Duplication bug and lost progress

Note: This is a very long post but if you have some time over, please read it and thank God that you're not me.

I've played Plants vs Zombies 2 for quite a few years now, maybe 7 years now that I think about it. One could say that I'm at the "end-game" having unlocked just about everything that can be unlocked without spending real money. This game has had its fair share of glitches and crashes but nothing too severe so far. This all changed on tuesday when an ad crashed my game by giving me a black screen. This has happened before so I just exited the game and restarted. When I did this the tutorial started which is never a good sign. I didn't play through it, instead I exited the game and started again. On the start screen I could check and see that I had 2 profiles, so I just deleted the new one and thought that was it.

Oh how wrong I was. In my old profile all of my resources were screwed up. I had a few thousand each of gems, mints and gauntlets before the bug and suddenly I had millions of each. My Penny's Pursuit fuel was at the normal 15 before but was now several thousand. My Garden Sprouts were decerased oddly enough to about 1/6 of what I had. But the glitchiest of all were my coins. I had neary 20 million coins prior to this but now it was at -1,74 billion. This means that I can't buy anything because my coins are negative which is what happens when a duplication glitch hits the ceiling. I promise I'm not a politician even though I lost almost 2 billion in 1 minute.

If we pretend that one could get 30 000 coins/day by playing Penny's Pursuit, arena winning streaks, daily challenges and other things it would still take nearly 160 years to "break even". Hopefully my great-great-great-great grandkids will see this happen around the year 2180. If I instead were to buy in-game coins to get back to zero it would take nearly 7 million in my currency for me to do so and I can't help but feel that buying a small apartment in the central capital city would be a better investment.

I didn't see it immediately, but my Blast Spinner and Doom-shroom plants were locked again even though I played through the arena all the way with Blast Spinner and were about 3/4 done with Doom-shroom. I also noticed some smaller bugs that I can live with. My november calendar progress was reset and so was my progress in Penny's Pursuit. The Plant Nursery changed from Winter Melon to Electric Peel and my arena progress was reset too. I also noticed recently that my Mangofier plant was at level 1 and I had no seeds for it. But at least that one remained unlocked.

Before a "Clever Dan" decides to tell me to use EA Help, I already did. Since tuesday I've had contact with several BOTs/people. I first used e-mail and described my problem. I was asked to provide my player ID, which I did. That wasn't good enough because it had to be a screenshot, so I sent that along too. Then I get a message telling me that my problem was fixed. It wasn't fixed, of course. This goes back and forth for a couple of days and I had to supply my player ID again because I guess the BOT-people don't read the attached files history.

I kept using e-mail support, even being told to uninstall the game and re-install, which I also did. Eventually I was told to use live chat. After chatting for a while I'm told that the e-mail address I provided can't be verified because I used the website and not in-game help. I then used the in-game help and when the BOT-person was backed into a corner after I provided all the info it asked for, it wanted me to check so my PC specs were good enough. When I said I'm playing on an Ipad it was quiet for a few minutes and then it claimed my problem was fixed and wanted me to restart my game and check so I could verify in the chat. The problem wasn't fixed and I was then tasked by the same BOT-person with waiting 2-3 hours. That did not fix it either as I'm sure most of you figured out by now.

Yesterday I finally got sent to a different department and this might have been a real person in that chat. He said that I would be contacted by e-mail about what would be done. Today when I check my e-mail, it's a message in broken english telling me that it looks like my account is now fixed and offered me a little extra coins, gems and gauntlets as compensation for my "new account" if the stuff I got was a bit too low. There was no way of verifying exactly how much I had according to the e-mail. My account however, remains the same as it did yesterday. I know for a fact that this kind of issue can be solved, and from what I read on the forum the only way to do it is through EA Help.

Hopefully a real person from EA can see this and fix my problem, or at the very least I've given an insight to how "support" works. And maybe you who bothered to read all of this got a good chuckle out of it.

Cheers,

FoxxMan

Update: I noticed a few days ago that I can't even upgrade plants that only require seeds. When I click to upgrade the store opens and wants me to buy coins. The update from today also made the arena unplayable because now the game crashes as soon as I try to open it.