Pet disappears = working as intended

Rom

My pet disappeared and the response is working as intended. No remedy provided or necessary. Seems pretty poor design and respect for customers. Don't think this needs to happen to many times before I take a break from the game.

Arnold7

Am seeing this kind of attitude on the part of UO just too often anymore.  Sorry UO.  Saying thats just too bad, sorry, does not cut it anymore in a game like this one when players have legitimate complaints.

dvvid

Is it possible you didn’t stable your pet then logged out?  If so, I think that is typically not a good idea. 

Lord_Frodo

What kind of pet was it that you lost?  When you stabled it did your follower count go to zero?

Rom

Lord_Frodo said:

What kind of pet was it that you lost?  When you stabled it did your follower count go to zero?

It was a najasauros. As far as the follower count, that's not something I pay much attention to usually as the pets always take up 5/5 slots.

Punisher

I've lost 2 bonded fully scrolled 120 cu's before. I know of quite a few people this has happen to, spending 500m on scrolls and nothing they can do about it

Rom

dvvid said:

Is it possible you didn’t stable your pet then logged out?  If so, I think that is typically not a good idea. 

There are many, many times that I do not stable my pets before ending play for an evening. Logging out in a house with my pet etc. You're saying that if the player does not stable their pet before ending a play session then this glitchy deletion of pets is the players fault and not that of the developers? What if your house disappeared for no reason, would that be okay?

What this GM said is that if things disappear for no reason that there is no recourse; "GMs cannot give out items to players, nor replace items, pets or houses."

Imagine your house went poof overnight...

Rom

Punisher said:

I've lost 2 bonded fully scrolled 120 cu's before. I know of quite a few people this has happen to, spending 500m on scrolls and nothing they are currently willing to do about it.

I fixed this for you.

Archangel

HOW on earth does a bonded pet disappear!???

Lord_Frodo

Archangel said:

HOW on earth does a bonded pet disappear!???

Good question.  Another would be
How does a bonded pet not auto stable when logging off?

Does heat of battle effect pets?

Skett

I’ve had several unbounded pets disappear I didn’t think bounded pets would just vanish 
sorry for your loss that’s really messed up and needs fixed 

Rom

Skett said:

I’ve had several unbounded pets disappear I didn’t think bounded pets would just vanish 
sorry for your loss that’s really messed up and needs fixed 

Thank you. This was a bonded pet. It had died and was resed countless times, not a newly bonded pet.

Pawain

Lord_Frodo said:

Archangel said:

HOW on earth does a bonded pet disappear!???

Good question.  Another would be
How does a bonded pet not auto stable when logging off?

Does heat of battle effect pets?

Pets do not auto stable when you log off. They go into a nether world. If you die and log off they go into a nether world.  Some may call this nether world auto stable.  But we have no way to know if that pet goes into our stable.  I do not think it does. They return to you when you log back in if you are alive.

@Rom they can not return things that go poof, or else everyone would have a Castle, rare pets and items going poof every day that need returned.

I swear I had a Blaze Cu out Mr. GM and it just went poof.  You can even see it in my stable on TC....

McDougle

Rom said:

dvvid said:

Is it possible you didn’t stable your pet then logged out?  If so, I think that is typically not a good idea. 

There are many, many times that I do not stable my pets before ending play for an evening. Logging out in a house with my pet etc. You're saying that if the player does not stable their pet before ending a play session then this glitchy deletion of pets is the players fault and not that of the developers? What if your house disappeared for no reason, would that be okay?

What this GM said is that if things disappear for no reason that there is no recourse; "GMs cannot give out items to players, nor replace items, pets or houses."

Imagine your house went poof overnight...

Like the people who had houses deleted by mesanne 

Pawain

Only exploiters had houses deleted. That has nothing to do with a pet that went poof. 

Was the OP told multiple times that his pet was placed as an exploit? Nope

Stick to the topic.

McDougle

I just replied to another poster and understand your perception of the issue but placing a house legally then converting it is not an exploit IF int makes the house illegal it shouldn't be allowed and to delete homes that stood for years out of an anger driven power trip is totally unprofessional i ran around LS  the other day and a keep was placed in a manor i couldn't get around it should I page and have it deleted what if it was YOUR  house...

popps

Pawain said:

Lord_Frodo said:

Archangel said:

HOW on earth does a bonded pet disappear!???

Good question.  Another would be
How does a bonded pet not auto stable when logging off?

Does heat of battle effect pets?

Pets do not auto stable when you log off. They go into a nether world. If you die and log off they go into a nether world.  Some may call this nether world auto stable.  But we have no way to know if that pet goes into our stable.  I do not think it does. They return to you when you log back in if you are alive.

