Spiral Knights - Accidentally sold items

Accidentally sold items

20 replies [Last post]

Thu, 07/14/2011 - 19:45

Senshi

Legacy Username

Okay, so, a -lot- of things suck about the interfaces in spiral knights and many players can't figure out the auction house, don't understand why their first crafting won't work and why they can't put their vendor or AH bought item into a recipe, etc, etc. They also accidentally sell things to Basil or Kozma when they try to re-equip but still have the trade window open.

Well, when support used to undo such accidental sales that was fine, but as support is now telling people (at least one of my guildmates, anyway) that transactions cannot be reversed period, check the window next time... wtf.

First of all, why can you sell things to Basil -anyway-? Who wants to sell anything to Basil?
Well, maybe someone does, and as much as I hate the durn things, this might be an ideal time for a 'do you REALLY want to sell your bestest 5* sword to Basil for far less than it will take to recraft it?' pop-up question. Or you could just turn off selling things to Basil. I know you can, because you can buy but not sell with Brinks.

Also, everyone, doublecheck when at the terminal, there's no safety net anymore no matter what testimony people have posted in the past. This ain't the old Three Rings anymore.

Thu, 07/14/2011 - 19:58

Metaphysic

Legacy Username

People sell things to the

People sell things to the vendor all the time. Haze bombs are generally vendored rather than put on the AH. Players who don't need Vanaduke tokens also vendor the 5 star gear from there.

In order to accidentally sell something to a vendor, it needs to be un-equipped. You then need to go into your inventory, click on the item to equip it, not notice it didn't give you an option to equip it and that it didn't light up, drag your mouse down to the confirm button and click that as well.

As much as it sucks that you accidentally sold your best 5* weapon to the vendor, it's not exactly an easy process if you're paying even the slightest amount of attention. I imagine that the reason they won't restore gear is that the data to confirm the legitimacy of the claim isn't easily accessible.

Thu, 07/14/2011 - 20:17

Algol-Sixty

In order to accidentally sell

A more likely set of events: When you click on Basil, your arsenal window pops up. Accidentally clicking on a sword will put it in the "trade" box. Not recognizing that it is even possible to sell to basil, you gloss over the fact that there is a sword in the box, you then click on a recipe, and hit "confirm".

Selling things to vendors is not an obvious thing. I played for weeks before I heard about it on a forum post, went to see which vendor it was that could buy stuff from, couldn't find any since I was expecting a different kind of vendor, much like the sword vendor vs recipe vendor, etc. It was another couple of day before I found how exactly to do it.

The UI for this is bad. Instead, only allow one type of transaction at a time and have radio buttons for "buy" vs "sell" to select what you want to do would be much clearer. Not only would it save mistakes, but it would make it much more obvious that selling is even possibly.

Thu, 07/14/2011 - 20:23

Senshi

Legacy Username

@metaphysic

People sell things to the vendors in haven all the time. Not to Basil at the terminal. That was my point about disabling sales with basil in particular.

Also, it wasn't me that made the accidental sale although I have come very close to doing so and am not surprised that it happens fairly regularly... you click your weapon, it doesn't give you the equip option. You click 'confirm' to close the vendor dialog like you always do after deciding not to buy a recipe... unless you notice the item that has appeared in the other side of the interface (the side that many people don't know what is actually for, witness the surprise expressed by a number of players in the forums when learning for the first time, often after being 5* geared and quite experienced... that you can -sell- things to vendors! Yes, yes you can.)

Is clicking 'confirm' when you really mean 'close' a bad habit? Yes..... clicking cancel might be a better habit. Until you've had a bad experience, how do you know it's a bad habit?

If it was more like a traditional dialog, the 'confirm' would be dimmed and you'd -have- to click cancel to leave without performing any transaction and nobody would get into the habit of 'confirming' a non-transaction. But they willfully decided -not- to follow UI norms, and then decided -not- to remedy the habits they encouraged by that by -not- taking action when a support request came in from a user error that their bad UI design encourages.

(PS: I like wrs's more revolutionary revision of the trade interface even better!)

