What's that, Furcadia?

For those of you who don’t understand exactly what went on with the recent ‘alt rollback’, here’s some of the specific information about what went on.

I do warn you, however, that the details could prove boring to those not interested in the world of alt trading.

Special thanks to the FAM/FAZ staff members who helped make sure the information was accurate.

February 7, 2009 – Dragon’s Eye Productions fixes a ‘bug’ in the ‘expiration’ for characters that have been inactive for a specified period of time.

February 11, 2009 – Dragon’s Eye Productions issues a rollback on over 200,000 alts that were incorrectly removed in the rollback.

You may have noticed the new influx of ‘information’ about the alt rollback that Dragon’s Eye Productions performed on February 7^th. Over 230,000 alts were removed from the Character Database at that time.

Since that time, over 200,000 of those characters were returned to their original owners. Still, from that number over 30,000 characters were cleared from the list appropriately.

The alt-trading community was in an uproar when this information was made public. The reason for this is twofold.

First, a lot of people lost alts without an e-mail warning them that the alt was about to expire. These were names that were ‘special’ to the owners and they wanted to keep them. This group makes up the majority of the 200,000 alts that were returned. Some of these people lost alts that should not have expired, and some of them had been long-standing, (active) characters that were active within a week before the expiration.

Dragon’s Eye Productions is chalking this particular issue up to a bug, and those particular alts were returned to their owners with an apology from Felorin posted publicly on the Furcadia Forums.

Alts that should have normally expired were allowed to remain expired. That means some 30,000 alts that were supposed to expire, but hadn’t, were allowed to expire, and remained expired.

Over 100 alts that had Digos recently purchased on them were not returned to their original owners; Dragon’s Eye Productions allowed the new owners to keep their Digos and their alts.

The part that made the situation tricky was that several alts that were not supposed to expire did, and were claimed by new owners who had wanted them for quite some time. These new owners were upset because the previous owners had not logged on for several months, but were still within the six month expiration limit.

These new owners stated that because the alts were never used by their original owners, they should not get their alts back. The new owners said that they grabbed these alts specifically to use them, in effect pulling them out of the mothballs and making use of names.

DEP seemed inclined to listen to these requests and, (for one time only) reset the expiration date for the older alts to 3 months of complete inactivity.

Some people rankled at this, but overall it seems to have appeased most of the people involved with this situation.