@ Rom they can not return things that go poof, or else everyone would have a Castle, rare pets and items going poof every day that need returned.

I swear I had a Blaze Cu out Mr. GM and it just went poof.  You can even see it in my stable on TC....

I swear I had a Blaze Cu out Mr. GM and it just went poof.  You can even see it in my stable on TC....

Well, one would imagine that the game's code was to have LOGs for all characters and items, pets, houses, Ships and whatever else associated with them and in their possession.... after all, when a server crashes, we have sometimes seen the game restore a previously saved game....

Why couldn't then this be also possible for characters and their belongings ?

Sure, it would take work to look into that character's LOG and belongings stored in the LOG but, if code did anticipate this necessity, I do not understand why it could not be done.

Of course, if there is no saved LOG for characters and their belongings in UO then, it is a different story but then, if there were no LOGs saved, how could shards at times be then restored to previous saves ?

Tim

Was your stable full?

Rom

popps said:

Pawain said:

Lord_Frodo said:

Archangel said:

HOW on earth does a bonded pet disappear!???

Good question.  Another would be
How does a bonded pet not auto stable when logging off?

Does heat of battle effect pets?

Pets do not auto stable when you log off. They go into a nether world. If you die and log off they go into a nether world.  Some may call this nether world auto stable.  But we have no way to know if that pet goes into our stable.  I do not think it does. They return to you when you log back in if you are alive.

@ Rom they can not return things that go poof, or else everyone would have a Castle, rare pets and items going poof every day that need returned.

I swear I had a Blaze Cu out Mr. GM and it just went poof.  You can even see it in my stable on TC....

I swear I had a Blaze Cu out Mr. GM and it just went poof.  You can even see it in my stable on TC....

Well, one would imagine that the game's code was to have LOGs for all characters and items, pets, houses, Ships and whatever else associated with them and in their possession.... after all, when a server crashes, we have sometimes seen the game restore a previously saved game....

Why couldn't then this be also possible for characters and their belongings ?

Sure, it would take work to look into that character's LOG and belongings stored in the LOG but, if code did anticipate this necessity, I do not understand why it could not be done.

Of course, if there is no saved LOG for characters and their belongings in UO then, it is a different story but then, if there were no LOGs saved, how could shards at times be then restored to previous saves ?

There are logs. Everything is an entry in a database table somewhere. If they don't have backup instances they're one outage away from losing all data, so they do. They can easily verify what you did or did not have with an SQL query. I didn't exaggerate or make my loss any more significant than it was, a bonded pet. I feel exactly the opposite of what popps stated should be the case, if you let people's stuff disappear without remedy they will lose faith in the permanence of the game. That's not the type of stuff that customers should tolerate. If I buy a table and when I get home the table falls apart, guess what... I ask for my money back.

McDougle

Here's the problem the TOS clearly state all our stuff is really thier stuff blah legal blah so yeah they can say sorry for your luck chuck. now is that the right thing no is it terrible customer service absolutely.. the current developers seem very out of touch with the players and the fact that it's the permanency that makes UO  uo..

Arnold7

Various discussions I have read concerning these kinds of issues and others involving actions that could be easily verified from game logs indicate UO does not support the kinds of logs you are talking about.  Would be surprised if any kinds of backups exist.  Suspect the UO files on the player’s computer have more verifiable data about the player than UO does on it’s servers.  Suspect UO only plays forward and that’s all it is capable of.  Not a computer programmer or a game designer so I could be all wrong about this but just don’t see any evidence that UO has any backwards capability when it comes to verification or anything else.  

Pawain

They can revert shards. They can not revert individual accounts.

JenniferMarie

I'm confused by the repeated use of "auto-stable".

You either go to an actual stable in a town or to a hitching post, say "Stable" and store your pet. Or you mount your pet (if it can be mounted) and log out. In all my years of playing UO I never once thought "oh, if I log out this bonded pet will just be here whenever I log back in."

And for the record, the publish notes for Publish 111 state: the auto-stable is NOT your stable. (It's a temporary place for bonded pets to go if you forget to stable them when you log out.)

https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish-111/

Pawain

I log off often with a Triton.  It always returns when I log back in.

We do not know the details of this specific pet loss. I don't think it happened because they logged off.

popps

McDougle said:

Here's the problem the TOS clearly state all our stuff is really thier stuff blah legal blah so yeah they can say sorry for your luck chuck. now is that the right thing no is it terrible customer service absolutely.. the current developers seem very out of touch with the players and the fact that it's the permanency that makes UO  uo..

One thing is the TOS, another thing is having Policies which, eventually, may loose customers....

Now, I imagine that businesses are on the market to thrive and prosper and increase their customer base, not see it shrink, and shrink and shrink...