Thu, 07/14/2011 - 23:26

Flists

I have never clicked

I have never clicked "confirm" to close the vendor window, and it never even occurred to me that you could CLOSE a window by clicking "confirm". It does seem kind of stupid that it's an option, but it also seems strange to me that somebody would think to try it, then keep on doing it...

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 05:06

Metaphysic

Legacy Username

So I decided to look into

So I decided to look into your rather bizarre scenario. Here's a screenshot of a vendor: http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/4313/screenpn.jpg

You cannot click confirm to close the window unless there's something already in the window.
There is no cancel button. You can either confirm or empty the trade window.
If you want to close the vendor window you must either confirm the buy, click on one of the two X's in the top right of the windows, or hit escape.

Look, it sucks if someone accidentally vendors some gear that they plan to keep. Unfortunately, there's no fix for stupid.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 05:54

Bigindian

Sorry for your loss. Next

Sorry for your loss.

I really, really don't like the fact you cannot sell your bound 5* stuff to AH but you can sell it for nothing to some NPC by clicking a button. Wth is up with that logic?

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 06:39

jooozek

Legacy Username

I sell stuff sometimes when

I sell stuff sometimes when im at terminal and in need of those few crowns that i need to buy my energy with.

Protip: don't drink before playing.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 09:02

Myou

Legacy Username

Wasn't Drinking

I know the guildmate Senshi is talking about...as they are my guildmate as well. They were sober BEFORE the sell...but not so much after OOO told them they couldnt reverse the sale. This seems completely illogial to me honestly.

Most online companies have a 1 time policy with "mistake NPC" transactions. The GMs (or equivilant) look at the request, ask you a few questions about what happened, take the game money you got from the NPC back and give you the item, THEN tell you not to do it again. This idea that they wont even give you a one time buy back for a mistake is truely bad customer service, or sounds like the individual who recieved the request just didnt want to do their job.

Hopefully OOO reps will read this and at least TRY to make things right in some fashion. If not then it will be up to players to support players when BAD game design gets in the way of a good time.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 09:34

Aesthierinne

Legacy Username

Sorry about what happened,

Sorry about what happened, but insulting the game by calling it "BAD game design" won't make things better. That's not exactly a way of getting on someone's good side.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 09:39

#10

Sillty

"Sorry about what happened,

"Sorry about what happened, but insulting the game by calling it "BAD game design" won't make things better. That's not exactly a way of getting on someone's good side."

So now we have to get on OOO's "good side" to get decent customer service? And everyone else can just go to the place bad people go when they die?

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 09:54

#11

Aesthierinne

Legacy Username

Am I your enemy? Relax. The

Am I your enemy? Relax. The world isn't coming to an end tomorrow.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 10:39

#12

Facejuances

"but as support is now telling people (at least one of my guildmates, anyway) that transactions cannot be reversed period, check the window next time... wtf."

To be fair, support staff has no way to know you are telling the thruth when you tell them you lost X item.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 10:43

#13

Madadder

this is more of a matter of

this is more of a matter of ineptitude on the player than the fault of OOO i figured out most of the interface on both npc venders and the AH in a few mins

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 11:14

#14

Notbob

I wasn't going to comment,

I wasn't going to comment, because my experience with airing issues in this game in the forums usually breaks down to 1/3 agree, 1/3 disagree (usually with insults), and 1/3 haven't had the experience but feel the need to comment anyway (often with insults). This is never actually constructive.

But here's the thing, the person that this happened to is my wife (and guildmate, along with Senshi and Myou who have posted above), and she is not stupid nor was she drunk, despite all they very lovely and supportive comments that posters have already made.

So here's what happened, and it's pretty simple. She and Senshi were at Basil, and she had the interface open in order to see if anyone in the guild needed any of the recipes that were available, and had it left open in order to answer any questions. In the meantime she wanted to change equipment for the next set of levels, which included a 5* sword. When it didn't equip she went to close the Basil interface, not realizing that clicking on the sword had put it up for sale (most people don't realize you can sell items to vendors). When she went to close Basil, she happened to click confirm instead of cancel, out of habit when dealing with Basil, not knowing that she was selling the sword.

