Please provide a reference for your claim.

According to Businessweek, Bill Gates has given $28 billion out of a net worth of $59 billion, placing him second on the list after Warren Buffett. That appears to be considerably higher than 1-2%.

Everyone makes mistakes. That apology was merely the first step in rebuilding trust. Turbine will have to tread carefully for a while to come, as many of their players will remain watchful, if not outright suspicious should anything similar arise in the future.

I'm taking it at face value, unless given evidence otherwise. It's not 100% for me either, but it got them into the 80's or 90's for now. When I compare Turbine's response to almost any other organization that has made a mistake that affected me, it was faster, and more complete.

They're trying. Hard. And I appreciate that. So while I criticised them for doing something stupid (and would do so again in the future if necessary), I will also make sure to applaud them for doing the right thing without much of a delay.

Ever look at the UID range of most comments? It's pretty sad when the lowest UID of any commenter to this story is in the 50k range. I rarely comment anymore, and apart from stories that directly interest or affect me, and rarely read the comments either. Most of the time, I don't even log in, just scan the front page, and carry on with my day.

I think that management had a rosy picture in their minds, that was dispelled by the cruel, harsh light of reality. The original post appears to only live in Google's cache. Unclassy.

Here's the full link from the DDO forums front page (obtained from google cache):

Get More FREE Turbine Points with New Offer Wall!
April 12, 2010
Want to get your hands on more Turbine Points? Visit my.ddo.com/getpoints, log in, and check out the latest offers from our friends at SuperRewards. Simply complete a qualifying offer and SuperRewards will credit your account with Turbine Points* to use in the DDO Store! This new feature is just another way for players to get points in addition to earning them in-game or buying them directly. Unlike earning or buying points, however, players may complete offers right on the website and do not need to be logged into the game.

This new feature is an addition to our current DDO Store system and does not replace the existing ways you already get points. We will continue to add new offer providers and payment methods in the coming months - if you have a preferred payment method, we’ll probably support it. For now, the fastest and easiest way to get guaranteed points is still to buy them in the DDO Store directly from Turbine.

Enjoy!

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. What is the offer wall?
A. The offer wall at my.ddo.com is a feature that allows players to earn Turbine Points for completing offers from various Offer Vendors.

Q. What’s an offer?
A. An offer is an advertisement for a product or service that typically requires you to perform an action. That may include registering for a newsletter, signing up for a subscription service, or buying a product. Offers may also include market research such as surveys, online focus groups, and more.

Q. Do I have to do this?
A. Of course not! This system is provided as a service to those who would like more Turbine points and who prefer not to pay for them in the traditional fashion.

Q. What about my personal information? Is it safe?
A. We do not share any personal information with the offer vendor other than an anonymous unique ID and an e-mail address for your receipt to be sent to. This information is not transmitted unless you participate in the offer wall system. You may be (and probably will be) asked to provide additional information to complete an offer. Turbine has no way to control what happens with that information or how it is handled. We recommend that you use your discretion when signing up for offers. As always, protecting your privacy requires vigilance.

Q. Where is SuperRewards’ Privacy Policy located?
A. Online at http://www.superrewards-offers.com/super/privacy

Q. I have a problem with X Offer or Y Offer Advertiser. What do I do?
A. Turbine provides no direct support for issues with our offer providers. If you have an issue with something related to the offer system please direct your inquiries to the Offer Vendor.

Q. Who is the Offer Vendor?
A. Our first partner in this program is SuperRewards. Their support information may be found at http://www.srpoints.com/help

Q. I have more questions. Who do I talk to?
A. The detailed service FAQ for the offer wall is in our public KB at http://na6.salesforce.com/_ui/selfservice/pkb/PublicKnowledgeSolution/d?orgId=00D80000000L4s5&id=50180000000QJka. For general questions, visit our offer wall forum at http://forums.ddo.com/. This forum is for general feedback and information only. Support issues must be resolved with the offer vendor directly.

