Restoring lost items...

[pjw]

Perhaps this has been discussed before, but this thead http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=289909 makes me wonder that it has not yet been addressed.

Over time, I have lost a few items. Lost in the mail, just plain disappeared, and I am sure some were mistakenly sold.

Not once has an in-game GM been able to tell me what happened, where it went, or most importantly, restore it to me.

The severity of cases can perhaps be measured based on player pain. Based on the ones I have experienced or have heard of, I would say a rough ordering would be:

1. Losing whole bags of shroud ingredients.
2. Losing green steel weapons (like a mini-shroud bag)
3. Losing bound raid gear
4. Losing extremely rare weapns (WoP rapier)
5. Losing good, but not-quite vendor trash. Twink gear, that kind of stuff.

The questions are, what can be done about these? And what are the consequences?

Firstly, the consequences of inaction are deeply distressed players faced with the necessity of grinding for something they have already done the work for, combined with the possibility of rage-quitting, or at least taking a break from the game.

The possible consequences of replacing the items are that there may be some exploit (verification is required) and it may take a lot of time for the GMs.

So what can be done?

First I am going to make some simple assumptions based on my experience with software development. They may be invalid assumptions, but if they are, it should also be fairly easy to make them valid with some minor tweaks.

Assumptions

1. All non-stackable items in game have a unique ID. Even vendor trash from level 1 quests. ie. the +1 Dagger of Deception if get from Garrisons Missing pack has some large number as it's unique ID. The item IDs showing in myddo suggest this is the case.

2. Stackable items will have a type ID (eg. Large Scales) and a counter; each stack will have a unique ID as well as per #1.

3. There is a mechanism for automatically logging transactions on items (sale, destruction, trade, and in the case of stacks the operations would include 'combine', 'put in bag'). The dialogs with GMs in the thread above suggests this is likely to be true.

4. The complete history for items is archived, perhaps to a separate database. May not be the case; easy to implement.

Solution #1

(a) Add an 'Item History' panel to all vendors (or myddo) that will display all item transactions for items destroyed, traded (edit: also, received, mailed etc) or sold by your character for some reasonable period. Allow a player to retrieve up to 1 destroyed/sold item per day; more than that would require a support request and a GM. In the case on trades, they would at least know who they gave it to, and might help in the case of hacked accounts.

This will deal with player mistakes; seliing stuff, dropping it etc that may be missed via the buy-back option. Worst-case scenario for a sold non-bound item would be:

- sold to vendor at <time>
- purchased by another player at <time>

(b) Give GMs a 'Stocktake' ability; this will automatically reconcile the characters current inventory with the history of items they have owned. If an items history shows that it is currently owned by the player, but it can not be found instantiated in the game, or can be found, but does not match it's transaction history, then the GM should be able to restore it to that player.

This should solve all the problems listed above.


Solution #2 (Partial)

If #1 sounds like too much work, then only apply a minimal history keeping requirement to BtA and BtC items. These can never be traded, are going to be sold less often and are in much smaller quantity in the game.

This would solve the problem for raid and GS items, at least.

Conclusion

The key here is to reduce player pain while also avoiding exploits and not substantially increasing the load on GMs. I believe that Solution #1 would achieve this.