Compensation for Downtime

In the 7 years I have played - I think MAYBE total down time for when I could/wanted to play might be 18-24 hours. So uhhh yes... I would like my 50 cents please

To the OP - I disagree with you 100%. Some things cannot be controlled - we live in an imperfect world...and those who can adapt do much better than those who just stand around and complain about it's imperfections.

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Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

I'm sure that if downtime went waaaaay out of their hand they'd compensate for it.
i know of a few times where the servers went down unexpectedly and Zwill fired up Ustream to at least talk and give updates on what is going on.

If the launch of a new issue goes well beyond their 8 hour mark, and with well beyond i mean a day or more, i'm sure they'll find something to make things right. However, from all the 'expected downtime is 8 hours' 9 out of 10 times it was about 4 hours.

The reason we don't really know if we get a compensation for long downtimes, it because it never really happened, and the few times the server went down for a short time, like i said.. Zwill fired up Ustream.

We all know downtime is part of the game, and what do u rather have? They work as fast as they can to either get the server back up and fix things, with Zwill entertaining us on Ustream oncve in a while.
Or they work slow not really caring about anything and you get a day extra on your time?
I'll take the 1st.

No one out there even guarantees 100% uptime anyways... Amazon, for instances, only offers 99.95% uptime for EC2. Because there will be downtime, even when you're paying through your teeth for service.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

The game was down!! I demand my $0.37 back!!

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Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

QR:

Generally speaking, server outages don't tend to last very long to begin with if they do happen. I've never once felt (with City of Heroes) that I "deserved" compensation for lost time. Heck, the longest outage that my memory can bring up was the transition to Freedom, and that was more of an event that an outage, honestly.

So, do they owe you anything? Legally, no. Morally, maybe. It depends on time lost, really. Anywhere under 24 hours, no, in no circumstance. 24-48 hours is sort of iffy, and depends if it was announced or not. Anywhere past 2 days and it'd be good form of them to provide some sort of compensation. These days it most likely won't be VIP time, but free Paragon Points or something like that. Obviously though, once you get into the neighborhood of a week, it's a different discussion.

And for the record, I do think it's nice to bring this up in a civil manner. It's not a topic that's really talked about any time that isn't immediately after an extended outage, so it rarely sees any degree of civility. Normally you have 2 camps, one yelling about how they're entitled and deserve free stuff, and the other doing everything in their power to tell them they aren't and act like rabid white knights of whoever's in question. Both are equal parts annoying. Oh, and the third camp that actually points out the monetary value lost and contributes nothing to the discussion. So, 3 camps. All annoying.

No.
they dont owe us nothing
Just cos one game does something doesnt mean others will
otherwise i want kung fu fighting panda's

Now lets end this thread

Here's my take on it.

I expect the game to be down sometimes. I expect that once every week or two, they might be pushing something out, so I probably won't be able to access it for a little while. I expect that once in a blue moon, something may go horribly wrong and it's down for a few hours, perhaps even during peak hours, perhaps even while I really want to get something done. I know that every once in a great, great while, downtime might cause me a lot of personal inconvenience, such as servers crashing a mission or two before the end of a task force.

It's just the nature of the beast. Do I like it? Of course not. But do I understand it? Yes, I absolutely do. That's why they put the clause in the Terms of Service that account for it, so that everyone is on the same page up front that your $15 per month (or whatever you spend, whether it's more or its less) does not guarantee you 100% uptime, or even 100% uptime with some scheduled maintenance now and then. When you fork over money or accept the ToS and log in, you're acknowledging (whether you know it or not) that you understand this, too.

Having said that, I would find it hard to believe that if there were a really extended downtime, like on the order of magnitude of days (which happened to Sony last year, remember), they wouldn't try to find some way to compensate players through time or other giveaways. They're not obligated to, but that's just good customer service. Fortunately, they haven't run across such an outage situation and hopefully they won't.

I find complaint threads after an unscheduled downtime mostly disingenuous. They almost always come off as, "Give us something for nothing because of an event you had little to no control over and, realistically speaking, I should expect sometimes!" I really do feel like people try to milk everything they can out of the devs and the company. To some degree, I don't blame them, I want stuff, too. But when they start to get rude and nasty about it, that really pisses me off because they are the ones being unreasonable, not the devs or the company.

Please stop the animal abuse, even if it's a dead animal.

So confused.

I thought downtime for updates and maintenance were WHAT I WAS PAYING FOR all these years. How do I deserve compensation for getting what I paid for? If I wasn't paying for people to take the servers down and do updates and maintenance, what was I paying for?

Why am I riding a horse?
WHO KILLED MY HORSE
I don't even have a horse...

{matrix kid}There is no horse...{/matrix kid}

True Story Time™

When I was in 7th grade, my science teacher was doing her normal teaching thing when she stepped backwards, tripped over a cord and planted herself legs up in the garbage can! The entire class became ultra silent, we feared she was injured from the contortion. After helping her out she dusted herself off and the bell rang.
The next day we got to class and to our shock we had a pizza and movie party! She said it was thanks for not laughing at her, as we could have made it a legend at the school but we showed class. Our class got pizza parties the rest of that year at the end of the every month.

I've always looked at anything they do for us after an unexpected problem as a pizza party. It isn't something they have to do, it's something they want to do. Being classy during the 'crisis' can only serve to increase the odds of a DxP perk or the like.
That said, we should never expect or demand a pizza party, even more so given the general reliability around here.

Great... Now I'm hungry.

I like the cheese and pepperoni slightly charred please tyvm.

If any compensation is to be given, I prefer it to be in Paragon Points.

Game on, my friends.