*Players participating in this offer program do not earn points from Turbine directly. All points are granted by the offer vendor (e.g. SuperRewards) at the vendor’s sole discretion. Turbine does not provide any end-user support for this system. For questions about point rewards, offer content, or payment details please contact the Offer Vendor or advertising company (the company whose offer you complete). Turbine is not responsible for Super Rewards points or transactions. Turbine is not able to assist with Super Rewards purchases or interactions. For inquiries about Super Rewards or your purchase with them, please visit http://www.srpoints.com/help. If you believe that you have not received Turbine Points purchased or earned through Super Rewards, please contact Turbine. The Turbine Terms of Service apply to all Super Rewards transactions involving Turbine Points.

Have you sought professional help? You should, really.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I think someone screwed up in finance or marketing. An interview with the executive producer in March 2010 referenced this as follows:

Fernando also mentioned that Update 4 will include as-yet-unspecified "Character Bank Upgrades" and the ability to announce certain accomplishments in DDO to your Facebook feed. He also mentioned that Turbine will soon announce details of a deal with a third-party vendor to allow players to earn Turbine Points through some kind of "offer-based payment options", which means you'll do something like take a short survey for some commercial entity and earn Turbine Points in return (Netflix does something very similar to this.)

Turbine appear to have been looking at this as a good thing, another option for players. Perhaps with more careful implementation next time (if there is a next time), it could become what they hoped it would.

I think it was pretty fast, and an appropriate response. The wall came down. They said the words "we apologize".

I hope they don't make the same mistake twice, or allow any other major goof-ups like this to take place. I want to keep playing this game for a long time to come, and more mistakes like that could be fatal to the game.

Search is promised for this year. Finally. There have been bug fixes with the monthly updates - mass heal was just fixed last week.

They appear to be trying and making progress. I would expect to see more this year, since the extra revenue from going Free to Play has only started to appear in the past 6 months, and it takes time to ramp up development.

Ideally, Turbine's goal should be to extract as much money from premium players like me as they obtain from VIPs. There are two ways to do this, but only one keeps me in the game.

So far, the Turbine store contains mostly perks that are not necessary to enjoy the game. If that changes, and I need to spend real-life money to buy items to play the game, I'm gone. However, if they release compelling new content like the best of the existing packs (Desert, etc), I'll keep spending.

The DDO Forums damn-near literally exploded yesterday over this issue. Turbine got the message loud and clear, and saw that people were ready to vote with their wallets.

I don't expect altruism from a corporation, but I expect someone with my credit card information to be trustworthy, and to partner with trustworthy firms. This is a huge step in the right direction, and is helping restore my confidence in Turbine.

I would suggest that the typical Facebook user is quite different from a typical DDO player. Most of the people in my guild are in their 30's or older, many are very tech savvy. Compare that with Facebook, where the typical user wouldn't even understand how they are being compromised by those offers.

Learn to read then. From the DDO site, emphasis added:

There were also technical issues that raised valid questions about security. Overall it was a poor user experience that was not up to our standards, and for this we apologize.

Sure, I would have phrased it differently, but you can bet that the corporate drone who approved this debacle in the first place died a little inside even thinking about those words.

While not a perfect apology, it is good enough for me.

Other ways to pay? Certainly. But nothing should have been sent to the scammers just from viewing a page hosted on Turbine's site. That was a severely bad implementation problem. The other problem was Turbine associating with a company like SuperScamSpamRewards in the first place.

There are 3 type of account on DDO. VIP is a regular monthly subscription that gets access to all content and most account features, along with 500 Turbine Points each month. Free to Play pays nothing, can access a good subset of content up to around level 12 (level 20 is the cap). F2P players can grind and earn Turbine Points by playing (somewhere around 25 turbine points per hour I believe) with which they can also buy content packs. Premium players are F2P players who have bought Turbine Points, or VIPs who let their subscription lapse.

