So let me tell you a story. It’s a story about an online gaming company that had major problems with its servers last weekend. Players lost currency, rep, and other rewards. And just a few days later, the studio responsible explained what was doing on, apologized, and offered quite a bit of compensation to players affected.
And that game’s name? Abraham Lincoln. No, it was Sea of Thieves. Rare posted its apology to Twitter this morning:
“After investigation, this data has proved to be unrecoverable. We apologise to those of you who were impacted by this and we are now preparing to compensate all players who launched Sea of Thieves between July 15th 00:00 UTC and July 21st 00:00 UTC. All players who launched Sea of Thieves between the times stated in the above tweet will receive a bundle of 60,000 gold and 200 Doubloons. Unfortunately due to the loss of data, any progress made in Tall Tales, Daily Events, Commendations etc. cannot be compensated for. Compensation will be rolled out today directly to player accounts although it may not appear immediately, so please allow up to 72 hours for us to complete the distribution process.”
Huh, that’s weird – this story has a lot of parallels to another story we’ve been talking about this week, only that story is on day nine of barely any communication at all, let alone apologies or compensation. Real head-scratcher there since apparently community management is indeed still possible, as Rare’s shown.
