Recent pricing errors and bans - official Kongregate statement page 3

Kongregate’s handling it as best they can, I hope you all can see that.
They’re refunding your kreds so that it’ll eventually be like this little fiasco never happened.
Just be patient. :)

There is no way that Kong can make this like it never happened. Snail has banned these accounts and has not been very forthcoming in what will be done with them. I think everyone realizes that Kong has handled the problem as best they can. It is now in Snail’s hands and we all know the amount of time, energy and resources Snail puts into having a smooth, fair and well run game.

I for one will miss those players that will not come back even if they are thawed out (unfrozen). Grizz I will still find a way to peek at you somehow.

Posted on Snail forums Mon Jan 14, 2013 10:37 am

We will have more news this week. At this time we’re putting our solution into effect. Please check back at a later time. Thank you all for your patience.
Tsunami (Community Moderator / Snail Games)

“I said aye! dumbasses! baby I got your money!” — ODB or also Old Dirty Snail.

Phoenix00017 this is directed at your comment…the airlines on 2 occasions that I know of for a fact (could be more) have sold airline tickets for very cheap (like $30) the people who bought them at this price got to KEEP and USE the tickets to fly to their destinations!!!They were not charged more money nor had the tickets taken away.THIS IS A FACT!!! They bought the tickets at a price set by the airlines system… we bought points set at this systems price.We should not have been banned/frozen for doing this!!!

Greetings,

First I’d like to thank all of you for your patience with the Kongregate and Heroes of Gaia issue.

We are nearing completion of our solution for the Kongregate compromise and apologize for the time that this has taken to resolve. Our systems were not designed or expected to handle the amount of damage that was done as a result of this issue. To help clear up any confusion, we want to give some insight into the thought process behind the decisions we’ve made.

The issue began January 6th, when a Kongregate admin account was compromised which allowed Kongregate’s back-end systems to be modified by an unknown user. When we received this information we took action by freezing any accounts that took advantage of the modified point system. The intent of freezing these accounts was to prevent any further damage to the economy. After these accounts were frozen we were able to begin work on a resolution that would be in the best interest of our players while maintaining the integrity of the game. The amount of goods purchased was in the hundreds of thousands, and over the span of a few days players had purchased thousands of Kongregate points for far less than intended. Kongregate has done their best to ensure that players are refunded for any purchases made during the time of the compromise.

After much discussion we came to a resolution that we have been putting into effect since January 11th. One of the options available was to completely roll back the servers to just before the incident occurred. After considering the length of time that had passed, we chose not to proceed this way as we felt that it would be unfair to the players who had legitimately and significantly progressed.

We instead opted to roll back only the characters which took advantage of this exploit. We will begin unlocking these accounts within the next few days as soon as we have finalized this process.

We recognize that we have not met your standards in regards to exploitation in the past and are actively looking to correct this. Any accounts involved in the purchase of excessive points may consider this a final warning, and further exploitation will result in a permanent ban.

We’d like to thank you all again for your continued patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an email to Support@Snailgamesusa.com.

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Community Moderator | Snail Games

Posted at 9:30EST 1-16-13 by Tsunami on Snail Forums

Snail has unfrozen some accounts now :)

Yes, unfrozen and they still have the illegal obtained stuff, at least some of them have.

unfrozen who? NOT ME wtf

It seems dice is unfrozen :-)

why are some accounts unfrozen and I AM NOT?

well i’m guessing after 3 weeks and no clear communication this will probably drag on forever. i have decided that i will no longer play a game where the company cares nothing for their customer but only on how much money they can make. By playing this game i am directly supporting the callous way in which you treat your customer base. I cannot do that anymore so i leave this game and many friends behind all at the cause of mismanagement. and for the record i do not mind being frozen which is your choice its that fact that while most were frozen on the 6th or so i was allowed to play for 2 weeks before you decided to freeze me. that and the fact that i’ve written several emails to your support and getting no replies after an entire week, so i’ve decided to cut my loses (and your too) and pick up a game that while may not be as fun as Heroes of Gaia may atleast listen to their customers and try and make a difference. Congrats on ruining a game that could have been fun.

Originally posted by charles75:

Congrats on ruining a game that could have been fun.

Here is where you go wrong. That part was already established by Dice/Khaidhun and their little friends, like Galama.

Posted Tuesday Jan 29, 4:03pm On Snails Forums
Greetings Heroes,

Snail Games USA wishes to extend its thanks to the Heroes of Gaia community for your continued patience regarding the recent Kongregate/Heroes of Gaia issue.

As you may know, a sizable portion of the community took advantage of this issue to reap exorbitant rewards, drastically altering the economic landscape of the game in a way that, unchecked, would have had far-reaching and persistently detrimental effects on the Heroes of Gaia servers. A thorough investigation was conducted alongside our game technicians to determine if the frozen accounts could be “fixed,” reversing the damage and returning the accounts to their users.

As mentioned in our previous post , Heroes of Gaia’s systems were not designed with contingencies for an incident of this magnitude. While we had hoped to remove the many item and stat gains resulting from this situation, we have determined that the severity of the damage makes reversal a nonviable option. We can’t allow these accounts to return to the game with the gains they obtained through this series of events, as they would have an enormous advantage over accounts that did not leverage the price error. The accounts will therefore remain frozen indefinitely, and will not be unfrozen for any reason.

While we take no joy from this decision, it has been made in the interests of fairness to the community and the health of the game. Please recall that, per our Terms of Service, Snail Games USA can take any action it deems necessary to protect its games and their communities. If your account is frozen as a result of this action, any inquiry regarding a possible refund of the points purchased during the incident must be directed to our partner, Kongregate.

