Hi,

Yes, this happened because of a thing that I did. We're looking at our options right now, but there are some other things I have to sort out first today. We'll get back to you!

-Greyscale

PS My player account owned both blueprints, I understand your pain.

So...this thing you did...any chance you can tell us for curiosity's sake? Or is it a secret?

This sort of thing they did was delete them...

you removed Capsules and they were never returned

Mimir Blueprint
/c

I'm a little disappointed with this.

As a collector of this kind of stuff I'd like to see this not happen. ISK as a replacement would not be acceptable. How can you put a price on them?

Long explanation

The good news is that when we do this sort of delete, the server keeps track of the deleted items for a while, and we made a copy of those data last night, so we know who owned what quantity of every deleted type. We don't have any of the information on blueprint research, so any returned blueprints will have "default" values (which I don't see as a huge problem for something that's primarily a collectors' item).

We don't have any of the information on blueprint research, so any returned blueprints will have "default" values.

Does this mean, that any restored Mimir Blueprint will suddenly have 40 new runs on them - thus introducing more ships... being the number of Mimir's in-game is limited to a set amount.

/c

Dear CCP,

Whoever made the decision to start removing items from the game due to them being perceived as useless or unused does not understand the concept of "collector's items". This is a game where certain ingame items become priceless to each individual, be that item a bellydancer, a drone or a scribbled piece of paper.

If it means you get a bunch of free Mimir's Chribba ill gladly take one off your hands. Seeing as how I'm such an awesome OP of this thread <3

o_O they took our snowball launchers too!? YOU BASTARDS!

The goal was not to remove things "perceived as useless or unused", it was to remove things that should never have been in player hands in the first place. There were a fair number of things on the list that were in player hands and were *very clearly* not supposed to be there, which we've since rectified. [ ... ] Overall, we cleared out just over a thousand types and we're still below ten false positives (ignoring the blueprints which were removed unintentionally).

Can you please provide a list of what was removed? I can't get on-line just now but am quite concerned about stuff that may have gone. Aside from mine BPOs, mine BPCs, mines and Capsules, I have quite a few other rare bits and pieces I've collected through the years and I wouldn't want to see them vanish.

Oh, also, please hold off petitioning the GMs about this for now, there's nothing they can do about it because the types literally don't exist on TQ right now. There's nothing in the DB for them to give you.

There is a past been list on Failheap

they are still there.

+ good to hear the mines are making a return!

Sadly no I do not own any blueprint, I was more worried about a potential introduction of more ships - making the current become less rare.

/c

Ho yeah keep loving your useless funky stuff from the past, just like good cave people, please don't evolve and keep wining, cly a little more please mu cup is empty.

So you're fixing mines and adding them back in to be useful...

A good change IMHO *cough*

there goes persistent universe.

Welcome all the new wow in space.

ask someone at CCP that has that ability.

I'll just say it again here:

The "Mining Drone - Improved UNUSED" was never unused. These drones dropped consistently from convoys in 2003 (typically 4-8 at a time) and were erroneously renamed at some point before Revelations expansion. They are absolutely meant to exist and should never have gotten the "UNUSED" tag.

Does this mean, that any restored Mimir Blueprint will suddenly have 40 new runs on them - thus introducing more ships... being the number of Mimir's in-game is limited to a set amount.

/c

Here I was getting all pi55ed about my unique ship collection and mine BPOs... how are you doing Entity? I bet you are livid!

I am not pleased atm...

Hi,

Yes, this happened because of a thing that I did. We're looking at our options right now, but there are some other things I have to sort out first today. We'll get back to you!

-Greyscale

PS My player account owned both blueprints, I understand your pain.

Regardless of how they entered the game (accidental or intentional), they are a part of the game's rich history for better and for worse. They do not harm the game in any way, and are great conversation starters.

Deleting player owned items = Deleting the game's legacy. Don't do it, CCP.

Okay, If you want to know.

This deletion fiasco is genuinely upsetting to me as it undoes the 9 years of work I put into gathering the very rarest of rare items. Upsetting to the point of wondering whether I should continue investing my time in EVE. (cue "can I have your stuff" responses).

I'm firmly believe items should be left alone unless they break the balance of the game. A bunch of drones, implants and other crap that has no measurable effect on the game? Why delete it if they give people joy?

Perhaps it is not the "intended" way of playing the game, but for a game that is supposed to be a sandbox, being a collector is as valid a career as any other player's, and in the end we're all playing the game for fun.

