The Escapist is reporting that the developers behind the Japanese MMO game M2 are shutting the game down because they accidentally deleted everyones account during server maintenance and they didn’t back it up.
On Oct 21st, the servers were taken offline due to a “critical issue” with one of the games’s main servers and while trying to fix it, someone accidentally hit the big red button that said delete.
Neither Hangame nor Sankando, the original developer, could restore the game data so the game was shut down. While I’m sure nearly all players are upset they lost their accounts and time, the most upset are the ones that spent money to buy in-games items. Hangame however did say they will provide conditional refunds to certain players.
Pretty insane to think a MMO developer wouldn’t have multiple backups of players game accounts. I’d say maybe this was an excuse for them to shut the game down if they were losing money, but this also completely ruins their name. If I was a player, I’d never even think about playing another MMO from either of those two development studios.
That sucks. Im sure the devs arent happy about it either.
If anybody enjoyed the game they should look forward to the next one they do or if they can fix up M2 and just start over.
They could have used any excuse to shut down without just deleting everybodys accounts.
Every company has made mistakes throughout their existence.
Every company makes mistakes, but what company DOESN’T take incremental and full backups of both their user accounts and their data a as a whole?
The problem often is that they THOUGHT they were taking backups, but when they went to get them they discovered the backup process was hosed. By then it was too late.
A proper backup process includes periodically verifying that the backups really are backups.
I’m just saying this, the only company who has extensive daily backups are blizzard, ncsoft and Eve Online (a few others like entropia universe too).
Most companies don’t, and I’d say the majority of F2P companies only backup before major updates. If a disaster happened to the servers of your favorite f2p mmo, you can either wait for rollback to a few weeks into the past or lose your account.
Words for someone who worked for a major f2p publishers.