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SOE respond to Planetside 2 cert gain drama: “we humbly apologize”

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The Planetside 2 community has been flailing around in panic these past couple of days as a huge injection of certs to compensate duplicate purchases flooded the game. With the introduction of account wide unlocks, many players who had played by the rules of character bound unlocks were given extra cert points. However it was made apparent that some characters were receiving astronomical amounts of certs without any explanation. This led leaderboards being torn apart, and minute old characters being able to unlock more weapons/upgrades than someone with months of playtime.

After investigating this issue, Planetside 2 Creative Director Matt Higby sheds some light on some of the enigmas surrounding the cert grants.

“After about 12 hours of investigating, and pouring through virtually every character on the list we’ve found zero characters who were granted certs that didn’t make the appropriate StationCash purchases to warrant those cert grants based on the above grant logic.” said Higby. “Yes, that includes all of these characters with 20-100k certs granted.”

So how did those characters receive so many certs? Promotional bundles seem to be the culprit.

“A lot of confusion has come from players who purchased bundles which contained items that had previously or were subsequently purchased on other characters on their account – these were flagged as repeat purchases and treated as such.”

Well the fact remains that some people do indeed have a brimming swiss bank account worth of certs, and that no rollbacks of confiscation will occur due to this being “our mistake”. But how many people were affected by it and how is this going to affect the game as a whole e.g. leaderboards?

“It’s worth noting that less than 5% of our player population was granted certs from this and less than 0.03% of players received anything more than 2000 certs from the grants.” assured Higby. “As a note, we don’t want “granted” certs to be part of the leaderboards, so in a future update those certs will be removed so that only “earned” certs are being displayed to ensure that the leaderboards more accurately reflect level of effort of the player.”

It seems that with all good intentions, this cert gain has left a lot of the community jarred, some feeling cheated, others overwhelmed. If one thing is guaranteed is that SOE have learned some hard lessons.

“Moving beyond this incident, we will be reevaluating our policies for future compensations to ensure we have methods that do not cause the kind of impact to our player community that this admittedly has.” stated Higby. “Finally, to those of you who feel betrayed or hurt by this incident, we humbly apologize.”

Read the full statement from Matt Higby here.