energy, and hours of time.
I am considering that to be good luck, as I was farming on Tower III, with ministry fragments, so the odds are 1/3, when a fragment appears. Odds are even lower for other families.
Now, multiple this by the 252 to 900 (7, 14, 21, or 25 * 36 foundables) fragments that need to be re-earned. It is going to take thousands of runestones, tens of thousands of energy, and hundreds of hours to recover just those runestones.
Please relay this additional information to those that are coming up with the "make-good" solution.
Eu perdi todas minhas estrelas verdes em todas as páginas ouro e desafios. Não vou recuperar estes fragmentos de jeito nenhum. Ou me decolvam meus fragmentos ou vou desistalar este jogo. Não gasto nenhum tostão mais. E na minha opinião quem está tentando recuperar e gastando dinheiro está persendo tempo e dinheiro. Este jogo não é confiável.
Everyone with substantial losses get ready to be excited for a store pack (that everyone can claim) containing a few potions and some books. Get hyped for the future events and content that were planned anyway, so has no real benefit, and again, benefits everyone. No solution that seems to have been presented thus far actually compensates those who have been hit by this travesty of a fix.
I didn’t get the May 27th fix through to my game, so I only lost fragments from the first incident and did not lose as much as some others on this thread, but I am genuinely shocked and appalled at this entire situation. I get that it’ll take a lot of manpower to fix everyone’s accounts manually, but something needs to be done.
It’s as though the bank said: “Due to several software glitches caused by insufficient testing on our end, members’ savings accounts have lost a variable number of deposits. But, we have good news! Though we have no way of knowing whether an individual customer lost $10 or $1,000,000 we will adding an extra $100 to every account! We thank you for your patience and sincerely hope you enjoy banking with us into the future!”
@hpwulola - i reposted your message because it was literally buried at the very bottom of a previous page, where many people would likely miss it.
(i would have reposted your message at the start of a brand new thread, if only i could)
most forum moderators/administrators would post important notices from staff as “sticky” or “announcement” level posts that go to the top of a thread or even the top of one or more forum sections ... this current method of official communucation by @HPWUTeam members is a bit disorganized and haphazard. best practices for reaching the most readers as promptly and efficiently as possible should be adopted and consistently used by you all on @HPWUTeam .
@VanFanel842 This post has an overview of the issues.
@hpwulola Thank you for being a frontline contact. While you don't hear it enough, it's very much appreciated and the only reason why there is negative feedback is people really enjoy the game and it feels like lots of time, money, etc. have been lost.
What I meant was more of the internal "what actually happened"... Many of us lived the user side of it, but knowing mistakes that were made and safeguards that will be made to try to avoid something like this again are all things that demonstrate the team's desire to give user's a great experience. We don't expect this tomorrow but if any of these things can be done regarding post mortems, NDA beta/players, etc., it would be great to know they're important to you also and something that will happen or at least explain alternatives that can be done.
For example, creating a process where announcement can be made about the game going offline shortly for a rollback or other maintenance could be really beneficial. I'm really happy the game is very rarely offline but if you need to take it offline once or twice a month to ensure proper backups/restores of my user data or other maintenance can be done, many of us will be fine with this. It feels like if we had a way to take it offline after an announcement, a decision could have been made to rollback the changes or something else.
Honestly, this is unacceptable. I am a daily player, without exaggeration: nearly every fortress Fragment was placed before your „fix“ and the „fix to the fix“. The green star is lost for every single item in the main registry.
My challenge registry was completed on gold. Including the green star. After your fix: gone. Everything. I have done a few 1000 fortress battles.
and for the record: I wasn’t able to place one single thing when so many others told storys about 100s of runestones and red books. And i am lvl 60. now I am just running behind your Event timetable to get the needed items back.
I can live without the books, even the runestones. But the loss of very rare foundables two times in a row is brutal, and you just tell us you won’t fix anything. Are you serious?
You will effect us in future events. Think about the dragon oddity for example. There was a one time possibility to get the Chinese dragon in Europe. I collected 66 of them. Now my counter is on zero! See my screenshot. at least the eggs are still there.
So if the other dragon from that page will be available I and many others will be stuck for month on that page. Again. Behause you made a huge mistake and don’t really care. There is no other interpretation of your statement to not fix anything in our registry. This is so unfair.
Sorry for grammar and spelling errors I am not a native speaker.
