Discussion: Extended Live Server Maintenance - Thursday, September 22, 2011

Agreed - server upgrades do not constitute "emergency fixes," and should be known and scheduled well in advance. There is no reason to have these downtimes occuring on such short notice.

"Well in advance"?

What's your definition of "well in advance", because a day before is pretty good notice. Also, we don't know what sort of schedule they're on or how they operate. Maybe it WAS last minute and they didn't know beforehand.

Assumptions folks. You all know what they do.

For my company, if we need hardware upgrades for a project, we usually know 3-6 months ahead of time that they will be implemented at an approximate date. By the time it gets down to 1-2 months in advance, the date has been finalized and the hardware orders have been placed, and announcements go out to all affected employees and organizations informing them of the scheduled downtime.

The timeline for the CoH team may be a little different, but I can assure you that no one is buying hardware on a whim to be installed 12 hours later. Considering how long Freedom has been in the works, and assuming that the upgrades were needed in relation to this project (either to handle game changes or in anticipation of more server load due to new players), then I'm sure that this upgrade was planned quite some time ago. As soon as the dates were fixed, this should have been announced. This should never have been kept off the announcements until the night before, that's just careless.

Not so much.

There is a quote form somewhere I can't remember (some TV show) that fits this bill perfectly.

"People do not get upset when things go wrong in their life.

People get upset when their expectations aren't met."

If the server migration / hardware upgrade had been announced, say a week, in advance - and the majority of players knew about it - then there would be far less complaining.

Those that would be complaining, would be the ones who were still expecting the servers to be up.

Precisely.

It most definitely does change the situation.

First, it changes people's perception of the situation; if they are informed in advance, they feel like valued customers, whereas if things like this are sprung on them at the last minute, they feel they are being ignored or forgotten and that the company doesn't care how they are treated. Which of these do you think provides happier customers? Perception is a powerful influence, and can drastically affect attitudes.

Secondly, it gives people the opportunity to plan their time according to the scheduled downtime. If you know in advance that the game will be down on a particular day, you'll plan on not playing, and instead schedule other activities. But what happens if you don't have notice about a large downtime like this, and plan to spend a few free hours playing that day? You try to log in, expecting everything to function normally (because of course, you were on just yesterday, and everything was fine and nothing was scheduled), but to your surprise and shock, the system is down and you can't do a thing. Now you feel that your time and money have been wasted, because you had planned your schedule to make use of a service you had paid for, and you have been denied that time and that service.

These downtimes need to be announced to the customers with sufficient notice; bare minimum one week in advance, preferrably 2-4. And the announcements should not just be buried on the forums where most players never go, they need to be made clear on the launcher, where they will be easily seen. Keeping your customers in the dark is never an effective way of generating good will, trust, or respect.

And yet again, we in Australia get hit right in our prime gaming time. At least it's the standard maintenance evening....Nope, that's Thursday!

Anyone willing to take the bet that we'll get an extended outage again on Thursday? Anyone?

Edit: Sorry, this just occurred to me. Where did they say that this would be the final Freedom patch? I'd be willing to bet cash money that it isn't...at the very least we'll get the emergency fix a day or two later to cover the first few things they didn't test properly, as usual.

I think that game downtime should be compensated with game time, not money equivalent.

While I think compensation would be best, anyone who feels strongly enough about this can drop to Premium for a month or two, play some new characters, and so save the money wasted on this downtime and a little extra.

I agree. No matter what people will never be happy . Destitute are unhappy they are fighting merely not to die, poor are unhappy they cannot afford convenience, middle class are unhappy they are not as pampered as they could be, upper class is unhappy that they are not even richer, rich people are unhappy at any single slight inconvenience to them.

Meanwhile I'm here, working 60-70 hours a week while going to college full time whilst fighting to stay afloat financially whilst going through the nasty D word with my wife who stole my car. Yet I'm happy. Go figure . If COH happens to be down I simply do something else. But hey, it's your choice to spend your life kevitching .

Ummm yeah. For myself and all the group of Oceanics I play with over the last two months 70% of the time we have tried to play has been thwarted. 110 PP can buy what? One part of a costume set? Almost everything I have seen in the shop has been 200 - 800 PP except for a few temp enhancements or single costume pieces. Sorry but to me 110 PP would be a downright insult.

And yes most of this could have been avoided if they had bothered giving decent notice. A few hours before is useless. I don't know about all of you but we try to organise get togethers days in advance. And lately, 70% of the time we come home from work, have dinner, spend time with the kids then after all that sit down to log on and play with friends. The fact that word of the shutdown was posted earlier on that day doesn't help us
a bit. We're stuck unable to do what we planned. Do we then go and do something else? Yes of course we do. That does not mean we aren't annoyed. And when it happens that often we start to question what we are paying for. However had we a couple of days notice of this then we would have planned something else and no one ends up annoyed. Well unless it happens too often of course.

Oh and as regards this freedom of speech bit. Some of you are forgetting that just because you have the right to speak out doesn't automatically mean you should. This threads purpose was for a group of people to express their feelings to NCSoft. Realistically no one else has the right to but in because it was not expressed to you. Nor do you have the right to judge other peoples feelings to be right or wrong. If what is being asked for here is more than the company is willing to give they will simply ignore it and the customers will have to decide if they are willing to keep giving their custom.

I mean for crying out loud if certain, and in particular one, individuals had minded their own business this thread would have been about a fifth this length. It is only that people felt that they had to justify their feelings that inspired most of the posts. Not to mention the meddlers have also caused an increase in passion about the issue for the same reason.

Oh and to clarify something for those pompous prats who try to use it as an insult. Just because people spend 10 minutes posting a complaint about something does not mean they are spending the other 23 hours and 50 minutes worrying about it. So saying things like there are more important things to worry about is plain insulting. You are just making yourself look idiotic saying things like that.

I am insane and childish...

pleasedtomeetcha.

Actually I don't know whats more "insane and childish"... appreciating what you have -or- receiving big changes in code and expecting things NOT...to...break...

yeah, I'm insane and childish...

People <not PPL> loves me for it.

I'll say it again: the issue isn't things breaking unexpectedly and requiring emergency fixes, we are talking about PLANNED HARDWARE UPGRADES which the company had to have scheduled in advance, but which they failed to notify the customers about with sufficient warning.

And I'll say it again: Insane and childish! Me! so there!

Fortunately they had the good grace to announce on the 23rd that the publish would be done on the 27th. That's a step in the right direction. It is a shame, however, that if you don't check the forums constantly specifically for this information you would never know. I, for one, was surprised to discover the outage today. But at least they did something, right?