Feldon Although there has been no post to EQ2Players.com or the EQ2 Forums, it seems that all SOE login servers are down for up to 9 hours of maintenance, as well as several hours of downtime for the EQ2 game servers. Here is a post from the SWG Forums from their Community team:
On Monday August 9th, we will be conducting maintenance across several different systems. The work will affect customer login and authentication, and we will be bringing down the galaxies while work is ongoing. Once the intrusive part of the maintenance is complete, we will bring up the galaxies and make them available to players.
The maintenance window is scheduled from 12:30AM through 8:30AM PDT. If additional time is needed to complete the work, we’ll update this thread accordingly.
We appreciate your patience and understanding during this process, and apologize for the disruption.
and from the Vanguard forums:
We have some maintenance to do on the servers on Monday and this will unfortunately mean you won’t be able to get to the login servers during the hours of 12am to 7:30am Pacific time on Monday 9th August.
If you’re already inside the game during these times you will be fine to continue playing, but should you log out you won’t be able to get back in.
There’s a rampant discussion on the EQ2 Forums on this subject.
A bunch of accounts were hacked over the weekend and some of them were from people that didn’t give out their account info to anyone so, I’m guessing someone might have hacked the login servers.
This was scheduled at least since last Wednesday, but for whatever reason they didn’t post any information about it on the EQ2 forums. It sounds like they expected a short downtime and ran into problems. Unfortunately, SOE has a long-standing policy to treat their customers like mushrooms when something like this happens.
The odd thing imo is that the more channels (twitter, facebook etc) the less communication.
Amnerys is fail. (And not just because of this)
He/She should be able to twitter/fb it from anywhere in the freaking world.
According to a post on the offical forum from Amnerys- it appears she was not brought into the loop via email notification so that she could let us know. Perhaps they need to update their email lists to include the new staffers O.o on important details.
100,000’s of customers, and they forgot to tell their entire revenue stream that their product will not be available for 9+ hours !!! This is what their getting paid for is to be online and available.
This is not “oops, did you not get the memo of the meeting”….this is beyond acceptable. There are things that are acceptable, understandable if things are missed, but not informing your entire revenue stream of this is poor leadership and care for their community.
Brutal. I am glad my 2 account run out this Friday. SOE is slipped to far for me (with F2P), and this just adds more fuel to that fire.
U N A C C E P T A B L E !
I’m not going to fry one person for being tired, or having a real life.
The real issue to me is that it does not make sense that there is only 1 person at SOE designated to post updates, news, server messages, etc. on their largest product — EverQuest II.
Let’s think about this. Update Notes and Status Updates are sent out as an e-mail to one person. That one person has to format the information and post it. There isn’t really a codified system for someone else to be watching the announcements and making sure they’re up-to-date.
Kiara did a tremendous job with announcements and posts on EQ2Players, but there should be a backup, someone who’s picked for the hand-off, and someone ready to pick up the slack if something is missed.
I know of no company that has a single point of failure for announcements about their flagship product, except SOE.
This is not an Amnerys issue, this is a “We don’t manage our company message to the public” issue. This is not just inherent to EQ2. As a press site, I get screen shots without EQ2/SOE badging/copyrights and have to add them myself.
Feldon, thnx al lot for all the Fan Faire coverage, followed it close !
Perhaps I should quit reading this site before I rage quit and leave my guild without me… Currently raiding is the only thing I do, leveling my alt, I cant do that anymore. Im getting more and more tired with SoE and their false promises, especially the incompetance they show on so many fronts.
Craig, you really think EQ2 has 100,000´s subscribers ?! I don´t think so..
I believe EQ2 has roughly 250-300,000 subscribers. If 5% of subscribers are online during prime time, that’s 12-15,000 players online including all servers, which jives with some informal numbers people have tracked. Considering a lot of players only log in 1-2 times a week and some only a few days a month for live events, I have no reason to disbelieve these numbers.
I think we are all hungry to see more players on our servers (merges incoming 🙂 ) and new players coming to the game. The logistics and ethics of getting players to TRY EQ2 for free, get hooked, and convert to subscription is the issue for me.
And I continue to be unimpressed by what I have seen of the marketing. Every time we ask “why aren’t you doing any advertising?” we get the story “it’s a six year old game”. Attack ads can backfire, but we are in desperate need of an education campaign of WHY someone would switch from WoW to EQ2.
Some of my guild members actually are going to wow from eq2 and having a blast over there. They say that wow is actually less easy mode now than eq2. I don’t buy it (having never played wow I can’t really comment) but, yeah. They need to do something.
Though all 100,000’s are not online at the same time, the business plan for SOE is that one person is to post or be informed about 9 hour outages is a poor business plan. We have moderators posting saying “I’m not sure why the servers are down”. This is how you communicate BIG events to your subscribers. Remember, the reason we pay is because we can play. When we cannot, we need to know, and Oops I was away is not an excuse. Sorry.
If Feldon is correct (great work Feldon on all that you do on this site), 250-300,000 paying subscribers, that’s about $4.5 million per month in revenue, nothing to sneeze at (all approximate), and we have only one person who is able to tell all subscribers that the servers are down for almost half a day.
I’ve drawn my conclusion.
Sounds plousible. Damn, and for that revenue they cant create some more content.
I’m really dubbing if I should continue playing till my next MMO fix, probably Old Republic. If I play a MMO it should be interesting enough to keep me busy besides raiding, that is not the case here 🙁