We play on Official Small Tribes. Like much of the player base we were affected by yesterday's character deletion and rollbacks. All of the members of our tribe had their character deleted. Our server was also rolled back 2 real life days. We had just finished building our new base and moving all of our assets over into it. The rollback put us back into the middle of this transition with very minimal defenses up. We spent the last two days grinding out to get all of our defenses up and running, but the 2 day rollback eliminated all of that. We also had no way of logging into our tribe since all of our characters were deleted. So we had no way of defending our base or even a way of putting defenses up.
Today our base was wiped. We lost months’ worth of work and assets with literally no way of doing anything about it. People unaffected by the negative results of this patch are free to transfer from server to server wiping out any tribe that is unable to even login to their characters. The repercussions of this massive mistake are particularly dire to players on Small Tribes.
There is no way to sugar coat this, but whoever is responsible for the loss of the production data (characters, server save states) should be fired. I have never witnessed such a blatant disregard for standard operating procedures in handling production data. At the very least thousands of characters were deleted and tens of thousands of hours of collective progress wiped out in an instant because a group of developers working for a major development studio have no idea how a basic software development lifecycle works. It is crystal clear that no testing of any kind was performed before pushing out this update. They had absolutely no plan for a backout if the update failed or produced unexpected results. (What would be the expected results if you don't perform any testing?). They still have even yet to respond to any of our tickets to restore our characters or address the server rollback.
How do you expect people to play a progression based game when absolutely no effort is put into preserving progression (or even characters)?