Or am I wrong in my thinking ?

popps

Pawain said:

They can revert shards. They can not revert individual accounts.

But in their reverting a Shard, don't they "also" revert an individual account with all it has in the bank box, character's backpack, House, stables and all that ?

Which leads me necessarily to think, that somewhere in the Shards' Archives that they have and use to revert Shards to a previous save, they "also" have individual accounts comprehensive informations....

It would only be a matter of "extracting" that individual account's information from the Shard's Archive when necessary.... sure, it is work that needs be done, but players do pay their montly subscriptions, don't they ?

The one question to ask, really, is whether the Developers may or not have the ability to "see" a LOG of an individual's account's actions in game.... for example, can they see that account  XYZ "sold", donated or gifted a given item/pet, whatever, that was in possession of the account rather then having it go "poof" for some bug ?

Because, one thing is being able to assess that a given item/pet whatever was in possession at 00:00 on day X of an account and gone at 00:01 on day Y of that same account, another thing is "seeing" how and why that item/pet whatever has been gone.... that is, if from a willing action from that account, or due to a bug....

I think that this might more be the problem here, rather then whether or not individual accounts have an archived database or not...

Unless the Developers can "see" a LOG of all in-game actions of a given account, it is hard to be able to tell whether a missing item/pet or whatever has happened due to a bug, or because it was the account user who disposed voluntarily of that item/pet whatever in possession of their game account....

Personally, I think that it should be a Golden Rule # 1 of Game Design that games should be coded to LOG in any and all characters/accounts in-game actions at any and all times that they are logged, and store them for later retrieval and evaluation whenever needed (this could also come handy to assess whether or not an account may have been using cheats...). Such a practise would save a whole lot of headaches and problems with paying customers in the long run, me thinks.....

keven2002

JenniferMarie said:

I'm confused by the repeated use of "auto-stable".

You either go to an actual stable in a town or to a hitching post, say "Stable" and store your pet. Or you mount your pet (if it can be mounted) and log out. In all my years of playing UO I never once thought "oh, if I log out this bonded pet will just be here whenever I log back in."

And for the record, the publish notes for Publish 111 state: the auto-stable is NOT your stable. (It's a temporary place for bonded pets to go if you forget to stable them when you log out.)

https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish-111/

100%

It's unfortunate but I don't think we have the full details here. Sounds like there were 2 pets out at once? If it's a 5 slot naja as claimed, then this shouldn't be possible so not sure if this person knew (maybe using an exploit) or not so more details would be needed. What it does sound like though is that the OP logged out to "auto-stable" their pet instead of taking an extra 30 seconds to go stable it. 

That's like parking in a fire lane to run inside the store real quick dozens of time without any issue and then one day you come out and you are getting a ticket or being towed; being outraged because you've done it a bunch of times and never had an issue and you were only in there for a few minutes....

As for the GM interaction; they were just sticking to protocol. They aren't allowed to replace things and they can't give you Vet rewards or store items. I understand asking just to see what they say, but then to get mad because they won't give you what you asked for? To the point that curse words are being used, that's an immediate prompt for the GM (or any customer service person) to end the conversation. 

Best bet is to email Mesanna with full details of what happened. If anyone can do something it would be her. That said, I'd probably clear up the "I don't remember" pieces of the story what make it seem suspect. Maybe there wasn't anything shady going on but not being able to provide any real details of what you did to reproduce the issue kind of damages the credibility of what you are claiming.

Seth

I already told them long ago. 

I lost $10, real life money. They don't even refund. Why would they compensate a tamed pet.

https://forum.uo.com/discussion/3101/skeletal-cat-dies-no-ghost

It's not the GM fault, it's the policy.

McDougle

Has any developer returned something in the past? 

LilyGrace

McDougle said:

Has any developer returned something in the past? 

Not that I've ever seen or heard of.

Yoshi

JenniferMarie said:

I'm confused by the repeated use of "auto-stable".

You either go to an actual stable in a town or to a hitching post, say "Stable" and store your pet. Or you mount your pet (if it can be mounted) and log out. In all my years of playing UO I never once thought "oh, if I log out this bonded pet will just be here whenever I log back in."

And for the record, the publish notes for Publish 111 state: the auto-stable is NOT your stable. (It's a temporary place for bonded pets to go if you forget to stable them when you log out.)

https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish-111/

“Mmm this is a tough one,
to the devs credit, they have put more and more and more safeguards in for pets, so much so that people literally don’t even bother stabling them anymore…

@Rom I got the general gist of what happened from your original post, could you tell us exactly what happened, where you left your pet, roughly where you went etc,
while they won’t be able to restore your pet, if I could reproduce the issue it could prevent others from having the same issue.

“