I will be so upset if the “make good” solution is given to all players. Not only will they have been given countless red books and runestones, while not losing any fragments or green stars, they will also get a bonus gift for no reason. Meanwhile, I have lost thousands of fragments and green stars, and wasted potions, runestones, energy, gold, money, and a year of my time.
I need to amend my last comments, as over the past few days I've realized that TONS of my family fragments are missing. Not just Oddities/Challenge fragments. As HPWU has backup data detailing everyone's losses, why cant they use that to make everyone whole? Is there any way to gain access to our backup data just so we can be fully informed on what was lost? Can ANYONE tell me where to find the required fragment counts to prestige before all this mayhem? I have some notes on where I was at, but they're meaningless without knowing the actual goalpost. @hpwulola or @HPWUrobert ?
I've thought about it, and one thing I cannot abide is bad customer service. The players have been treated with utter contempt. Even if I have wound up with only minor losses personally, I cannot continue to play a game that treats its players so badly. One star review left, off to delete the app. Bye to my in-game friends, it's been nice exchanging gifts with you, but each of us who remain now just encourage others to throw good time & money after bad. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. They have shown us loud and clear.
Comments
@BenTiger yeah, I agree. I’m just attempting to be funny now, because it’s better for me than being angry. Apologies if my juvenile sense of humour is missed by some folks.
@HPWUTeam It would take at most a few hours to answer everyone in this thread individually - even just to acknowledge each person’s frustrations individually. That’s probably a worthwhile use of someone’s time right now.
@hpwulola
I'am not sure to understand you said you didn't find any perfect solution but you found something right ? I think we all prefer a partial refund than nothing. You said you won't make any changes to registries ? That's mean you won't refund ANYTHING ? i'am not sure to understand ?
I'am also wondering if you also lost green star progression as well ? because for me it was the most impacting (i have lost about 50 green stars)
Finally, i really need a clear answer. Should i have expect to have NOTHING back ? I don't want to invest more time or money in this game if you tell me that i have lost everything. I don't really care about pre 2.13 fragment (i have just lost same severe here) but if i lose my start i don't want to start again. In this case, i hope your support team will ready for giving money refund..
Making mistake is a thing but your lack of communication is not acceptable.
Have any of you native English speakers thought about writing to JK Rowling about this? On the Wizarding World site or some other means. Maybe she would like to know what a bunch of (insert the insult you like here) people are doing with her brand here.
I’m more interested in a guide/post on why it was decided to overhaul the fragment counts to begin with @hpwulola
just in case anyone missed this post buried at the bottom of page 4 of this thread:
hmm, looks like the green stars and fragments “are on the roof”
Thank you, @hpwulola.
@hpwulola
There are exactly 2133 coins on my account. I have bought 2100 of them recently - please deduct them from my account and refund me.
If you are not responsible for refunds, then please inform me of proper way of making this operation, thank you.
I am done with your company and its mistakes.
Forward my "thanks" to people in your company responsible for this.
@hpwulola your clarification did not clarify anything. Is this saying that you will NOT be returning any lost fragments/stars? By moving forward, do you mean just leaving all of us with the registries we currently have (after losing so many fragments)?
@hpwulola I don't expect my fragments fixed at this point and I've lost too many to even list but in terms of transparency, I'd like my lost fragments to pay for some brief answers to basic questions:
1) Some explanation on what happened: what mistakes were made and (learned from)? Many games and online services provide postmortems with the outages or failed rollouts as it provides some reassurance to users that the company cares about processes and minimizing problems for their users.
2) Can NDA players be recruited to better exercise changes with staged rollouts so you have a small number of players to inspect/fix/repair?
3) If the repeat-placing of images is optional and in some cases not optimal, such as when you're very close to prestiging a page, why is it so easy to accidentally place an image again? We can't even look at how many foundables we returned or what severity they are if they're ready for placement or repeat placement. It will place them the moment we touch them. I feel like 99.9% of users could have told the team that pretty quickly if they were under NDA, see 2).
@hpwulola
There would be one relatively simple solution: set the status of every foundable for every player to “placed” (green star) without touching the fragment number. That way everyone gets to prestige all pages to the next level. This would certainly help those who have fragments missing and ought to be safe as you don’t have to touch the fragment counts. It was stated after the first fix went wrong that the placed status was a separate value from the fragment count.