During PAX, there was a sale on DDO of almost 7000 Turbine Points for $50. Since most content packs range from around 250 to 1000 Turbine Points (the best ones come on sale for 500-750 points every few months), that is enough to keep a casual gamer like me busy for many many months. You can't find value like that on many other MMOs.

Thank-you Turbine, for bringing down the Wall so quickly in response to customer concerns, and for apologizing to DDO players. That helps immensely.

Apologies are few and far between these days, and it is refreshing whenever a corporation actually says they are sorry.

I enjoy playing DDO, and I hope that the apology will help mitigate the harm to the game caused by this incident, and I also hope that the game population will continue to grow.

Turbine has announced that they are dropping the wall, and they also apologized to their players.

That only took a day or so from when the Offer Wall was introduced, which is reasonably fast by corporate standards.

Thanks Turbine, for listening to the players, and for the apology. You make a great game, and I hope to continue playing it well into the future.

Full text of the announcement:

Turbine’s slogan is “Powered by Our Fans." That means more than just words to us. It’s a promise. We pride ourselves on listening closely to you, our players, and working with you to do what’s right.

Turbine is continually looking for ways to stretch the boundaries of pricing and commerce models in our games. That’s the kind of thinking that lead to Founder’s pricing in LOTRO and the launch of Free-to-Play in DDO. We’re always focused on providing the best possible value to the widest group of players, but not if it compromises our relationship with our fans.

Recently, we opened an Offer Wall with a selection of ads that got a strong negative response. There were also technical issues that raised valid questions about security. Overall it was a poor user experience that was not up to our standards, and for this we apologize.

Based on your feedback, we’re stepping away from the ‘Offer’ category for now. We’ll keep exploring alternate ways for players who want points to get them. We’ll also continue to innovate in pricing and accessibility because that’s who we are. As of today, the Offer Wall is coming down. We’ll collect all the feedback we’ve received over the last few days and will use it to guide future decisions.

Finally, there was a lot of speculation about how information such as your username or e-mail address was being used by our commerce partners. Ultimately we chose to pass the e-mail address to our commerce partners in the URL to facilitate e-mailing receipts to players. It went no further than that. Neither PlaySpan nor Super Rewards passed the information on. It was stored in the user database only and not transmitted to any of the companies who advertised via Super Rewards. Players who visited the page did not expose any new information to PlaySpan (our in-game store provider) that they did not already have.

Even though this implementation did not constitute a technical breach of our privacy policy, we certainly understand the concerns that have been communicated to us and how seriously players take their privacy. As a result, the Super Rewards team has already removed the e-mail addresses from their user database. If we decide to return to the Offer category in the future we will certainly work with our partners to implement a better system than the one we tried this week.

Your calculations need to look forward as well. I have over $50 in Turbine Points (non-tradeable currency that can only be used in the Turbine store to buy adventure packs and account features) just sitting there waiting to be spent. I can now play all of the best content in the game until the servers are shut down without spending another penny. I've been playing for six months so far, and in another six months, the cost of my own account ($130) will be less than $11 per month, and dropping. Unless they release enough compelling content that I end up burning through my stockpile, I might be able to get my average spending into the $5-8 a month range in 2011. Since I've been buying content on sale as I go, and have not even entered most of the mid-high level content I bought (Gianthold, Vale of Twilight, etc), I fully anticipate that I might finish 2010 with what I've already bought.

The cost of F2P can really add up for people who want some of the optional stuff from the store, like trinkets that improve the loot from chests, character rebuilds, or potions that increase XP earned by 20% for a few hours. Apart from a shared bank and an additional character slot, I only spend money on adventure packs. Here is a guide to playing for "free", written by a gamer. It is theoretically possible to play without spending a penny, but I have more money than time. So far I have found it well worthwhile, and I really like Turbine's model with the exception of this latest act of stupidity.