I have items that are literally several orders of magnitude more rare and obscure than any of the stuff that was wiped, and even some (harmless!) stuff that is not meant to be in the game, and I fear for those treasures now.
Regardless of how they entered the game (accidental or intentional), they are a part of the game's rich history for better and for worse. They do not harm the game in any way, and are great conversation starters.

Deleting player owned items = Deleting the game's legacy. Don't do it, CCP.

Deleting player owned items = Deleting the game's legacy. Don't do it, CCP.

Give the guy a break people! It was a mistake.
Im especially confused about the whiney responses from some very famous EVE players.
CCP Greyscale already said that it was going to be fixed, read the thread before moaning. It's another mistake and suddenly everyone breaks down and starts the standard "I hate CCP" bandwagon again.

Why not work with CCP and let them know exactly what you lost and try to assist them in their quest to clear out the database, that way you might get your stuff back faster and you'll be helping rather than just posting rubbish on the forums.

Give the guy a break people! It was a mistake.
Im especially confused about the whiney responses from some very famous EVE players.
CCP Greyscale already said that it was going to be fixed, read the thread before moaning. It's another mistake and suddenly everyone breaks down and starts the standard "I hate CCP" bandwagon again.

Why not work with CCP and let them know exactly what you lost and try to assist them in their quest to clear out the database, that way you might get your stuff back faster and you'll be helping rather than just posting rubbish on the forums.

Give the guy a break people! It was a mistake.
Im especially confused about the whiney responses from some very famous EVE players.
CCP Greyscale already said that it was going to be fixed, read the thread before moaning. It's another mistake and suddenly everyone breaks down and starts the standard "I hate CCP" bandwagon again.

Why not work with CCP and let them know exactly what you lost and try to assist them in their quest to clear out the database, that way you might get your stuff back faster and you'll be helping rather than just posting rubbish on the forums.

Why not work with CCP

CCP should add a new 'signed letter of apology from CCP' to the game and hand them out every time this stuff happens - you know, the kind of thing that rare item collectors would like to have.

Hi,

Yes, this happened because of a thing that I did. We're looking at our options right now, but there are some other things I have to sort out first today. We'll get back to you!

-Greyscale

PS My player account owned both blueprints, I understand your pain.

a tale of lacking peer review, broken referential integrity, CASCADE definitions, ON DELETE triggers, untested production changes, incomplete knowledge, assumptions, avoidable data loss, unnecessary points of no return and untested rollback paths

CCP, what you may see as a usless item that is no longer usable in game is actually a rare piece of the sandbox's history.

Simply deleting these from the game is a crappy thing to do, and to be honest shows a limited understanding of your players and the sandbox nature of the game.

In Eve, where a player makes his own story, many people become collectors of rare items. You (CCP) just broke that.


It was a bad thing to do and you should feel bad!

[
Edit:
You know what is NOT going to happen? Entity is NOT going to take over f****** Delve and Fountain with a full flight of mining drones. It just isn't going down like that. If CCP wanted to "fix" a potential imbalance or or something, it would take virtually nothing to just nerf the specs of whatever they wanted to remove instead. Again, I can't speak for Entity, but I would bet you he wouldn't even care if they did. The thing that makes those items cool is just their history within the context of eve and their rarity, which gives them value. Anyone with their head in the game would know that.

solution, put mines back in just make them disappear if you leave the system.

Regardless of how they entered the game (accidental or intentional), they are a part of the game's rich history for better and for worse. They do not harm the game in any way, and are great conversation starters.

Deleting player owned items = Deleting the game's legacy. Don't do it, CCP.

I've not heard a good argument for anything else beyond those drones and the other mentioned types

Leaving one of these things in the DB because some player has acquired one illicitly

... Leaving one of these things in the DB because some player has acquired one illicitly ...

we have things in the DB that appear to be in game but which nobody can remember *why* they're ingame, is more likely to happen in future.

This is exactly the kind of ongoing problem that we were trying to prevent in the first place with this cleanup.

[quote=Entity]
It also hurts the player's trust in their assets. It makes us feel like any of our stuff can just be disappeared at any time. I feel for people like Entity who've spent years collecting this stuff, and now his goal in the game is directly threatened by this

... We ended up deleting 1031 types, out of a total of 11430...
... We don't do this sort of delete very often...

I take it you never lost a sock in the dryer. I've had items vanish without a trace from my apt with no explainable reason.

EVE is Real! Gäó.