Once she realized what had happened, she was very upset, and angry when there was no way to fix this, but more on that below.

You can make all the snarky comments you want, go ahead, people already have and always will. My favorite is "there's no fix for stupid". I sincerely hope that next time you do something by accident or because of odd interfaces that you get exactly the same sort of response from people (note my breakdown of all comments at the start of this post).

As a response to this:
"To be fair, support staff has no way to know you are telling the thruth [sic] when you tell them you lost X item."

Once the accidental trade went through, we sent an immediate support request, basically explaining what happened and asking for the sword (no UVs on it if that helps you in some way) to be returned and the crowns taken away. It seems that "reverse a transaction with an NPC by returning an item and subtracting the crowns" would be a simple thing to do. If telling the truth is an issue, then the GM can ask a few questions. I can't imagine that too many people would be trying to cheat in this fashion.

The response came back pretty quick, but it basically said "Sorry, I'm not going to do anything. Be more careful the future. Sorry for the inconvenience." (That last line was our favorite, BTW, such PR bull.)

There have been issues in the past where people have lost items for one reason or another, and they have managed to be returned by someone involved in maintaining the game, so it seems that there is some way of fixing this. To be told, very quickly, "no, go away" wasn't very helpful. If it was a no with some sort of better explanation as to why items have been returned in the past, but couldn't be here, that would have been slightly better.

She has already started re-crafting the sword, after the somewhat insulting response from the GM and no response to her follow-up request/comment. At this point, having the sword returned isn't an issue. We're not happy about having to re-spend the CE and crowns, but that's already happening. I can't even say what a good resolution would be at this point.

Thanks to those of you who actually had something constructive to say (you are in the valuable minority here). Yes, "be more careful in the future" will definitely happen. Yes, improvements to the buy/sell interface would help--I've played many a game where you have to choose Buy or Sell at a vendor, and you can only actually sell something if you're in the Sell interface. To those who had insulting comments or happily made judgments, and are likely to do so to *this* post as well...good luck to you, I have nothing else to say to you.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 11:50

#15

Metaphysic

Legacy Username

So here's what happened, and

As I pointed out, there is no cancel button. There are two buttons in the transaction window: Empty and Confirm. Now which button was she attempting to hit to close the window, because neither of them will do so unless a transaction is being made.

Nobody knows what their network code or game logs look like. You have absolutely no idea how easy or difficult it is for them to check transaction logs to an NPC to find out if you're actually telling the truth about vendoring an item. OOO usually has fairly good in-game customer service, so judging from their response it's not something they can easily check.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 12:13

#16

Notbob

As I pointed out, there is no

As I pointed out, there is no cancel button. There are two buttons in the transaction window: Empty and Confirm. Now which button was she attempting to hit to close the window, because neither of them will do so unless a transaction is being made.

I, and others, usually refer to that red X in the corner as the cancel button, since it closes the window. Yes, there is no button that actually says "Cancel" on it. I apologize for the confusion.

If you don't understand how someone can have in their mind to click on one interface element and instead click on another out of habit, ponder the occasional time someone has been on a lift, intending to click on the up arrow to return to Haven, and instead clicked on the down arrow out of habit, since this is generally what one does on a lift. If you've never done this or known someone to do it, bully for you. I've seen it happen to several people.

I agree that I do not know what the code or logs look like, or what is involved. What I do know is that items have been returned to players in the past. This suggests that there is some way of making this determination. I can come up with scenarios as to when someone would be lying about accidentally selling a vendor an item, but they're pretty far-fetched. Limiting a return to being a one-time occurrence would likely cut down on potential abuse scenarios.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 13:29

#17

Nodocchi

A confirm option is falls

A confirm option is falls into the same trap of habit where people won't even bother thinking after a while before clicking confirm. There is no replacement for a players own vigilance with regards to their own possessions. Don't make a mistake and then heap the blame on Three Rings and poor interface design. Does a person who misuses a lighter and burns his house down blame the lighter company for not making the lighters easier to use? I found the Three Rings interface design to be quite intuitive and simple to use.