We regret losing so many accounts, some played by prominent, valued members of the community, but it is important for everyone playing our games to understand that each of us is responsible for the choices we make, and we must live with the consequences of our actions. Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should do that thing.

Snail Games welcomes all reports of systems that may not be functioning as intended, and thanks those members of the community who value fairness and competition above personal gain.

We remain committed to Heroes of Gaia, and are working to enhance our Community, Support and Operations involvement with the community and the game. We’ll provide more details on that in the near future.

Snail Games

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Community Moderator | Snail Games

I guess Snail will be getting sued for running illegal gambling

Join TE.

LOL

Snail,

My in-game name is Gorbo, I haven’t played this game in over a year, my account (along with the Arete account) were both hacked a number of months ago. No restitution made, not even a response to my email inquiring if it was possible, but my time has long passed. I have no interest in playing my account with you, and no bias in what I am about to say beyond a keen interest in your disaster recovery response.

I have friends who lost accounts, I have enemies who lost accounts: the fact remains that what you are doing is completely unfair.

Lets start with communication: I would hope that in the future when an issue this immense arises that a Community Liaison with 20 something posts on their own forum isn’t the representative Snail Games USA sends to deliver the news that players are losing their accounts, restitution will not be made, all while the company both loses money and respect. I mean no offense to you Tsunami, but I think you might be a messenger that was sent to be shot.

Disaster Recovery: There is absolutely no tolerable excuse that the server database cant be rolled back 48 hours, a week, or even two weeks. No need to fix the individual player profiles for every abuse, just roll the whole thing back. If you don’t have those backups, then someone’s head should roll. If this is the case then Snail has been collecting money in bad faith from players. You operate a Service/Entertainment business, and in the real world, nobody would do business with you until you have proven or made assurances of such a disaster recovery plan. Entire IT departments are cleaned out of companies for exactly this kind of mess, or even less.

My final food for thought here is that if Snail is not competent enough to ensure the operation of one of its games its come time to LICENSE this product to a company better suited for doing so. Money could be collected from the license and players could rest assured that they will receive full support when they need it. Snail’s name has been incredibly tarnished by their reaction, or failaction on this matter, point fingers at players, at kongregate, whoever you want – the fact remains that SNAIL dropped the ball here, and they are the ones losing.

Nice post Gorbo. Though I would like to point out that not once has a representative from Snail posted on this forum. I have copy/pasted everything for them. They lack even the decency to do that. I will miss the friendships that I made there but not at all will I miss Snail and how badly they mishandled what could have been an incredible game.

That being said, since so many have been scattered to the four winds of the gaming universe, some of us: bb6, Feliinia, DT2, myself and quite a few Dragons have decided to join Kongregate and play Wartunes on Server 2-US East. We started a guild there called…Banned. We would like to collect the many HoG friends we have made through the years together there for some more fun.

I am sorry, but I just don’t understand this.
Why didn’t they just roll back the whole server for 48h? They have repeatedly said that they have that ability.
Of course that would have been unfair to all the players who did not exploit the hack; but they could have sent small gifts to those as compensation.
All the statements and actions they eventually took don’t make any sense.
And freezing any accounts permanently is unfair. Sure, the players who exploited the hack knew what they were doing, but it is just a game; most of them probably thought “well this is funny!”
Snail has no people with brains, that is now proven.

And with great pleasure, I delete the bookmark from my browser. F U Snail F U. What was once a game with an large active player base is now just a dying game. You demonstrated your incompetence to the playing community multiple times through untested updates, crashes, lack of use of someone who could speak 3rd grade english, lag issues, lack of in-game GM support, inability (or is that unwillingness) to repremand/discipline/ban the well documented major cheaters in the game (Dice/Galama/Khaiduhn/SL) and, the coup de grace, the latest Kred fiasco. Additionally, as CF points out, you never had the nuts to show up here to communicate with the Kong community.

The UNINTENDED benefit is that the remaining community doesn’t have to deal with the Dice/Gala/Khaid accounts anymore, but I am sure they have just picked up a new alt and are employing the same hacks/bots they used before. Hopefully the player behind those accounts will become disinterested in cheating on such a large scale.

I personally hope every one of Snail’s shareholders/owners loses their entire investment in Snail as they have shown themselves to be incompetant fools.

To the friends I’ve made over 3 years of playing HoG, stay in touch.

Hiya everybodies, I played for over 3 years, and made so many friends. So since my time at hog is done also, I’d like to tell everyone I knew and played with, thanks!!! Thanks for the friends I made, and even the ones who enjoyed killing me. :D

And like Celtic, I am at wartunes, but on server 1, so come over there! We are in wartunes chat room 8, (kongregate), and celtic, feli and I can have a thumb wrestling match for you all. :)

It’s just nice to have a place for the hog friends to still see each other. So Arxon!! come on over! Loosey you too!

anyways, see you around, and good luck where ever you end up.

love, nan :)

Well good bye all. I’m over at Wartune now too. To those that don’t come over, I wish you all the best, I will miss you.

Cheers,

Azog

wartunes too, european server :-)

what a BS Snail!! i played this game for over three years, just like most of all the other players you have banned.
I spended a huge ammount of money on your game, and 1 mistake(really your f u c k up) and i get this? wtf!
solutions were so simple rollback etc. but you responded like a snail.
thnx alot.
Thnx to all friends and enemies i had on this game, im on european server Wartune, hope to see you.
greetings Erikiasus

Everyone is at wartunes. Leave this game. It’s a lot more fun. Doesn’t matter which server, though Server 2 East is sexiest.