It time CCP acknowledge the collectors of eve and add an actual collectors item class, that cannot be fitted etc.

And whenever you feel you need to "clean up" you just move the item to this new class with no stats thus making the item itself "useless" but still a valid collectors item that can be sold and linked in chat...

I cant see any problem whatsoever with this approach, just drop all stats of the item except the description and change class type to "collectors item"

Posted about this changes month ago here and as always majority finds out when it's too late.

Also I want back my Infested Dominix

Did you find any Villard Wheels among thouse? I've been looking for them since... 2008, i think.

Perhaps CCP can give us a list of whats been deleted

Hi,

Yes, this happened because of a thing that I did. We're looking at our options right now, but there are some other things I have to sort out first today. We'll get back to you!

-Greyscale

PS My player account owned both blueprints, I understand your pain.

The capital hardwiring, for example was the *only* implant of that entire set existing on TQ, and I find it hard to believe that exactly one implant found its way into the game through wholly legitimate means.

Leaving one of these things in the DB because some player has acquired one illicitly means that this exact kind of problem, where we have things in the DB that appear to be in game but which nobody can remember *why* they're ingame, is more likely to happen in future. This is exactly the kind of ongoing problem that we were trying to prevent in the first place with this cleanup.

...or at least compensate me for the loss of unique collectibles.

...or you might just get banned.

Cue articles on every major gaming site in the world. No, I don't quite think they're going to ban me for fighting for my assets/career :P

Were the Creation only skills like Genetic Engineering and Mneumonics that were recently removed part of this clean up?
Are the other rare skillbooks alson in danger of being removed? Like Salvage Drone Operation....

Heh... that sounds like a threat! I like seeing the fire. ...that said, I think you might be getting a bit big for your britches.

How about Mining Drone - UNUSED? Are you telling me that 3B that I've spent to acquire those items have gone to waste?

If you guys really want a piece of history of eve, screen shot all your items and keep those in your computer.

A piece of history of Eve would be the first Quafe T-shirt, a Lego-Nyx, Leviathan dildo and so on. Pixels have no value if they don't belong to you...ho wait, that's exactly what it is !

Total dick move, deleting stuff, which just might make a new list on Cracked if they ever revisit the topic. Saves you what, maybe 100MB of database space at most? That's like blowing your nose before stepping on a scale.

That said, how can Mines truly be a collector item, if BPOs exist, they can still be produced, and due to the way EVE functions (no visible item creation date, serial number, etc) there is no way to tell between a 2003-built mine and a 2012-built one?

I'm from the Empyrean Age timeframe, so mines were unusable when I started.

As far as I can remember the BPO has no build requirements of skills or materials and cannot actually be used to produce mines. It can however be used to produce BPC's.

Incorrect. I had thousands of them in my hanger.

When did you build the mines though?

Fair enough. I only really remember trying to build them on BPC's. I think I may have just assumed it didn't work with the BPO's. I would test it out if i stall had them :P

Testing after/if we get them back may not prove anything either if they mess with them.

If that applies to the copies then I guess my memory has failed me. I guess if they can still be produced then the mines themselves shouldn't be all that rare or worth anything. Id like to think my BPO still held some value though.

Those poor fish dont deserve to die.

At the very least I just want assurance that items that have 1 or more instances owned by players will not be deleted unless they threaten the game balance. I need to be able to go to bed and wake up the next day without having to run my Asset GuardGäó script to check what CCP deleted this time. (some called me paranoid for that, but obviously that script has been vindicated now)

What is this script? Is it something you've released publicly or is it an Entity only script? This has made me think about what else I might loose. I'd love a copy if you don't mind!

Sorry, Entity-only. it's actually set of scripts working together with my collection manager and typedb scanner and it's all pretty rough around the edges, not the most userfriendly stuff ever.
Maybe I'll make a polished version at some point.

Greyscale Gnome's.
They're everywhere!

This is pretty tragic... I held onto some mines for a while. Not sure if I still have them. Either way, removing stuff and then Insinuating negative things about people who held certain items is absurd. Entity has a LONG history with EVE, and I know that he's one of the first people to yell and shout when something breaks or isn't supposed to be there.

Perhaps CCP should research HOW items got into game, maybe even include this history on the showinfo of unique items so that something like this doesn't happen again? I've been a CCP fanboy since 2004 when I started EVE, this isn't the way they're supposed to handle things.

[Edit] This thread would get a lot more exposure if the title was more accurate "CCP deleted items owned by players with no warning, only promises to give some of them back"

Okay, If you want to know.

