MS/Turbine still considers little gifts to calm down people after major game problems - well at least in AC2 which they want to survive a bit longer than until the release of SWG or World of Warcraft.
I wonder though if they give any **** about keeping the AC1 player base or if they suddenly will shut down the servers after they have driven away enough people for a commercial justification.
With next patch every AC2 (Two!) toon created before March will receive half of the XP needed from the start of current level to the next to compensate for ongoing connectivity issues during February.
And we will have the opportunity once per toon to return all skills and get all XP spent back at once while keeping the level - so we can create a completely different class (of the current race) without rerolling if we feel that the current class had been nerfed too much.
Those "gifts" (and the Pack Dolls back in the good old days) do not mean we could demand anything like this in either AC1 or AC2. If MS/T toss gifts around every time they screw something up we would even have more lack of available pack space

- therefore the EULA.