Well I have a PHD from Hogwarts in Magizoology at least according to the current lesson plan!! So when is the next lesson plan coming out? I am buried in scrolls, red books, and green books! 📚
"I think we all need to stop wrongly assuming that their backup data is complete and accurate. We simply don't know enough to make such a speculation. It's possible that the reason some people were missed entirely by the second wave of fragment adjustments is that the backup process was flawed and there was no data, partial data, or incorrect data for some accounts. This is just one possible scenario. I'm not sure if that would make them look better or worse than having proper backups but being unable to do anything with them."
@WSDC13888 I thought about how inaccurate their database might be. However, if some of the top grinders in the world are affected, and i personally know them - one has all his exploration pages completed, the other had more than 18,000 fortress battles to his name; I'm kinda baffled to know that Niantic/WB have not been actively tracking the progress of such people. Most gaming companies would be actively tracking the progress of their top grinders. Or maybe I am wrong?
@9threefour In addition to looking at WU's history, I would look at all Niantic games, and speculate after considering their behavior over time. If you were to go to Ingress communities and explain this situation, nobody would be particularly surprised. That's simply the reputation they've built. POGO did nothing to change it, and WU hasn't changed it either. My broader theory is that Niantic is a victim of its own success. They're a tiny company that wasn't ready to explode like they have.
@WSDC13888 when I started playing Ingress it was owned by Google and completely free.
When they decided it should make money, they started Niantic and the in game transactions were introduced. Something to do with Google being a non profit org.
I don’t see Niantic as anything but large knowing from where it started.
I haven’t heard of anything like this fiasco ever before from both companies.
I left ingress because of the spoofers
I left pogo to be on hpwu from the start
I am not happy they are not rolling back to May 6th where the progress you had was actually your own.
Has anyone successfully got a refund yet? The support team sends me to Apple and Apple is adamant that due to this being a technical issue they have admitted it’s on the app developer to fairly compensate. I am in a never ending loop. The App Store T&Cs even states that we are eligible for refund if there has been a technical issue preventing delivery of goods or services. I would even take the refund in Diagonal Alley coins.
I have moved on from wanting my exact stuff back because people smarter than me on the topic seem to have reached consensus that it’s not possible but if I bought bundles For resources to facilitate the fragments why is it so hard to give the coins back? I have a **** of a lot of potents to brew lol!
I had been so impressed with the customer service during the Knight Bus snafu. I once got three runestones back after a bad bus day. This is far more severe and they have really dug their heels in that it’s worth less despite continually agreeing it was their mistake and they know it’s frustrating in our correspondence. I guess I am looking for a statement from a decision maker as to their logic?
thats an interesting point... it seems that a high percentage of the hardcore-gamer seems to be hit by the crashes. That are the gamers who paid much of the money to feed the game.
Will the gamers being hit continue to pay money? I don't believe so.
Let's be honest: It was only a matter of time before the disaster would hit my registry. Please, be on the lookout for my foundables and send them home as quickly as possible. If you are lucky you might even encounter a green star.
Just signed up to the forum to post this. Daily player since day 1. But casual.
I was affected by the May 7th bugs. I tapped away as soon as I saw all those shiny shimmers. My wife was not as affected by May 7th because she prestiged after the server-side fix that day. Unfortunately, she didn't realize that there were situations where it would have been better to not re-place images. Then the "fix" happened and it worked for me. I got a bunch of the fragments that I lost while prestiging pages and I don't believe I lost any green stars. So I'm actually ahead of her now because, after a month, I know not to re-place rare things with green stars on pages I'm close to prestiging. (Unless my finger happens to brush against one!)
We think those are two reasonable outcomes.
But hearing from the players who lost all their green stars has really affected us. Today, I've been farming some challenge fragments and thinking "What if all these things I'm placing just vanished?" Putting myself in those shoes. And it really is agonizing. Then hearing that no more effort is going to be made for those affected players has made me angry.
I'm a mathematician and a developer for a high availability cloud service. So I spend a lot of my life trying to make sure things like this don't happen. Even given whatever disaster has happened to this data, I think the affected users could be detected (mostly). And the registries could be fixed (mostly). It's a fun math problem! Even if backups somehow disappeared, there are possible methods to detect affected players using the current account state and entire registry state. From very early on, I've loved this dev team. They were always making the game more convenient and fun. So this decision is very disappointing.