This deletion fiasco is genuinely upsetting to me as it undoes the 9 years of work I put into gathering the very rarest of rare items. Upsetting to the point of wondering whether I should continue investing my time in EVE. (cue "can I have your stuff" responses).

I'm firmly believe items should be left alone unless they break the balance of the game. A bunch of drones, implants and other crap that has no measurable effect on the game? Why delete it if they give people joy?

Perhaps it is not the "intended" way of playing the game, but for a game that is supposed to be a sandbox, being a collector is as valid a career as any other player's, and in the end we're all playing the game for fun.

I have items that are literally several orders of magnitude more rare and obscure than any of the stuff that was wiped, and even some (harmless!) stuff that is not meant to be in the game, and I fear for those treasures now.
Regardless of how they entered the game (accidental or intentional), they are a part of the game's rich history for better and for worse. They do not harm the game in any way, and are great conversation starters.

Deleting player owned items = Deleting the game's legacy. Don't do it, CCP.

Fittings including non-existent types cause the fitting manager to fail to open properly. They were removed so that you could actually look at your fittings again. (And no, before someone suggests it, we don't want to make our code more complex and harder to maintain and therefore more likely to break just to support the handful of people who want to import invalid fittings for fun.)

I'm going to fix up the name on the Improved drone and put that on the to-replace list too. I've not heard a good argument for anything else beyond those drones and the other mentioned types, though. The capital hardwiring, for example was the *only* implant of that entire set existing on TQ, and I find it hard to believe that exactly one implant found its way into the game through wholly legitimate means. Further, in this particular case, we've deleted *all* the capital hardwirings because we didn't have any intention of releasing them any time soon. Leaving one of these things in the DB because some player has acquired one illicitly means that this exact kind of problem, where we have things in the DB that appear to be in game but which nobody can remember *why* they're ingame, is more likely to happen in future. This is exactly the kind of ongoing problem that we were trying to prevent in the first place with this cleanup.

When will they return?

Hi,

Yes, this happened because of a thing that I did. We're looking at our options right now, but there are some other things I have to sort out first today. We'll get back to you!

-Greyscale

PS My player account owned both blueprints, I understand your pain.

This deletion fiasco is genuinely Upsetting to the point of wondering whether I should continue investing my time in EVE. (cue "can I have your stuff")

Threads like this make me die a little on the inside. Incase all of you raging nutjobs have forgotten, EVE IS A GAME. a f*cking game!! Yea, maybe just blindly deleting a bunch of "Unused" items wasn't the smartest way of handling things, but ffs you are all having a b*tch fit like they stole your house and car keys. Seriously. gtfo of your basement and go enjoy REAL LIFE. Then come back, and you will realize that those pixels aren't really that big of a deal...if your UNUSABLE eve items mean that much to you,you might need to re-evaluate your life...

A concerned citizen of REAL LIFE.

Ok, so.

Bettik and I have been running a cleanup programme on our data over the last six months or so. We cleaned out a lot of internal crud in our data revisioning system before Christmas, Bettik reviewed every type in the game over the holidays to make sure the "published" flag was set correctly in all of them (this governs what's eligible for autolinking and contracts), and in January I went over the same data to try and clean out all the obsolete types sitting around in our system.

The criteria was basically that anything that should never have been legitimately in player possession, wasn't a current testing/GM tool, and wasn't likely to be made available in the immediate future, was flagged for deletion. We ended up deleting 1031 types, out of a total of 11430.

Out of these ~1k types, there are nine that I'm now looking at as candidates for restoration: the four mines, their blueprints, and obviously the Mimir blueprint. The Mimir was a straight-up mistake; the mines I'd flagged for deletion based on the (mistaken) assumption that we'd removed the actual mines themselves years ago and only the blueprints were in circulation, and it seems that when you delete a type, it also (sensibly, in retrospect) deletes the type's blueprint.

The good news is that when we do this sort of delete, the server keeps track of the deleted items for a while, and we made a copy of those data last night, so we know who owned what quantity of every deleted type. We don't have any of the information on blueprint research, so any returned blueprints will have "default" values (which I don't see as a huge problem for something that's primarily a collectors' item).

We don't do this sort of delete very often (as you can probably guess from how many types we caught in this sweep); there is a process for getting them reintroduced, but we have a few technical cobwebs to clean out of it before we can make use of it, and at this point in time I can't 100% guarantee that this will work properly. We are however actively pursuing reinstatement of the abovementioned items, and we'll keep you updated on our progress. I'm hoping to have this sorted in the next couple of weeks; normally I'd say "within a week" but fanfest next week makes all our estimates a little less predictable right now. In the meantime, contracts containing these items are likely to have issues, but otherwise things should continue to work normally.

