We've all lost an item in an MMO and petitioned, knowing that if someone could just look at the circumstances surrounding the incident we'd get it back. PotBS players have the same problem, and Misha has a look at what happens when they get a request like this.

I spend most of my day dealing with support incidents along those lines. Everyone has a good reason why their particular claim is worthy. On the one hand, we should reimburse anything anyone wants. It’s a matter of customer goodwill. If you’re frustrated and angry and feel cheated, then we have a very undesirable situation on our hands. Our goal is NEVER to make you feel cheated. Certainly you should expect some loss – it’s a game: you win some, you lose some. But loss and cheated are different and cheated isn’t an experience you should have in the game.

It's a great look at the circumstances CSR's deal with in every game, when a loss of some sort is petitioned. Read on for the rest!

On the other hand, there are a number of reasons we can’t reimburse everyone everything regardless of the circumstances. For example, if you’re in a battle with another player and they pull their network cable, they shouldn’t immediately disappear and avoid being sunk. So they don’t – their ship remains in the zone until they’re out of combat or for 2 minutes. If they then claim they had a network disconnect and the ship that you sunk as it remained in the zone should be reimbursed, that’s an exploit. You now have a ship (if you’re a pirate) or at least the rewards for winning the fight AND he has the ship also. Suddenly, you can farm CSRs for first rates. That would be an untenable situation for the game for many reasons including economic and gameplay balance issues. Plus we just wouldn’t be able to staff the necessary CSRs to manage all those reimbursements.

So we have to draw a line somewhere. But where? Trust me when I say we’ve spent man-years debating the answers to that question. And, even though we have relatively solid policies in place, we re-debate the question daily. As a matter of fact, I have a meeting tomorrow to discuss it some more.

In general terms, if we believe the loss was due to a problem on our end, we reimburse. Otherwise, we don’t. For example, several players have experienced the bug where commendation turn-ins had no result. They didn’t receive what they “bought” but they did lose the commendation. In this case, we reimburse the commendations – this is a bug in our game.

As another example, if you experience a network disconnect and somehow lose your ship before you’re able to return to the game, we don’t reimburse. We can’t be responsible for flakiness in your wireless setup, your router, your ISP, or whatever.

Other situations are not so clear-cut. Something happens in the game that you don’t understand and you’re sure it’s a bug or an exploit or such and that you should be reimbursed in some way. But you don’t supply a clear description, logs, or screenshots (or you do but they don’t show us anything useful). We log in to your character and/or the character(s) of your enemy. We check our logs and other data. We’re unable to determine exactly what happened for sure. We may have theories but no way to prove/disprove them. We tend not to reimburse in these situations, but we spend a LOT of time and energy trying to figure out what could have happened before making the call. But sometimes we do reimburse in that situation. It all depends on a number of factors and generally there are three or more people involved in making the final decision.

Sadly, we have at times been very slow to respond to these. We have enough reports and they’re complicated enough to track down that it has been a week or more in several situations before we’ve returned with an answer. This makes the whole situation even more frustrating for all of us. You’re understandably angry that it took so long. And, particularly in situations where it’s not so clear-cut, we feel worse having made you wait for the answer you didn’t want to hear.

In any case – reimburse or not – comparing your situation to someone else is not generally helpful. We don’t discuss between players the specifics of incidents and we don’t always tell you everything we know. So we reimburse your friend but we don’t reimburse you “for the exact same situation.” Trust us; it was in some way not the same situation. At least not according to our data.

How will the implementation of insurance in 1.5 change our policy? In general principle, it will remain the same. However, now the game will do the reimbursing and CSRs will spend much less time on these incidents. You had a network disconnect? We’re still not responsible for loss caused by your roommate using the microwave near your wireless router during your port battle. But you received an insurance payment so you didn’t suffer the same loss as in 1.4. You experienced an actual bug that in some way caused you to lose your ship? You’ve already been reimbursed – you received insurance – but now we can spend more time trying to find and fix the bug and less time trying to figure out exactly what to reimburse you. There will continue to be exceptions – insurance doesn’t cover everything so that commendation bug is still a CSR hit. But insurance coupled with several of the 1.5 bug fixes should make the whole process faster and easier on all of us.