In any case, dev team, for the future:
1. If you don't have the tools to fix this, you can start building those tools.
2. If it isn't safe to run database-fixing tasks now, you can start building the infrastructure to make it safe. You can create a data services layer to protect people's registries from going backwards.
3. If your backups didn't help you, you can make them better.
4. If there's data you need from the phones, you can migrate that server side with a future app version.
5. If your continuous delivery workflow failed you, (it did), you can make some tweaks.
6. If this stuff isn't on your schedule, you can sneak it in.
Even though I'm not directly affected by fragment-gate anymore, giving up on these players has lowered my confidence in the team. I'm sure there are many more like me. And a store pack isn't helping that one bit.
thank you @Canooo for speaking up - i trust your wisdom and experience in assessing the feasibility of a fix a lot more than i trust the same of certain others here who go out of their way to defend the indefensible or at least make excuses for the inexcusable (they’ve lost credibility by doing so)! and thank you for your empathy for those who have suffered loss, as well as your anger at the many failures of those responsible for such loss!
@HPWULOLA Thanks for the update and for the freebies! I really appreciate it. I have not spent hundreds of hours playing nor hundreds of dollars, so my frustration level is way lower than some other players. I will continue to play because I enjoy the distraction the game provides and I will bear with the little hiccups along the way. It's a risk playing a living, breathing game. Nothing is perfect. You have created a wonderful game and I know it will only get better from here. Thanks again!!! 😀
@Suetu I essentially described why, from my point of view, I was in an unfair situation: having bought in game gold with the intention of collecting items which were later deleted by the developer and confirmed that they wouldn't be restored. I dealt with Apple, things went really smooth. Note that there are some generic refund policies, e.g. and in the case of Apple, I think that you can't get a refund for transactions older than 3 months (or at least easily). I'm also not sure if where you are located matters. In any case, wish you good luck! For me having my money back really helped me to go through this situation as I managed to get a significant part of the unfairness feeling gone.
@Canooo Being a software engineer myself, I agree 100% with what you said. I also provided a solution for the problem, if you are curious about it, see page 4. There would be many approaches for this though and that's just one possible solution but nevertheless I agree with you that the recovery of the fragments would be a problem where you could have some fun fixing!
I also totally agree with your post-mortem recommendations - that's what I'd have already done! - and I really hope that they will follow them in order to avoid problems like this in the future!
@Jagiellonia, thanks so much for the follow-up. I'm not sure that it will help me, as I'd be dealing with Google, and most of my spending was more than three months ago, but knowledge is power.
Honestly at this point I'd settle for just getting back my green stars. Leave my current fragment counts as they are. But give me the green stars I lost. There are so many pages that I would have been able to prestige at this point but for this huge error. The number of runestone rewards and high level foundables that were lost were devastating. It seems like just putting back the stars would be an easy enough solution.
I've been spending so many runestones trying to get back what I lost, but there's no real way to get back all those high foundables without months of effort.
Looks like the make-good gifts are their answer, even though it does not even come close to even replacing 1% of the total losses! They are continuing to provide 0% support through in game tickets.
I would like to thank @hpwulola, again, for relaying what little information that you are allowed to us. It is understandable that your hands are tied, as to what you are permitted to post. Any more assistance that you can provide with escalating our concerns about fair compensation for your losses is greatly appreciated. I feel sorry that you are placed in the middle of this fiasco, as it seems that the rest of the support team has chosen to just ignore all those still effected by this catastrophic debacle.
@Klc5048 same. was not the first time around and came to ask about the green stars before I even tapped. never got a response. waited a few hours and started tapping. unfortunately I still tapped before the fix that night. grr lol
Although OW seems so very official, and he does get word straight from the team, they have been known to shift things at the last minute 😉. But glad to know it will be tonight. Then again, it is only 2:15pm here on the Niantic West coast... we have a few hours still until 5pm.
Comments
Just to let you know guys that if you want to request a refund, you should contact Apple Store / Play Store, not Niantic. It worked for me.
Frankly, to me this feels more like Diagon Alley promotion than a sincere compensation attempt xD
Well I have a PHD from Hogwarts in Magizoology at least according to the current lesson plan!! So when is the next lesson plan coming out? I am buried in scrolls, red books, and green books! 📚
@Jagiellonia, how did you phrase your request for refund to succeed, when so many others failed? Also, were you dealing with Apple or Google?
Any details appreciated!