You could make this even safer by taken the game down for a couple of hours to do this, so player interaction would not interfere at all. We would all understand if this would be done.
Since the beginning of this who fiasco, Niantic and WB has not made any official statement to apologize to all their affected players. I believe that given such a big mistake, the first and foremost action would be to try and appease the players. Apparently not.
Secondly, there is no way Niantic and WB can make it up to the affected players without benefitting the rest of the players. The only possible way is via a compensation.
Thirdly, since Niantic and WB can remove things from us, and return things to us, like returning a potion or a runestone, reinstating our green stars should be made possible. Please figure out how and ensure that all green stars are returned.
Lastly, this is against consumer rights. By taking away game progress and not fixing the problem, this is mis-selling and amounting to cheat. Do the right thing and compensate us accordingly, or return us what was ours to begin with.
@hpwulola
"I see there is still confusion/worry surrounding this feature; would people be interested in a guide or more tips on how this feature works?"
I think that would be a good interim solution, but I'd rather see the UI redesigned such that it doesn't need any explaining. I believe Martin LeBlanc said it best: "A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good."
More so than a guide, I'd be interested in an inside look at the feature pipeline:
There are some things that your team clearly does very well. Rolling out new Brilliant Events? You've got that in the bag. 3D animations? They're all excellent. There are other areas where it's clear that more than one person has dropped the ball, multiple times. I'd like to see a post-mortem, and a list of lessons learned.
One last thing - the game gets lots of new content, in the form of:
I'd like to know if there are any concrete plans for advancing the Calamity / Grim Fowley mystery, and if there are any plans for further Profession development. I don't even need to know what those plans are, just whether or not they exist.
Thanks for reading and considering!
Erik
I've actually been fortunate enough to have a partial fix to my losses from the first bug and I still think that this is an absolutely appalling way to treat the playerbase.
Make it up to people through future content?!! If I were one of the affected players who had poured hours of time and more money than they should into this game I'd be spitting feathers and would never trust another Niantic game with my money again - and if the company treats it's customers like this it doesn't deserve any.
Even with most of my fragments back I'm now seriously considering giving up the game because of how badly others are being treated. I can only assume from both the game breaking bugs and the awful customer service that it is a deliberate decision on the part of management to drive the game to a point where they can shut it down, as these are not the actions of a business with any long-term goals for growth or success.
@hpwulola As of yesterday, I have been actively farming challenges, in order to recover some of my lost fragments that are obtained through challenges. In order to recover 10 fragments, it took over 50 challenges. That is 50 runestones, over 800 energy, and hours of time.
I am considering that to be good luck, as I was farming on Tower III, with ministry fragments, so the odds are 1/3, when a fragment appears. Odds are even lower for other families.
Now, multiple this by the 252 to 900 (7, 14, 21, or 25 * 36 foundables) fragments that need to be re-earned. It is going to take thousands of runestones, tens of thousands of energy, and hundreds of hours to recover just those runestones.
Please relay this additional information to those that are coming up with the "make-good" solution.
@VanFanel842 This post has an overview of the issues.
We are taking all your comments into consideration and looking how we can improve in the future.
Thanks for sharing my comment here @kiheikid, did not realize it would be trapped on the last page.
Eu perdi todas minhas estrelas verdes em todas as páginas ouro e desafios. Não vou recuperar estes fragmentos de jeito nenhum. Ou me decolvam meus fragmentos ou vou desistalar este jogo. Não gasto nenhum tostão mais. E na minha opinião quem está tentando recuperar e gastando dinheiro está persendo tempo e dinheiro. Este jogo não é confiável.
Wow. Just wow.
Everyone with substantial losses get ready to be excited for a store pack (that everyone can claim) containing a few potions and some books. Get hyped for the future events and content that were planned anyway, so has no real benefit, and again, benefits everyone. No solution that seems to have been presented thus far actually compensates those who have been hit by this travesty of a fix.
I didn’t get the May 27th fix through to my game, so I only lost fragments from the first incident and did not lose as much as some others on this thread, but I am genuinely shocked and appalled at this entire situation. I get that it’ll take a lot of manpower to fix everyone’s accounts manually, but something needs to be done.
Answer PLEASE
@hpwulola @HPWUTeam
WHY you will not be doing a fix or anything that impacts players' individual registries?
