QUESTION
I have lost items, can they be replaced?
ANSWER
Our in-game support staff are not able to trace or reimburse lost items. We apologize that this can be inconvenient, however tracing lost items simply is not possible with our current volume of items and limited tracking ability. We understand that items are extremely important to our players. Collecting, trading and using them are a very big part of Ultima Online. That being said, it is possible to lose an item from time to time.
The item loss is typically related to a game error, or a connection issue. In both cases our in-game support staff (GM’s) are not able to trace these items, which means we are not able to reimburse for the loss of the item. Without being able to verify how an item, stat, or skill was lost. A GM simply cannot make the decision to replace it for you, and we ask that you do not ask a GM do to so.
Your characters and items are stored on our servers, along with those of every other player. This is a necessity of a persistent world. We try to keep data loss to a minimum, however there are going to be occasional crashes or downtimes when data loss or "time warps" can and will occur. This is perhaps the most difficult situation for a Game Master to address, as they have no means to verify that you had the item, nor can they tell what may have happened to it. GM's are often asked to "look at the backup" and verify the item, stats, skills, etc.
Game Masters do not have access to the backups. There are literally gigs of data in a backup, and it is not feasible for any member of our staff to search this data for every player that requests it. Even if we could, this would only show us if the item did exist at one time, and not what happened to it. Without being able to verify how an item, stat, or skill was lost, a GM simply cannot make the decision to replace it for you, and we ask that you do not ask a GM do to so.
If you lost anything due to a bug in the game, please try to recall the events preceding the loss, and report everything you can about the loss and the circumstances to our QA team. You can do this by submitting the form at
http://www.uo.com/mailBug.html , and our QA team will do their best to recreate the situation and verify the results in a test environment. This information, if verified, would then be passed along to the Development team for resolution. While this will not get your lost items back, it may help us to prevent this situation happening to yourself or other players in the future, making Ultima Online a better world for all our players.
Finally, we do ask that you respect the Terms of Service (
http://www.uo.com/agreement.html ) which you agreed to at the time you created your account with us. This agreement clearly states that use of the service and the software is at your sole risk, and that we assume no responsibility for any damages suffered by you, including, but not limited to, loss of data, items or characters. While we do sympathize with your losses in the game, we must respectfully request that you take our limitations and current technological capabilities into consideration in this matter.