Downtime Compensation

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When I started up Trove yesterday I was asked to log in to my Glyph account. Since I play through Steam, this isn’t something I’ve had to do in a very long time. So I went through the process of changing my password and logged back in. I was asked if I wanted to link the account to steam, this was odd, the account had been linked to steam for years. When I clicked yes I got an error that it couldn’t be linked at this time. So I logged in again and skipped the linking and hoped I was logging in to the right account.

When I got into the game the general chat was full of people complaining about downtime. Apparently, the server had been down for the better part of a day. This is a very common occurrence in Trove. The server performance and uptime have long been a meme among the player base. If you’re not rubber banding, getting kicked out of the client, or crashing, you’re not getting the full Trove experience.

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The one thing Trove has always been good about is providing compensation for when the game is offline or generally bugged. A few months ago the leaderboards were broken for weeks and there was a decent compensation for it. Trove seems to have server outages every few months always with compensation to be doled out. Yesterday, we were given a 1-day patron pass, a Streamer Dream box(special ally/mounts), and 6 lustrous gem boxes (upgrade materials).

Players aren’t always happy with the rewards. Some argue that a few loot boxes and a bit of patron aren’t worth missing a day in the game. Other’s want more, usually in the form of a golden dragon effigy (a free dragon). While I think it’s nice that we’ve come to expect something when the servers go down, I’d much rather have more stable servers.

I don’t think I’ve played other games that handed out items for downtime. I remember playing a few games that had entire server role backs and just continued on as normal. Are there other games that give out compensation for downtime? Maybe other games just don’t go down enough to actually notice it.

4 thoughts on “Downtime Compensation

  1. Naithin August 22, 2019 / 7:20 am

    For significant downtime, I’ve played MMOs that have compensated the players.

    WoW and Asheron’s Call tended to reward in additional subscribed days if they had issues of significant length, but I don’t even remember the last time WoW actually had to do it. Might have been as far back as Wrath.

    BDO compensated players too, more akin to how it sounds Trove does it, with item boxes and other special rewards.

    So yup, there is definitely precedent for it!

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    • Kluwes August 23, 2019 / 12:29 pm

      I didn’t consider subscription games going down for periods of time. It definitely makes sense to give players those days they missed.

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  2. Rakuno August 22, 2019 / 9:45 am

    Hm. I don’t recall any specific instance with MMOs but I believe there were some that gave a free subscription day as compensation for the downtime.

    The only other specific instance I can think of is Azur Lane, a mobile game. They tend to give coins, fuel and some cubes (to summon ship characters) as compensation for server maintenance, even if it is just a regular server maintenance.

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