"I think we all need to stop wrongly assuming that their backup data is complete and accurate. We simply don't know enough to make such a speculation. It's possible that the reason some people were missed entirely by the second wave of fragment adjustments is that the backup process was flawed and there was no data, partial data, or incorrect data for some accounts. This is just one possible scenario. I'm not sure if that would make them look better or worse than having proper backups but being unable to do anything with them."
@WSDC13888 I thought about how inaccurate their database might be. However, if some of the top grinders in the world are affected, and i personally know them - one has all his exploration pages completed, the other had more than 18,000 fortress battles to his name; I'm kinda baffled to know that Niantic/WB have not been actively tracking the progress of such people. Most gaming companies would be actively tracking the progress of their top grinders. Or maybe I am wrong?
@9threefour In addition to looking at WU's history, I would look at all Niantic games, and speculate after considering their behavior over time. If you were to go to Ingress communities and explain this situation, nobody would be particularly surprised. That's simply the reputation they've built. POGO did nothing to change it, and WU hasn't changed it either. My broader theory is that Niantic is a victim of its own success. They're a tiny company that wasn't ready to explode like they have.
@WSDC13888 when I started playing Ingress it was owned by Google and completely free.
When they decided it should make money, they started Niantic and the in game transactions were introduced. Something to do with Google being a non profit org.
I don’t see Niantic as anything but large knowing from where it started.
I haven’t heard of anything like this fiasco ever before from both companies.
I left ingress because of the spoofers
I left pogo to be on hpwu from the start
I am not happy they are not rolling back to May 6th where the progress you had was actually your own.
Has anyone successfully got a refund yet? The support team sends me to Apple and Apple is adamant that due to this being a technical issue they have admitted it’s on the app developer to fairly compensate. I am in a never ending loop. The App Store T&Cs even states that we are eligible for refund if there has been a technical issue preventing delivery of goods or services. I would even take the refund in Diagonal Alley coins.
I have moved on from wanting my exact stuff back because people smarter than me on the topic seem to have reached consensus that it’s not possible but if I bought bundles For resources to facilitate the fragments why is it so hard to give the coins back? I have a **** of a lot of potents to brew lol!
I had been so impressed with the customer service during the Knight Bus snafu. I once got three runestones back after a bad bus day. This is far more severe and they have really dug their heels in that it’s worth less despite continually agreeing it was their mistake and they know it’s frustrating in our correspondence. I guess I am looking for a statement from a decision maker as to their logic?
thats an interesting point... it seems that a high percentage of the hardcore-gamer seems to be hit by the crashes. That are the gamers who paid much of the money to feed the game.
Will the gamers being hit continue to pay money? I don't believe so.
Let's be honest: It was only a matter of time before the disaster would hit my registry. Please, be on the lookout for my foundables and send them home as quickly as possible. If you are lucky you might even encounter a green star.
Thanks in advance!
Just signed up to the forum to post this. Daily player since day 1. But casual.
I was affected by the May 7th bugs. I tapped away as soon as I saw all those shiny shimmers. My wife was not as affected by May 7th because she prestiged after the server-side fix that day. Unfortunately, she didn't realize that there were situations where it would have been better to not re-place images. Then the "fix" happened and it worked for me. I got a bunch of the fragments that I lost while prestiging pages and I don't believe I lost any green stars. So I'm actually ahead of her now because, after a month, I know not to re-place rare things with green stars on pages I'm close to prestiging. (Unless my finger happens to brush against one!)
We think those are two reasonable outcomes.
But hearing from the players who lost all their green stars has really affected us. Today, I've been farming some challenge fragments and thinking "What if all these things I'm placing just vanished?" Putting myself in those shoes. And it really is agonizing. Then hearing that no more effort is going to be made for those affected players has made me angry.
I'm a mathematician and a developer for a high availability cloud service. So I spend a lot of my life trying to make sure things like this don't happen. Even given whatever disaster has happened to this data, I think the affected users could be detected (mostly). And the registries could be fixed (mostly). It's a fun math problem! Even if backups somehow disappeared, there are possible methods to detect affected players using the current account state and entire registry state. From very early on, I've loved this dev team. They were always making the game more convenient and fun. So this decision is very disappointing.
In any case, dev team, for the future:
1. If you don't have the tools to fix this, you can start building those tools.
2. If it isn't safe to run database-fixing tasks now, you can start building the infrastructure to make it safe. You can create a data services layer to protect people's registries from going backwards.
