Your indifference towards player data is as bad as what Oath did. Reading this made me so sick I had to register this account just to state that. People's time is a finite currency, you should have at least three backups of their data. Also, even though the server had custom exp rates, drop rates were still pretty miserable.
You equate people losing their items and characters in a video game to that of someone sabotaging a 7 year friendship, back charging several staff with what is the equivalent to wage fraud, and sabotaging that of the community to me saying "It's sad, but at least that stuff can be regained over time." Excuse me?
Do you think I didn't lose stuff either? I lost my own characters and stuff as well -- as well as had 14 months of my
free labor effectively sabotaged. Labour where I would sometimes work 18 hours day after day, just trying to make the experience that little bit better for people rather than actually getting to play the game, all in an effort to make the community that much more clean, the environment that little bit more fair, the server a little bit more fun. Even with restarting the server, I know it's not going to reach the same glory it once did. Trust has been damaged and that is ridiculously hard to build back, and some people just won't want to start again. So how about you stop putting words in my mouth and cut the hypocrisy right there, yes?
What I said wasn't "indifference" at peoples' stuff being lost. It was "We lost what we had, but it's a miracle we can at least start again and begin anew" because that opportunity was potentially just a handful of seconds away from being wiped too.
I'd strongly suggest for you to get your priorities straight. Ragnarok is a video game. What Oathkeeper did reached beyond the boundaries of the video game. His actions have genuinely damaged peoples' lives and put people in financial jeopardy. I can't even get the medical help I need right now because he froze my pay pal account thanks to this fraudulent charge back claim. And you want to claim I am as bad as him because of a sentence I wrote on a forum post that you clearly misinterpreted?
You are either painfully ignorant of the situation, or are extremely entitled to even consider this as an equal situation in my opinion. I'm almost envious, really.
It's not like player data got lost due to sloppiness, Oathkeeper deleted it. Dastgir should have backed it up but it's easier to assess this now with hindsight.
We had back ups for the player data and server. The keys were not given to Dastgir yet, and what back ups we had were designed to prevent technical failure, not the human failure where the person who is still in charge of the data because he didn't hand over access, intentionally sabotages said data and all of the back ups. We could have had 100 back ups and nothing would have changed, because instead of just burning the server and the back up, he would have just burned the server and the 100 back-ups.
Having all the back ups in the world doesn't matter when the one who owns all of the back ups decides to get rid of everything at the press of a couple buttons.