Deleted 3x crafter by accident

I accidentally deleted my crafter, a gm tink, tailor,carp with 50 bs char yesterday. Upon request that it be reinstated I was told this is against the rules for the staff to do, as they are unable to undelete things, and it's against the rules for them to change chars skills.

I'd like to petition to reinstate my character as I can prove the skills I had, and I believe it is a very simple and sometimes necessary action the staff can take. I admit I am an idiot for not being more careful. I clicked the char I wanted to delete then clicked delete then accepted, however I believe the mouse click did not register, and it deleted the last char I had played which was my mule. Anyway the main point is this would be something that a gm could easily do, and it would really make my day, as I would not have to go through all of the trouble remaking the char, from an honest mistake. The staff member I spoke to about it even said it was a reasonable request, and those I spoke to after on the player side said the same thing.


Please consider it, and if anyone would like to throw in their two cents on the subject feel free.


Thank you for your time.

Perhaps asking for donations from vet players as far as ingots etc... may be more productive.. If you can prove with Screen Shots that you actually had the skills, this is a pretty awesome community. You may be surprised by the response.

I accidentally left my door open last night and today all my vanqs and regs are gone. I can prove with screenshots that I had all those things...


We all make mistakes, that is a part of life. If you need help getting back up, the community (myself included) will be happy to help, but to ask for special treatment by staff is a bit much. No offence but your loss is quite minimal, the cost to gm a tinker and carpenter is not very high and tailor is by far the cheapest. Yes it sucks to lose stuff that you worked for, but every time it happens to me, i come back stronger and smarter and I get better at the game, its all part of learning.

It may not be much but I will pitch in the first donation of 2500 iron ingots. Send me a pm and we will arrange a meet.

Hope this motivates you to play more and harder and not the opposite!

Cheers

Technically it would just be a reinstatement of skill, which doesn't really change the balance of the shard. Someone stole your items, the items are still on the shard.

I don't mean this just for me, but for future mistakes. I thank you both for your opinion, and I will be taking 0 donations. I have a ton of gold, and I have the time to do it on my own, I just personally don't see it as a big deal to set skills on a new char, if you can prove you accidentally deleted those skills.

If this petitions gets 0 traction, im still going to play here, and im going to remake the char, the purpose was to see what could be changed, if anything.

It stinks that this happened, but I don't think the staff should give you a freebie. I haven't deleted a character in awhile, but I'm pretty sure there is a 'Are you sure' prompt. Mistakes happen, we've all made them, and we all hopefully learn from it.

Good luck!

I'm in agreement with the others. I understand your perspective, that its a small concession -- however, the fact that its a concession at all sets future precedence. Staff made the right call in saying no, IMO.

I see your point but there is the gump where you have to accept to delete. You fouled. Game over. Insert quarter for re-play.

Which is the purpose of my post, as I do not see why it would be a problem to change this rule permanently, not just for me.

Yes, but, it becomes a question of staff integrity then. Whether you see it this way or not, this is exactly what it becomes. Its not worth it for staff to get involved in a player situation like this, because then other players see it as an opportunity -- and when they get denied, as a rally cry. The neutral position is to simply say no -- and its the right one.

Again, I understand your perspective -- but you're only seeing it from the perspective of the slighted. This is a *SIGNIFICANT* effect in the game world, by staff -- and the precedence it sets is dangerous.

I agree completely that this can have a significant effect on the game world, however if you can prove you had the character 2 min ago when you accidentally deleted them, and prove their skills, there is no question of integrity.


I agree that the easiest thing to do is make a blanket statement "no". I also will accept this answer completely if I am unable to sway a change.
I agree that it is a significant change to the game world, however there is no effect on the game world if it's a legitimate provable accident.

So to whom are you petitioning? Staff said no... player base opinion is no...

There are no higher powers here. Good Luck, It sucks, It happens.... Folks have offered to help you rebuild... It doesn't get any better than this.

You quote my original post, then say the player base opinion is no, which you take from posts happening after my original post.

The idea is to see if there can be a change to policy.

I agree that it appears nothing will change, which as stated previously is something I would understand.

No question of integrity, to you. Again, you are the slighted here. You are only seeing this from your perspective.

I will be completely blunt from this point forward in the response.

The answer is no, for a very specific reason of what questioning of staff integrity will come of it. You might not see this as a potential, but trust me when I say that without a doubt, it WILL be. Someone on irc will get wind of it, they'll start screaming about how they 'know that staff did it for others' -- you'll have instigators coming in and talking about how they've gotten the staff to provide them with a 7x GM character (even though its a complete fabrication) -- you'll have people questioning how that staff confirmed that what was stated was true...

