Runes of Magic US / AU

Ladies & Gentlemen,

Firstly, my deepest apologies for taking this long to get in touch with you. While the Community Management has taken huge steps and gone through a lot of pain to get you fair folks the much needed attention, there is still so much to do. Well, there always is, of course.
It is quite clear to our team that there is a lot of pain that needs to be treated and so I’d like to take this moment to address the following topics which burn most under your gnawed on fingernails: Siege Wars, Chest Item issue & Aeria Games.

Siege Wars
When first addressed in all its glory by Nick a.k.a Swag bringing the details of the journey to Taiwan (Runewaker) on the table and the plans Frogster America had to solve this incredible feature, the hype was nothing beyond exhilarating. The intention was clear and well justified; the way of communicating this to you folks was not.

Let me explain: while it always is in our deepest interest to improve and resolve issues and let you participate in said knowledge it is not helpful to promise results if they have not even been sighted and approved. Quality in both material and verbal sense can only be justified if you have actual facts. And the Siege Wars are the best example.

Indeed the visit was incredibly helpful with ideas coming up quite fast. Runewaker did tailor a few things together to adjust the performance with Siege Wars. And while Swag communicated the greatness of all this, the reality was something else: it backfired. Not one of the hoped for solutions worked.

In the aftermath you –our much hyped community- was let down after a lot of promises. And of course, this is understandable.

Status quo? The Siege Wars are still on our radar and for the time being Runewaker may improve it every so often. On the other hand we’re evaluating the hardware and may tweak certain aspects (i.e. the amount of possible guilds participating or the change when the Siege Wars actuially start). Still, there is no ETA as to when the Siege Wars will be what they should be: a fully operational feature that we all love. Once we do know for certain that there is a solution at hand – remember, one that we have seen working- we will inform you. It’s in our own interest.


Chest issues
No matter what goodness we post there is always at least one answer going toward the “and what about the chest items that I lost?” Going straight forward: there are about 500 of you folks that are still waiting on the items being returned. The reason for this is that due to the massive amount of time that went by our Customer Care cannot reimburse those items as the database cannot check back that far.

But that’s not the end of the line. We’re working on a reimbursement bundle for these troubles. The details as to when these bundles will become available and how you will obtain them will be disclosed as soon as we have all the information confirmed and tested.

The bug itself has been fixed since a while so you should be safe to use housing chests again.


Aeria Games
It came to your attention that Aeria Games has successfully acquired a part of the license to publish Runes of Magic in certain parts of the globe. So far this is correct. It is also correct that Aeria Games has the rights to enforce an IP block to any of those countries covered by the license. This includes Portugal (ES), South America and Turkey.

As far as we are concerned no IP block has been enabled as of yet nor has there been any request to do so and there is no contract agreement to change this situation. Should there be changes to those players being possibly affected we will of course do our best to inform you.

~Silberfuchs, Lead Community Manager

Quoted from "lafxatxthizzx;510282"

LOL
"[COLOR=blue !important]
In the aftermath you –our much hyped community- was let down after a lot of promises. And of course, this is understandable.

so its understandable that you let us down. interesting, at least your admitting it =p
[/COLOR]

Absolutely correct. You were let down after having recieved false promises. I see nothing lol'ig about a statement that is straight forward and open to you folks. It's been long overdue. Won't be the last either, I'd expect.

Quoted from "MrsBarron;510291"

Hardware alone may not fix the issue - especially as some specific actions seem to produce the lag experienced in Siege Wars. I have previously offered to provide some suggestions on setting up an application performance test - this is a skill that comes from 30 years of hardware, programming and database expertise and that few people possess at the level that I do. You can produce the most amazing hardware in the world for use, but if simple configuration and programming issues are not addressed (for example, configuring RAID disks in the wrong manner or using poorly designed database indices) then the application will lag out and be unusable.
.

As stated above there are two sides of the medal: one is the developing side, done by Runewaker. The other is the Hard / Software side, taken care of by Frogster as the Publisher.

As you may very well understand in your position and with your knowledge, every system of every company works differently. More so if a software has been created from scratch, such as the Runewaker engine.
Then there is the often strange result when testing the software on a test system that runs 100% on the same hardware / OS to the live servers (same settings) and suddenly some part does not work anymore (had this happening in my old days working @ another company).

Explanations aside, the above addresses the status quo.

Quoted from "Neelah;510301"

With regards to the missing chest items, I do understand that you are unable to verify the exact nature of the loss due to the database being expired. A few points, though:
One, someone should have bothered to back up a copy of the item database prior to expiration, seeing as there were tickets outstanding on it.
Two, someone should have bothered to at least write this up as a canned reply and autorespond it to our outstanding tickets. To this date, not one of mine having to do with my missing items has even been acknowledged as received.
Three, if the items we 'claimed' missing, back when we still believed you could verify what we were saying, are reasonable in nature, maybe someone should just shut up and hand over some diamonds based on our loss. I have a DARN good idea of the RL money I am out in this mess, and if the promised compensation package either a) never matieralizes (as usually happens), or b) is significantly less than my loss, then we're going to have a problem. We're going to have a problem of the OMGThereIsAWomanInMyOfficeHavingAScreamingHissyFit variety.

One: absolutely agreed on.
Two: also agreed on

Answer to both above: Frogster America operated independantly whoch is no excuse but the truth. Of course all Frogster departments worked closely together but as with every firm who adds different locations across the globe there are some differences to be expected. One of those was indeed the way how to set up hard and software and how to take care of you folks, our community.

In the end when our European office took over we were left with a lot of work. And trust me when I say that what you experience is only the tip of the iceberg. But we've improved a lot -not everything yet, but a lot, i.e. upgrading the soft- and hardware, getting the support portal up-to-date etc.

Sadly, and I mean it, there was no way to address the lost items issue as the EU Frogster was not informed when it was a real issue. And that was back then all fine as FAI was absolutely correct to try and resolve these issues as best as possible with Runewaker. Did not work out as we all know.
We instead were left with the remains and this includes: databases. Old ones, too. The rest you can imagine and/or read out of the statement.

Three: the bundles are in the works and the way they will be spread is being worked on as well. That's verified and I've seen it with my own eyes. Just no ETA yet, we'll get there though.

Quoted

[COLOR=black !important]What?! So you're saying that it's still possible this bug will be back and we will be back to square 1? I really don't feel like screen capping 15 toons' chests on a daily basis if that is the case.[/COLOR]

Yikes, major typo: "since" a while not "for" a while. Edited.