3. If your backups didn't help you, you can make them better.
4. If there's data you need from the phones, you can migrate that server side with a future app version.
5. If your continuous delivery workflow failed you, (it did), you can make some tweaks.
6. If this stuff isn't on your schedule, you can sneak it in.
Even though I'm not directly affected by fragment-gate anymore, giving up on these players has lowered my confidence in the team. I'm sure there are many more like me. And a store pack isn't helping that one bit.
thank you @Canooo for speaking up - i trust your wisdom and experience in assessing the feasibility of a fix a lot more than i trust the same of certain others here who go out of their way to defend the indefensible or at least make excuses for the inexcusable (they’ve lost credibility by doing so)! and thank you for your empathy for those who have suffered loss, as well as your anger at the many failures of those responsible for such loss!
@HPWUTeam , i really hope you heed @Canooo ’s post #382 above!!
@HPWULOLA Thanks for the update and for the freebies! I really appreciate it. I have not spent hundreds of hours playing nor hundreds of dollars, so my frustration level is way lower than some other players. I will continue to play because I enjoy the distraction the game provides and I will bear with the little hiccups along the way. It's a risk playing a living, breathing game. Nothing is perfect. You have created a wonderful game and I know it will only get better from here. Thanks again!!! 😀
@Suetu I essentially described why, from my point of view, I was in an unfair situation: having bought in game gold with the intention of collecting items which were later deleted by the developer and confirmed that they wouldn't be restored. I dealt with Apple, things went really smooth. Note that there are some generic refund policies, e.g. and in the case of Apple, I think that you can't get a refund for transactions older than 3 months (or at least easily). I'm also not sure if where you are located matters. In any case, wish you good luck! For me having my money back really helped me to go through this situation as I managed to get a significant part of the unfairness feeling gone.
Has anyone claimed this already?Is it safe?
Or will I loose all my fragments?
Please report.
@Canooo Being a software engineer myself, I agree 100% with what you said. I also provided a solution for the problem, if you are curious about it, see page 4. There would be many approaches for this though and that's just one possible solution but nevertheless I agree with you that the recovery of the fragments would be a problem where you could have some fun fixing!
I also totally agree with your post-mortem recommendations - that's what I'd have already done! - and I really hope that they will follow them in order to avoid problems like this in the future!
@Jagiellonia, thanks so much for the follow-up. I'm not sure that it will help me, as I'd be dealing with Google, and most of my spending was more than three months ago, but knowledge is power.
Thanks again, on behalf of all.
Honestly at this point I'd settle for just getting back my green stars. Leave my current fragment counts as they are. But give me the green stars I lost. There are so many pages that I would have been able to prestige at this point but for this huge error. The number of runestone rewards and high level foundables that were lost were devastating. It seems like just putting back the stars would be an easy enough solution.
I've been spending so many runestones trying to get back what I lost, but there's no real way to get back all those high foundables without months of effort.
Looks like the make-good gifts are their answer, even though it does not even come close to even replacing 1% of the total losses! They are continuing to provide 0% support through in game tickets.
I would like to thank @hpwulola, again, for relaying what little information that you are allowed to us. It is understandable that your hands are tied, as to what you are permitted to post. Any more assistance that you can provide with escalating our concerns about fair compensation for your losses is greatly appreciated. I feel sorry that you are placed in the middle of this fiasco, as it seems that the rest of the support team has chosen to just ignore all those still effected by this catastrophic debacle.
still waiting on this store pack. has yet to show up for me
@CBG92 I haven't received it yet either, and I was badly affected by this error.
@Klc5048 same. was not the first time around and came to ask about the green stars before I even tapped. never got a response. waited a few hours and started tapping. unfortunately I still tapped before the fix that night. grr lol
I also have not seen a "make good box" despite opening a support ticket in game.
I have not received a complimentary gift??
I do not believe it has been released yet @etzkorny
The guess was it would be released sometime this week, but nothing official has been mentioned on an actual day. perhaps when the BE is over?
@Bormacska Orange Wizard said it would be monday on their facebook page and also that it would probably be tonight. Screenshot went to moderation!
Although OW seems so very official, and he does get word straight from the team, they have been known to shift things at the last minute 😉. But glad to know it will be tonight. Then again, it is only 2:15pm here on the Niantic West coast... we have a few hours still until 5pm.
Not our monday?
Hi everyone! The store pack will most likely be available tomorrow, I'll update you when it is live! Thanks.