The Ultima Online crowd, and ESPECIALLY the UO Free Shard crowd is a very fickle, uptight and opinionated bunch. If you give an inch, people whos entire mission in life is to be a thorn in side will happily take a mile and run with it. This is precisely what staff's response is set to avoid.

Again, the question of integrity, is not one that *YOU* would be questioning. That doesn't make it any less questioned. Please try to see this from a top level perspective, and not just yours of loss.

Just to clarify myself a bit -- when I say 'the game world', I'm not just talking about the data that makes up the server. This community is quite possibly the biggest single part of the game world, here at UOR. When I say that this would affect change in the game world, I mean that the ramifications that would come from it, from within the community, would be significant. And, they would -- people blow up over benign changes not going their way; why would they not when they think (again, even if its from a complete platform of falseness) that someone has gained an advantage over them in a way that signals a corrupt event?

This is where the problem with making such a change lies.

People will kick and scream at any chance they get -- and if you give them something like this, that from a laymans perspective carries with it a *LOT* of faith in the honesty of humans, on both player and staff sides, then they will use it as their next rallying cry. There is no reason to give these people the benefit -- and the easiest way to make sure this level of integrity does not even come into question is by simply not interfering with the game world. Chris and crew have set this as a precedence from the start of the server -- that staff will not play a role in the direction of the world -- and like it or not, thats exactly what this would do.

2 min after it happened I linked a link to the char that was deleted, because the website was not updated at the time.

Although I have 0 actual chance of ever getting this char back, I believe that had the rule at the time reflected the ability to reinstate if you can prove your loss of character, someone in the future may not lose their characters.

It's not a question of integrity if you can prove it.

I'm obviously not saying just believe everything anyone in irc/the forums says. Also, the act of proving or the amount of evidence needed to prove my statement would have to be something discussed by the staff.

Thanks for your opinion.

Look, from a technological standpoint, its never a question of actual staff integrity.

Chris keeps backups of the server, and can reload previous backups to confirm contents as of a point in time. Its a pain in the ass for him to do, but he absolutely can, and has in the past.

You're misinterpreting the actual integrity of the person involved -- which is not actually at question here -- and the perceived integrity compromise from the outside. They are two separate entities, but equally important in terms of efficiently staffing a free shard. You won't notice the potential for integrity compromise, because you know you're being honest. And Chris won't compromise his integrity, because I know him well enough to know that he would spend half a day confirming what was told to him via backups, just to make sure that its 100% accurate. However, the community at large would react to something like this negatively; because it gives a potential sense that staff is intervening in the world. Is it rational? Frankly, no, but its the way that the UO free shard community works for whatever reason. The lack of rational thought when it comes to cries of staff corruption from many in this environment is staggering.

The moment that perception starts to shift, the community starts to falter. This isn't good for any of us. It doesn't make it right; but it does make it human nature. I'm just asking you to understand that the perspective of integrity is not limited in this situation to only the person who made the mistake, and staff -- because of the 'global' nature of the community here. Its nowhere near as cut and dry as you seem to believe it is.

Absolutely not. Want to make sure it never happens again? Kill your alts for long term murder counts. You cannot delete characters with murder counts.

This was suggested to me when I made a joke about my wife potentially deleting my characters.



If you said it was a 7x poisoner with resist, I might feel slightly bad about this. The fact that you're out a few piles of resources, is really nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.


Players lose MILLIONS of gold worth of items just for taking a long break, then come back and do it all over. Consider how long you've been here, how long you plan to be here and how long it REALLY took you to make that character. A drop in the bucket of the time you are likely to spend here.

That is a clever suggestion.

If a player asks a gm to undelete, or re-skill as it were, while the char skills are still on the website, I'd have no problem with it from an integrity standpoint. I'm all for stark lines, I'd just draw mine in a different spot. But the staff policy is certainly understandable, and this unfortunate circumstance has had the benefit of making that policy clear. Caleb, chalk this up as taking one for the team

After reading this thread I feel a lot better about delete'n Vlar about 6 months ago when he was 6xGM with 90'ish taming. *curses the god of wine*

Truly "undeleting" something, unless UOR staff has written a tool specifically for reloading old backup files and integrating them piecemeal into the current worldset, is not possible. It's not that it's impossible to figure out, but the functionality doesn't exist in RunUO and probably doesn't exist in UOR's fork of it.

So given that technical dead-end, "undeleting" a character would actually consist of transforming a new character, via GM commands, into the old one - and like the other opinions above mine, I am wholeheartedly against GM modification of player characters, for any reason other than very judicial repair of damage directly due to a major bug.