It’s as though the bank said: “Due to several software glitches caused by insufficient testing on our end, members’ savings accounts have lost a variable number of deposits. But, we have good news! Though we have no way of knowing whether an individual customer lost $10 or $1,000,000 we will adding an extra $100 to every account! We thank you for your patience and sincerely hope you enjoy banking with us into the future!”
hmm, wonder whether White Star Line offered Titanic survivors special gifts on exciting future cruises ?
accepting that the bug is too multifactorial now, why not just put green stars back on everything for everyone at this point?
@hpwulola - i reposted your message because it was literally buried at the very bottom of a previous page, where many people would likely miss it.
(i would have reposted your message at the start of a brand new thread, if only i could)
most forum moderators/administrators would post important notices from staff as “sticky” or “announcement” level posts that go to the top of a thread or even the top of one or more forum sections ... this current method of official communucation by @HPWUTeam members is a bit disorganized and haphazard. best practices for reaching the most readers as promptly and efficiently as possible should be adopted and consistently used by you all on @HPWUTeam .
@VanFanel842 This post has an overview of the issues.
@hpwulola Thank you for being a frontline contact. While you don't hear it enough, it's very much appreciated and the only reason why there is negative feedback is people really enjoy the game and it feels like lots of time, money, etc. have been lost.
What I meant was more of the internal "what actually happened"... Many of us lived the user side of it, but knowing mistakes that were made and safeguards that will be made to try to avoid something like this again are all things that demonstrate the team's desire to give user's a great experience. We don't expect this tomorrow but if any of these things can be done regarding post mortems, NDA beta/players, etc., it would be great to know they're important to you also and something that will happen or at least explain alternatives that can be done.
For example, creating a process where announcement can be made about the game going offline shortly for a rollback or other maintenance could be really beneficial. I'm really happy the game is very rarely offline but if you need to take it offline once or twice a month to ensure proper backups/restores of my user data or other maintenance can be done, many of us will be fine with this. It feels like if we had a way to take it offline after an announcement, a decision could have been made to rollback the changes or something else.
The potion FELIX FELICIS to fix green stars and lost fragments not work now.
Nothing we say here will fix our lost fragments and green stars. Niantic dont care.
Honestly, this is unacceptable. I am a daily player, without exaggeration: nearly every fortress Fragment was placed before your „fix“ and the „fix to the fix“. The green star is lost for every single item in the main registry.
My challenge registry was completed on gold. Including the green star. After your fix: gone. Everything. I have done a few 1000 fortress battles.
and for the record: I wasn’t able to place one single thing when so many others told storys about 100s of runestones and red books. And i am lvl 60. now I am just running behind your Event timetable to get the needed items back.
I can live without the books, even the runestones. But the loss of very rare foundables two times in a row is brutal, and you just tell us you won’t fix anything. Are you serious?
You will effect us in future events. Think about the dragon oddity for example. There was a one time possibility to get the Chinese dragon in Europe. I collected 66 of them. Now my counter is on zero! See my screenshot. at least the eggs are still there.
So if the other dragon from that page will be available I and many others will be stuck for month on that page. Again. Behause you made a huge mistake and don’t really care. There is no other interpretation of your statement to not fix anything in our registry. This is so unfair.
Sorry for grammar and spelling errors I am not a native speaker.
I will be so upset if the “make good” solution is given to all players. Not only will they have been given countless red books and runestones, while not losing any fragments or green stars, they will also get a bonus gift for no reason. Meanwhile, I have lost thousands of fragments and green stars, and wasted potions, runestones, energy, gold, money, and a year of my time.
I need to amend my last comments, as over the past few days I've realized that TONS of my family fragments are missing. Not just Oddities/Challenge fragments. As HPWU has backup data detailing everyone's losses, why cant they use that to make everyone whole? Is there any way to gain access to our backup data just so we can be fully informed on what was lost? Can ANYONE tell me where to find the required fragment counts to prestige before all this mayhem? I have some notes on where I was at, but they're meaningless without knowing the actual goalpost. @hpwulola or @HPWUrobert ?
I've thought about it, and one thing I cannot abide is bad customer service. The players have been treated with utter contempt. Even if I have wound up with only minor losses personally, I cannot continue to play a game that treats its players so badly. One star review left, off to delete the app. Bye to my in-game friends, it's been nice exchanging gifts with you, but each of us who remain now just encourage others to throw good time & money after bad. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. They have shown us loud and clear.