It’s happening right now with ESO’s 10th Anniversary celebrations.
It kicked off with an in-game Anniversary Jubilee event that started two weeks ago, and almost immediately players noticed the insanely low drop rates for some event items, taking players on average about 20 hours of mind-numbing grind of the same old content for certain pages, and some even longer.
The kicker with these low drop rates is that it’s unprecedented for ESO in its current form after having implemented plenty of progression systems for loot to lessen the impact of RNG.
Even now, at the end of the event, Zenimax Online Studios has refused to acknowledge the low drop rates, which only means that the player frustrations are intentional, most likely to pad player numbers for the sake of appeasing shareholders and/or daddy Zenimax Inc.
One week after the event was launched, ZOS also released a Public Test Server build of their latest chapter, Gold Road. This iteration of the PTS is supposed to have a copy of everyone’s PCNA characters so they can use their existing gear and setups for testing the new abilities and content. Template characters were also available to create, offering players a ton of gold, unlimited resources, and literally all the gear in the game; Public Test Server, after all.
About 30 minutes after the PTS went online, it was taken down, and so players who were on the PTS at the time went back onto their Live servers.
Turns out, the PTS wasn’t running a copy of the PCNA Live database.
It was using the PCNA Live database.
So now we have players who have deleted existing characters to create template characters on the PTS with a billion gold and trillions more value in loot running around on Live. The gold has been dispersed into the in-game economy.
The Live servers were taken down 20 minutes later.
There’s nothing else to be done; a server-wide rollback is imminent. After all, it would be dumb to just quarantine the players who have logged into the PTS and attempt to manually track down all the rogue gold and loot, right?
Right?
Well, ZOS is up to the challenge! First, they issue permanent bans on all the players who logged into the PTS (you know, the most loyal and experienced of the players) with an email stating that it’s temporary, that their accounts would be rolled back to about 9 hours before the servers went down (I assume that’s when their last backup was), and we could expect this issue to be resolved and for our accounts to be unlocked in 2-3 days.
Keep in mind, an event is active right now. There are reward boxes for completing any quest with high chances of dropping motif pages, crafting recipes, materials, currencies, etc, and most players are doing the 7 daily crafting quests for those on each character (max 20 characters).
The locked-out players are missing out on about 140 of those boxes per day.
3 days went by, there was another update. We’d be freed soonest at the end of the week. That makes 5 days of lockout. We’d be compensated, of course; they’d make things right.
5 boxes. Is all we get.
Okay, we also get a lot in another currency that lets us buy certain items in their microtransaction loot crates, and naturally the non-locked-out players are pissed about that.
Remember the event items with insanely low drop rates? We get all of those too. Would be useful to me if I hadn’t sunk 33 hours grinding those all out already.
With the event, there’s another currency that you can earn once daily, and you can use it to buy certain items from the event store. We’re not getting compensated any of those, though, even though those matter a lot for the sake of the event.
End of the week comes by. New update: there’s a maintenance right after the weekend, and they would discuss when best to take the server down after that.
We are guaranteed at least 8 days of missed game time. The event is almost over.
That server maintenance is happening right now. I will update on what they say next.
Update: they said earliest we’d be unlocked is Thursday. They’d also grant us one of the rewards we’d miss from the daily logins.