Steffi says:
April 24, 2018 at 12:07 PM
Unfortunately the player council is not currently active as we’re waiting for the elections of the second term, which will likely also allow us representation from the United States if all candidates meet the requirements (currently being confirmed). However, it will be necessary that any new player council members confirm their willingness to take part in the project with the Community Managers, which unfortunately did not happen for the last term, although we did have some election results.
That said, we have released an explanation about the tool issues yesterday, as soon as the issues were resolved, and we started compensating players for the amount of days they have been banned unjustly as a first step. We are still in the process of compensating the more extreme cases that could not be covered by a generic compensation. However, fortunately only a relatively low amount of players was directly affected by this malfunction of our tools (
37 cases across 9 game worlds – all other bans we found to be correct and justified), so we can look into their cases individually and find a compensation that should hopefully make up for most of their losses and help them lower the impact on their whole alliance.
We would also like to point out that this problem occured due to combination of a misconfiguration and several other problems that were exclusive to the US market. The tools are neither being tested on this market, nor were they implemented without prior testing on the beta environment. This was merely a case of several individual smaller problems leading to a bigger error in the system that targeted the aforementioned ~30+ innocent players, which is something we still deeply regret and understand the frustration about.
The configuration issue, as well as the tool, have been fixed immediately after we could confirm the issues and we are confident that no such error should occur again. Furthermore we will train our supporting teams to handle such situations with even more care.
We hope that the affected players and their alliances will accept our apology as it was not our intention to cause any harm by attempting to keep the game a fair place for everyone playing without the help of bots.