Every single RPG I have ever played (and I have played many), allowed players to sell unwanted items to NPCs. So either you have never played an RPG before in your life to assume that you cannot sell items to NPCs or you were just really negligent with regards to NPC transactions. In any case, fiddling with your equipment while having trade open is just asking for trouble and something I wouldn't even consider doing.

Yeah it sucks that Three Rings won't replace your weapon, but don't then blow up on the forums blaming them for poor game design when it is your own responsibility or in this case the responsibility of the player in question to keep track of their own equipment.

Fri, 07/15/2011 - 19:53

#18

Senshi

Legacy Username

Actually...

Lighters have 'locks' on them now that are required by law (is that in some states or all? true here anyway) to prevent accidentally burning down houses when they get into the hands of children. How effective they are may be another question, but, yes, people have blamed lighter design for exactly that and lighter design has changed because of that.

Anyway, I agree that selling to NPC vendors is expected. However, the design is in such a way that people often find it hard to figure out -how- to sell items to vendors (because they are looking for some sort of 'sell button' or 'buying things vendor', neither of which exist), and others accidentally sell items because a single click with no other feedback puts your inventory item in the sell-list. While I seem to have made a mistake about being able to close the dialog with 'confirm' normally, it's still true that people have been trained by twenty years of Windows(tm) interfaces to click 'ok' to close dialogs in just the same way.

The lack of a cancel button is actually kind of bad for that reason now that it has been pointed out that the interface doesn't look as I remembered it... faced with 'ok / cancel' you might actually think about the decision. Faced with just 'ok' ... pretty automatic. Changing the word to 'confirm' I don't think changes that.

Without worrying about -that- dialog, I think it would certainly be better if the inventory open when you're in a vendor acted just like a normal inventory except for adding a 'sell' option to the pop-up menu. Faced with the choice between 'equip' and 'sell' vs the choice of 'confirm' or 'little x in the corner', a lot less mistakes would be made.

Also, I'll note that user interfaces in games like this -should- be designed with the assumption that the user is pretty darn stupid. Many are going to be kids with short attention spans and varying levels of experience with game or computer interfaces, and others are going to be adults at the end of a day of work, quite possibly with an alcoholic beverage at hand even if not in the case prompting my post. I'm quite sure my effective IQ is a good 50 points lower at the end of a 12 hour shift, and yet I might want to spend a couple of hours unwinding with a game and not have to study every dialog carefully or even attentively before clicking.

Also, I thought the sell-to-vendor interface was bad design before this incident, and still think there's a lot of bad design in the auction house interface even though I've not been involved in any inc... eh, well, any incident of note. I have accidentally listed 10 items for the price of 1 or vice versa when putting up multiple auctions that were supposed to have been identical, but I wasn't particularly upset by it. I agree that a 'confirm' dialog is problematic when over-used, and in particular if you had a confirm dialog for -both- buying and selling people might still click it through by habit. If you have only a confirm dialog for selling and it reads 'Really SELL xyz?' (icon for xyz following) ... that would be a warning in sooo many ways, the unexpected confirm dialog, the word sell, the picture of an item the vendor doesn't even sell (in most cases. You could accidentally click to sell a recipe to Basil, perhaps, or more likely to sell a weapon to a weapon's vendor.) Other suggestions that separate buy-sell functionality more would be better than a confirm dialog though, but confirm dialogs are generally -easy- to add crutches for a design decision that may be difficult to rework properly.

When I say it's bad design, mind you, that's not to say UI design is easy or simple, and most of the developers at three rings are not GUI designers, they're game programmers and game designers, of course.

Sat, 07/16/2011 - 07:09

#19

Bigindian

- Why in the first place

- Why in the first place would they allow a 5* item to be sold for a miserable fraction of it's value, when on the other hand you cannot sell these items to a player willing to pay it's real value?

- Having ignored this trap why won't they refund a player that obviously stumbled upon this design black hole?

The more I think about it the more I regret spending my money.

Sat, 07/16/2011 - 07:31

#20

Cherubrock

wow this is soo messed up. i

wow this is soo messed up.

i really hate it how you can sell these bound items

Search

Accidentally sold items