Hi 

Glad to help.  Thank you for reminding me about the down arrow.  I am going to edit my last post to add it.  Just in case someone else reads it and can not find the information because I did not say to click on the down arrow.  

Dot    

As of 1:30 p,m. September 26th (DST Daylight Savings Time) that means 13 days and 6 hours from now the Anniversary Event ends for me. As I lost all of my progress (Level 125) it will be a mixed blessing to have the Halloween event start around Oct 13th.

Mixed as it is my birthday (Friday the 13th's are lucky if it is your birthday)  but the Anniversary event has allowed me to progress from Level 1 to 24 in a month and it is very unlikely that I will be able to participate in the Challenge around the Halloween Event which is likely to be much more "challenging" than the one that occurred around the Anniversary Event. At least I will be able to visit Friends Halloween rooms.

I had to start over again as an update appeared on my game and foolishly, I allowed it to download before realizing it was not one I should be getting. AEGram has explained how to restore your game if it has been saved in a Save.db but this did not happen for me. I am waiting for the request for a restore (since Ag 24) to the best that they can do and have sent updates on my avatars, pets, level etc. but no reply yet from BFG. Friends have been a HUGE help in getting to where I am now. Anyone reading this--thanks for your patience!

My Problem when my Hard drive crashed is, not only did I not have a backup, I also didn't have any Friends and actually didn't even know my Player #.  BFG had said that they'd try to build my game back, If I could remember what I'd had before. But after years of Playing by myself, I had lost more stuff than I could even begin to remember.  All I knew is I was up around level 89, so I just told them to forget it.  I wasn't gonna put them through the pain of trying to rebuild my game and I'd just start over (THAT was the tough part!  LOL!).  Thanks to everyone here, I'm past where I'd been but even with all of the Help, It's still taken a while.  I keep thinking of all of the countless hours I'd put in playing, just to lose it all.  And now, all of this time "Invested" that I could probably be better used elsewhere. 

Honeyphan said:

in the new anniversary HOS, with the posters that change images - one has a Halloween pumpkin that changes to a message "3 days" -

The mystery has been solved..............

In another discussion (Anniversary Contest (delphiforums.com)) SamSLB talked about a contest on Midnight Castle's Facebook page related to the Anniversary HOS. The goal was to find all the "Easter Eggs" in the scene. The contest has finished, and a list of the "Easter Eggs" was released.......

 As you can see the "3 Days" refers to the Paranormal Files game series put out by Elephant Games, thus ends the mystery.........

SamSLB said:

AEGram has explained how to restore your game if it has been saved in a Save.db but this did not happen for me.

The save.db file will only work if you're transferring your game from one device to another. You download the game to the new device, replace the save.db file in the AppData\Roaming appropriate folder, and when you launch the game all the game files come down from the Big Fish servers. Your friends are also there because they, too, are in the save.db file. Again, this will only work if your game is safely stored/saved on the Big Fish servers because their servers contain ALL of your game information/progress except your friends list.

IF you inadvertently did an install that caused your game to load back to Level 1, your game has departed from the Big Fish servers. In this case, when your save.db file sends your ID to the Big Fish servers, there is no record of that ID on the server and a new game is delivered to you.

IF you have your old ID, you can submit a ticket to Big Fish and ask them to rebuild your old game into that new ID. They will put you back to your previous level; give you a ridiculously low smattering of inventory (if you can tell them what you had, some will try to give you more). Some of the techs will try to give you a few of your achievements, pets, avatars -- again, if you can tell them what you had. But your Event Album will be empty.

rodnocker12 said:

My Problem when my Hard drive crashed is, not only did I not have a backup, I also didn't have any Friends and actually didn't even know my Player #. 

I was somewhere around Level 35 when I learned about friends because that's when I found the Big Fish original forum. Your getting to about Level 89 has me beat by a significant number.

That said....there is no backup that a player can make or have. ALL of your game files are on the Big Fish server. YOUR game is still on the Big Fish server because you just lost the ID from your hard drive that told them which game to deliver to you. IF you had a unique name, and you posted it here, one of us could go into our PC game to search for it. With knowing approximate level AND which avatar you were displaying, we might be able to narrow it down a bit. Certainly worth a try. 

Once again, I will reiterate. For years we thought we could save information from the AppData\Roaming\Elephant Games\Midnight Castle folder as a "backup" for our game. We thought this because many of us had successfully transferred items from that folder to the same location on a new computer on which we'd downloaded the game. By doing so, we could move our game to the new computer because the Big Fish servers don't know "what computer" is being used. It just receives the ID when the game is launched....does a mini-high-speed search on their servers to find that game progress and deliver it to the device from which the ID was sent. 

The update pushed for the game on October 4, 2021, caused more than a few players games to crash and get the message that "there was a problem with their game save." Countless players lost their games and had to start over. Some lost even the newly started game. It was a horrible mess for a bunch, bunch of PC players. At that time, we learned that ALL game files are housed on the Big Fish servers. Only the game ID and friends list are housed on the individual's device. And, I recently learned that both the ID and the friends list are in the save.db located in that AppData\Roaming location. 

Bottom line is....IF a player has an issue with their own PC device (hard drive or motherboard crash), they can purchase a new device, download the game, send their old and new ID to Big Fish and request the progress from that old game be moved to the new game. They can't give you your friends back because they have no record of your friends.... those were on your crashed PC and are now lost unless some PC tech can get back some of your user files.

But....IF a player receives a message that their "game save" didn't make it to the Big Fish server or IF when they launch the game and it opens at Level 1 ... the Big Fish servers have no record of game progress for that ID. The BF techs can try to "rebuild" your game, but you get only a shell of what you once had.

The "Backup" thing I've seen others post about needing to be done on a "Separate Drive" but have been unable to figure out how to do.  That pretty much answers my Question about "Backing Up" the Game.  When my Drive crashed, I'd just been using the blank avatar and "Player" so that's why I told them to not even bother trying, lol!

I am puzzled by the ID as it appears to be my old one but I would say I definitely have a new client number which means it is very unlikely that anything can be restored. As I have a rather different approach as to how I am playing the game this time (initially, I ignored a lot of the parts of the game that took too much time) I am hoping that, with a few events, I should be back to 125...in about a year. However it would be "nice" if  the techs would reply in the next few months....Thanks again for your always-excellent advice.

SamSLB said:

However it would be "nice" if  the techs would reply in the next few months...

Did you contact Big Fish or Elephant Games? 

Big Fish was doing a really great job of responding to tickets until a few months ago. Now they're taking 3-5 months to respond to a ticket. (One person surmised there may have been more layoffs in Big Fish.) ...............At any rate, Elephant Games started helping out about a month ago. 

If you sent your ticket to Big Fish, please send a ticket to Elephant Games. Give them your Big Fish ticket number and explain the issue/your request to:

support@elephant-games.am

Note on MC Official Facebook site by moderator:
Midnight Castle
(name removed for privacy) please send an email to support@elephant-games.am, let them know what has happened, and that you haven’t received a response from BF.
Lara MOD

My ticket was to Big Fish Games and I will definitely send a message to Elephant Games. I may be able to find my old ID but it certainly was very close to the one I have now. At any rate, worth a chance!