Kabam! Facebook gamers fume after script deletes fake stuff
Anatomy of a social snafu
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
On August 4, Kabam turned up in The Los Angeles Times, lauded as a small social gaming company "quietly gaining momentum" in an arena dominated by giants like Zynga, Electronic Arts, and Disney. But that same day, engineers pushed out an update to one of its massively multiplayer Facebook games that would challenge the tiny startup's ability to cope with its own success.
With its update to Kingdoms of Camelot – a Facebook game that has 2 million active users – Kabam inadvertently introduced a bug that allowed players to gift each other virtual goods for which they would ordinarily have to pay (real) dollars. The following morning, the company realized that tens of thousands of players were creating an "astronomical" number of these digital game pieces, causing a kind of power imbalance across its virtual world. So, Kabam's engineers wrote a script to remove these illegitimate items.
The trouble is that the script also removed legitimate paid-for items from the accounts of an estimated 70,000 players, and the company is still struggling to appease an army of angry customers.
The snafu led to hundreds of complaints on the company's discussions forums, and nearly 3,500 people have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of the game.
Speaking with The Register, a Kabam spokesman acknowledged that the company made a mistake when its script removed legitimate items from accounts, but he said that this happened in error and that Kabam has spent the last six days working to restore the items in question – and then some. "We made a mistake and we're trying to rectify that," he said. "It's been tricky, but we're doing our best.'
According to the spokesman, in addition to the script removing legitimate items from the accounts of about 70,000 players, a "separate but related" problem involving a backup system affected additional players. He said that the company is working to restore the inventory of all these players, but also to compensate others who were playing the game at the time and thus were affected by the imbalance in play caused by the original update. This involves providing them a "high value" virtual item.
The spokesman says that the company pushed out an update to restore inventories and that it's also responding to emails, voicemails, and forum posts from individual users complaining about the state of their accounts. He estimates that the accounts of 95 per cent of the affected users have been restored, but he acknowledges that "some people are still unhappy".
Indeed they are. Rob Shepherd, a longtime Kings of Camelot player based in the UK, tells The Register that although Kabam has responded to his support ticket to say that his inventory has been restored, his missing items are still missing, and others continue to complain in the public forums. Shepherd and two other longtime players – Karin Franklin and Lise Broer – tell us that the Kings of Camelot community had already built up an ample amount of resentment for Kabam's engineering and customer support practices.
"My own inventory was restored correctly, but there are people on my team who are still missing paid inventory. These are people who went pretty deep into their pockets during a recession," Broer tells us.
"Kabam has cultivated the top of the gaming market at a social networking site," he said. "And the company did a lot of smart things with this game, but they have also delivered a buggy product whose customer support is consistently below industry norms...Basically, a lot of people resent this company for continually escalating the cost of competitive play at a flawed product. The dam burst when Kabam confiscated inventories."
In recent weeks, Kabam has also received heat from a competitor, Kixeye, which accuses the company of blatantly copying one its social games and threatens a lawsuit. Kabam denies the accusation, and it just released the game in question, Edgeworld, on both Facebook and the brand new Google+ gaming platform. After attracting 2 million users to Kingdoms of Camelot, the company launched three other massively multi-player Facebook games, and Edgeworld makes a fourth.
Indeed, momentum can build quite quickly for a small company building games atop Facebook. But for at least some playing Kingdoms of Camelot, it can build too quickly. ®
COMMENTS
Meh
Maybe this will teach people a lesson about spending real money on fake stuff!
Moral of this story:
Don't get too attached to your virtual property in online games. If either you or the game operator are hacked, it can disappear, and the game operator has no obligation to reimburse you. It says so in the Terms and Conditions that you must click "I agree" to before you can play the game.
I learned this the hard way after I played World of Warcraft for 2 years. I tried to log in one day, to be told that "suspicious activity has been detected on your account, and therefore your account has been suspended for 24 hours". My immediate reaction was to run every security check I could think of on my laptop. I found nothing at all.
I tried to contact Blizzard, but the 24-hour block included posting anything on their forums (no, they don't advertise an e-mail address). There was a web page which allowed me to directly appeal the ban, but it required me to enter the answer to my "secret question". It wouldn't tell me what my secret question was, and after 2 years I couldn't remember (mother's maiden name? first school? preferred breed of sheep?).
When the ban expired I was able to log in again. My 2 level 70 characters (the level cap had just recently risen to 75) were still there, but all their equipment, money and possesions were gone. The 6 or 7 lower-level characters had simply been deleted. Nearly all of my virtual possessions were held on these characters. About a week later, Blizzard restored the armour and weapons of my 2 level 70 characters.
I spent about 2 months trying to talk to Blizzard about what had happened, without eliciting a single human response (it was still possible that the security breach was at my end, but I needed the co-operation of Blizzard to help me track it down). Eventually, I cancelled my account and deleted my remaining characters out of sheer annoyance.
I would love to play WoW again, and I will do so when it has fallen so far out of fashion that Activision sell it to someone else, who might value existing customers over new ones, and employ some semblance of honesty in their customer service.
Of course we all have
If you'd stop stop being pednatic for a moment you'd realise that comment should've read "don't spend real on fake dross on a sketchy platform like Facebook, much as an yet more sketchy third party", it just doen't have quite the same ring to it
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