I am not happy. My mine BPO's had quite a lot of research on them.

You clearly missed the point. Restoring the items is good, but doesn't help much restoring trust in that CCP isn't going to silently baleet player assets in the future. And last I checked the whole point of forums is to voice ones opinion and concerns.
Of course I fully acknowledge it's CCP's game to do with as they pl..... oh wait :lolincarna:

But fair enough, one guy's legitimate grievance is another guy's whining I guess. yay, forums.

At least Greyscale is honest and come clean about this.

But I agree, a) they should not delete parts of the games history b) having a single person (with the help of another) being fully in charge of deleting stuff from the database is beyond disturbing, and does not give much trust at all that he can just remove whatever he wants to, that quick/easily.

He came clean in a thread called "Anaconda and Python mine bpo's missing".
Entitys thread was called "CCP - Perfectly working legacy items deleted ?! " but the dev felt the Anaconda and Python thread would be better. Okay it was frist, but the title is all wrong.

On top of that they have said in tthe past that forums do not count as official.

I havent received an ingame evemail telling me that some of my items were deleted either. With OTHER things they have done in the past I have received generic evemails from "The Team"..

It's a bit like fessing up to a crackhead that you killed a police officer.
Or telling your priest that your porking your neighbour.
Yea, It's coming clean.... Just on the quiet.

Dear CCP Greyscale

Before everything, please do not take me personal.
That said, fitting problem with the non-existent items is a poorly excuse to remove the itens. Simply unfit the item, let it at player hangar. If he fit it and his fitting windows crash, he will know the reason. Fitting windows problem is not an excuse to remove items, sincerely.

He came clean in a thread called "Anaconda and Python mine bpo's missing".
Entitys thread was called "CCP - Perfectly working legacy items deleted ?! " but the dev felt the Anaconda and Python thread would be better. Okay it was frist, but the title is all wrong.

On top of that they have said in tthe past that forums do not count as official.

I havent received an ingame evemail telling me that some of my items were deleted either. With OTHER things they have done in the past I have received generic evemails from "The Team"..

It's a bit like fessing up to a crackhead that you killed a police officer.
Or telling your priest that your porking your neighbour.
Yea, It's coming clean.... Just on the quiet.

Not going away...Answers...now...

RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE

Threads like this make me die a little on the inside. Incase all of you raging nutjobs have forgotten, EVE IS A GAME. a f*cking game!! Yea, maybe just blindly deleting a bunch of "Unused" items wasn't the smartest way of handling things, but ffs you are all having a b*tch fit like they stole your house and car keys. Seriously. gtfo of your basement and go enjoy REAL LIFE. Then come back, and you will realize that those pixels aren't really that big of a deal...if your UNUSABLE eve items mean that much to you,you might need to re-evaluate your life...

A concerned citizen of REAL LIFE.

I wrote this a week ago & held back on posting it because it sounded like our items were going to be restored quickly. As it has instead been swept under the rug, I hope this will bring focus to what is really at issue here. Please excuse the ::WALLOFTEXT::



Collecting as a Profession.

someone at CCP that has that ability.

Hopefully my Jovian Ambassadors body parts are still in my hanger (bone splinters and such)... I'd like to hang onto them

Good that both are coming back.
Can someone explain and remind me why don't we have them mimes anymore?

It sounds very posh to have a bunch of mines dumped on the gate while being chased by the mob.

Thanks for taking our rare collectibles. We appreciate it :(.

I had the mine bpos several snowball launchers etc all wiped out and no isk won't make up for it.

Maybe give them back as "Disabled Mines" or some such? Just saying...

Hell they could label anything that has instances in the game but is unused with the [Collector's Edition] flag, or something equally pseudo-clever, so that these items are easily recognizable for that they are by both dev and player. Would prevent this kind of nonsense in the future too.

I do hope we're getting these back still...

I wrote this a week ago & held back on posting it because it sounded like our items were going to be restored quickly. As it has instead been swept under the rug, I hope this will bring focus to what is really at issue here. Please excuse the ::WALLOFTEXT::.

Great points here.

Do not matter if the item come to TQ because of some mistake/misbehave of a CCP employee, that items were acquired by legal game player and we should never be stolen from us.