Someone certainly needs to step up and take responsibility for this, and better sooner than later. The fact that it has been kept hush hush and is not on the Dev Blogs, or Facebook or anywhere other this external forum says a lot to me.
This is a 24/7 game, as are many other games of theirs, so therefore I would think that there would be at least one person at Inno available 24/7 for emergencies. Or at least on call, every company usually has at least one person on call. Someone that could have made the call on either cancelling the bans or making them unattackable. Even if there was nobody on call, could this not have been done what, 6-7 hours later when Inno was up and working in the office? Ball dropped, right there, a huge one, one that could have helped to put a halt to everything going on that nobody could do anything about, and certainly would have alleviated some of the hostility currently being projected right now.
And another question. So far every support ticket I have seen so far has the same moderator responding. I do not know how many worlds the responses are from, I know at least two of them, and I know mods are responsible for more than one world (they have to be, there are only a handful of them!), but if the same moderator had this massive influx of ban appeals, that should have been the very first clue that something was wrong. And this should have been figured out within 8-12 hours easy...which I would like to again say, would have been within the Inno open office hours.
Now, I feel for the players that lost wonder cities because of a company error, and I would not blame them for being furious, wanting someones' head, and/or leaving the game, that is more than a years worth of work down the drain due to something out of their hands that could have been rectified if only someone had spoken up sooner. Now it is too late, and faith and trust has been lost by the players, as you can see from this whole thread. I only wish more players affected by this had stepped up and spoken in here also so Inno could see exactly how they were affected by this. However, I am willing to bet more than half the players never check the external forum, so they do not even have a clue that this is being discussed currently in here. My guess is they are still sitting there, waiting for someone to respond to their support ticket, feeling abandoned and have probably given up all hope on in game support. Another ball dropped.
Inno needs to realize that you can't keep customers with subpar support. You do not have enough moderators, and from my experience, quite a few of the moderators do not have much knowledge of the game, which needs to be changed also. However, apparently you have to have a completely clean player account to get a position, and that must explain why you are always asking for more applicants. By being too picky, you have missed out on what would have been some very good moderators, ones with a massive amount of in game experience, that would have made all your jobs much easier. And not exactly sure what happened in the past couple years, but do not think that nobody noticed that most of your best moderators have all quit or been let go. One of them was in my alliance when they quit, and I never asked, but something must have happened that made them so upset that they actually completely walked away from the moderator position and the game and have never looked back.
Someone mentioned paying the moderators with cash instead of gold, it is not a bad idea at all...but actually give them the ability to think for themselves and make actual decisions if needed, also. Not everything is black and white, as this failure has proven to all. The inability on the players part to prove their innocence is absurd, and the mods cryptic messages without actually telling the player what they did wrong are even more absurd. But please, change your generic responses, and if your evidence is fully conclusive, I don't really care about your methods, I want to know what time you thought I was cheating, so I can go through and tell you exactly what I was actually doing and prove your evidence is incorrect. Someone that has never been busted using an illegal script before should be given the opportunity to prove themselves innocent.
Well, I imagine this thread will quiet down in the next day or so as players come off of ban, but could pick up also after they get back into the game and see what kind of damage was done while they were locked out and get upset all over again.