New BAD article about NO communication and broken game

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Luponator

L
Muthax said:
Oh you mean that couple of hours of hiccup the other day?

Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about some massive game breaking bug that is impeding people from playing
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I wager a bet that there are a few people out there who cant play due to that hiccup, yep.
just because me's been lucky so far doesnt mean I dont believe those who say they have massive issues. Let me read the FD statement on the bug, nature and fix. Oh, wait...
 

tarragon

T
SA? There is nothing organized about this mess. Not the company, not the unhappy customers.
Negative push should wake devs up to the fact, that they need to communicate (trivial thing.. fixing comes later). Simple.

PacalB said:
Let me guess, you guys pushing all this type of stuff are SA, yes? Didn't get your way so you're going out of your way to bad mouth and disrupt the game as much as possible [of course, within forum rules, I mean you can't be getting booted and banned now can you, you've had to much experience playing at this forum warfare elsewhere for that now haven't you?]. It's pretty obvious there's a organised negative push being conducted on these forums. Anyway, well done, keep it up. :-/
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BLCBob

B
That hiccup took all of my ship upgrades, leaving me in a system I can't get out of. It took most of my cash, leaving me unable to buy the upgrades to jump far enough to get out of the system I'm now stuck in. I also can't afford cargo, to make money to buy upgrades to get out of the system I'm stuck in. I'd call that game breaking.
 

Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
Bazil said:
Why did those people join the beta rather than wait for release? It wasn't in any way compulsory to join the beta development.
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There are a lot of passionate people who care about "Elite" (84 onwards) and wanted to both support the company in their creation of a modern version and help find issues with the game prior to release.

Sometimes you will find that this passion spills over into the forums, more so when you care about a franchise and watch it go wrong ..
 

Sentenza

Sentenza
philux said:
Nobody put a gun to FD's head and demanded that this game has to be online. They deliberately decided to do so. Hence, they also have to have a plan to provide appropriate support during holidays.
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This. Yes I absolutely know how much 24x7/365 costs, in fact I vetoed some proposed projects exactly because they would have required a support level we could not afford. The thing is, if you want to sell an ALWAYS ONLINE GAME, then you MUST have an always on support. You have no freedom of choice on this. As I said before, making money is not guaranteed to be easy.
 

Kris

K
philux said:
Nobody put a gun to FD's head and demanded that this game has to be online.
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But we have to remember that online part was always going to be separate from offline part. If servers would go down, you could not continue your online commander, you could only play separate offline session (separate "save").

My point - offline mode would not "fix" potential server problems.
 
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philux

philux
Kris said:
But we have to remember that online part was always going to be separate from offline part. If servers would go down, you could not continue your online game, you could only play separate offline session.

My point - offline mode would not "fix" potential server problems.
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Sure. What I was implying is that if a company decides to sell an online game or make an essential part of their game always online, then they also have to provide adequate customer support and maintenance; esp., during those days when most ppl have time to play such as on the weekends and on holidays.
 

Kris

K
philux said:
Sure. What I was implying is that if a company decides to sell an online game or make an essential part of their game always online, then they also have to provide adequate customer support and maintenance; esp., during those days when most ppl have time to play such as on the weekends and on holidays.
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Ok, misunderstood your post.

Agree, they got to resolve support issues better. Hope they learn from this (and most importantly, make it better - hire more people, communicate faster etc).
 

Talarin

T
I didn't realise that Frontier were offering an SLA on their product. I guess I should have read the license agreement...
 

bitstorm

bitstorm
Muthax said:
Luponator said:
Of course not. Only clueless newbies have ghost cargo, or cargo bay issues, or outfittimg problems. It will all go away once everyone knows how to play.
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Oh you mean that couple of hours of hiccup the other day?

Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about some massive game breaking bug that is impeding people from playing
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What like the ghost cargo issue, the cargo bay issues and the outfitting problems that are preventing people from playing?
 
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philux

philux
Talarin said:
I didn't realise that Frontier were offering an SLA on their product. I guess I should have read the license agreement...
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SLA is meant for renting servers or other B2B online services. Online gaming companies usually waive all responsibility for failure of online services through their EULA, as does FD in ED's EULA. So customers buy online games while hoping that the company acts in good faith and doesn't screw them over eventually.
 
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DarkWalker

D
philux said:
SLA is meant for renting servers or other B2B online services. Online gaming companies usually waive all responsibility for failure of online services through their EULA, as does FD in ED's EULA. So customers buy online games while hoping that the company acts in good faith and doesn't screw them over eventually.
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Yep. And with the Internet, news of outages and issues travel fast and are for all intents and purposes preserved forever, which means not having good service levels can gimp the prospect of future sales.

It's in Frontier's best interest to not give players cause to complain about the service; if they can't do that, maybe they shouldn't have made the game an always-online affair.

BTW, in this light the issue happening after two weeks of smooth play is even more damming, as it happened when they couldn't even blame the rush caused by launch. Which means that, unless they get their act together and make their servers more reliable, the same thing could happen again at any time.

Though I'm more concerned about how the fix seems to be taking its sweet time to be applied to everyone. That likely means that they are manually fixing each account, which means an employee is basically being paid to spend time fixing things, cutting down on their margins. If they get other incidents like this, the cost of fixing things might impair the long term prospects of the game, specially because there is no subscription.
 

kjbaran

K
BLCBob said:
That hiccup took all of my ship upgrades, leaving me in a system I can't get out of. It took most of my cash, leaving me unable to buy the upgrades to jump far enough to get out of the system I'm now stuck in. I also can't afford cargo, to make money to buy upgrades to get out of the system I'm stuck in. I'd call that game breaking.
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The hiccup on the 1st of Jan took away my Type 6, 300k, and left me with a sidewinder and 30k. I have NOTHING. This sucks uber and makes replaying VERY difficult considering how much time I put in right before getting to my first T6. I submitted a ticket with of course no response yet. If anyone is willing to part with something of substance to help me I sure would be grateful!
 

Steve O B Have

Steve O B Have
From Frontier as posted in the INC article:

Hello,

On January 1st 2015 at 11pm GMT we had an issue with one of our databases . One of our engineers spotted this immediately and removed the database from circulation. This took around 2 hours to complete, test and make live to commanders. In this time, a relatively small number of commanders were affected by failed transactions and small losses in credits. These commanders should have received their refunds, along with a 20% bonus as in previous instances.

If you are still having problems, please create a support ticket for our customer support team via https://support.elitedangerous.com.

Finally, we do have 24/7 server engineer coverage over the holiday period to catch problems such as these. However, to further communicate these issues to commanders, we are currently working on creating a server status page where we can communicate any immediate issues or known problems. This should be live within the week.

Apologies again for the disruption in service.

Fly safe commanders!
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WalterHWhite

WalterHWhite
^ Sounds like all the information anyone would ever need, thank you.

Seems the "channels where information is delivered and should be expected by users" could do with some improvement though.
 
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