It's taken a long time and a lot of effort to squash the nasty Outriders bug that’s been wiping player inventories, but the patch deployed last week appears to be doing the job. Publisher Square Enix said today the update is "successfully deployed and continuing to prevent any further complete inventory wipes," and that means it can finally start working on other things, including inventory restorations.
The further good news, for a lot of players, is that the returned equipment will be in better shape—possibly much better shape—than when it was lost.
"Items granted will have the same attribute combinations but with God Roll values. This means that these items will be at least the same if not better quality than the originally lost items," Square Enix explained. "Items will be granted at the character’s highest available equip level taking World Tiers and Challenge Tiers into consideration."
As part of the process, developers have divided Outriders players into three groups: Unplayable characters with an invalid inventory, playable characters with a valid inventory who have lost items, and players who haven't lost anything, who need to be tracked to ensure that they don't somehow get hosed by the inventory restoration.
Interestingly, it's not possible to "conclusively distinguish" between the second and third groups, and so the restoration process will be different for them than for the first group.
Group 1:
- All items, regardless of rarity, that were equipped at the time of your inventory wipe will be restored..
- All legendary items there were in your inventory.
- For non-Legendary items: 20 previously acquired items that were in your inventory, with first prioritization based on rarity (descending from Epic rarity) and second prioritization based on date acquired.
- All fully completed Accolades will be restored if you previously reached the final tier of said Accolade.
- Interim tiers and progress towards any tier of an Accolade cannot be recovered
Group 2:
- Up to 20 legendary items there were in your inventory.
- All fully completed Accolades will be restored.
- Interim tiers and progress towards any tier of an Accolade cannot be recovered.
Group 3:
- No restoration required.
"We had hoped to provide an exact date for this today, but we do need a bit more time to make sure that the process is running precisely as intended. When running operations of this scale on our database, we want to ensure that there are no instances where a restoration could have a continued significant negative effect on individual players, or the population as a whole," Square Enix said. "Nevertheless, we are working to an ‘ASAP’ schedule and fully understand how disappointing it is to not yet have your items back today."
Progress is also being made on the "community appreciation package" announced earlier this month, a Stadia patch is expected to roll out next week (although it will not enable crossplay), and further multi-platform patches and balance changes are on the way as well.
