Dethdlr From Rich Lawrence on the EQ2Forums:
Hi folks, this is Rich Lawrence, CTO with SOE. Some of you probably remember me from original Planetside as “Twist”. TR rules, but I digress.
I must apologize for the extended down time of EQ2 while we get everything in order for free to play. Obviously we didn’t anticipate it being this long. I know how important it is for the game to be available when you want to play, and what it means to miss a raid you were looking forward to, or check out new features. In this case the issues that are keeping you from playing are under my watch, so I need to say it: I’m sorry. I value my game time as well when I can get it, and I know how you feel.
EQ2 is a great product with a long history for us, and part of the reason we are taking so long on this update is because of that. Let me explain a bit. In order for everyone that played in the past or currently to get the best experience when logging in on the first day of free to play, there were many changes that had to be made in data to represent all of the features those players (past or present) were entitled to, plus new goodies, and the merge of what amounts to two different products in a business sense (EQ2 and EQ2X). This is a lot of accounts – millions – and a lot of ‘business rule’ complexity. While we have top of the line hardware running our databases for this kind of thing, and folks dedicated just to keeping it working well, the result of all that took quite a bit longer than we thought it would.
I hear the engineers of you out there (and yes, I know we have many very capable developers in our audience) saying, “But you should have modeled it ahead of time and known how long it would take!”. You’re absolutely right. We did. Turns out our model was just a tad less than 1:1 scale in some respects. I know, I know, Captain Obvious calling.
In the end we realized two things as the maintenance progressed – that this was going to take much longer than we thought it would, and correspondingly the results would be not as well tested as they should be before release. For instance, there was a risk that some out of those millions might not end up with the right race packs or character slots. In the end, we decided it was best to extend the maintenance through the night so we could do a better job of checking that kind of thing.
Please understand that we don’t do this casually or think that it’s a lack of dedication. Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that.
I’m committed to changing how we do this type of operation going forward so that it has much less visible impact on you the players – we will trade more back end prep time and resources against less publish downtime, basically. I do hope everybody enjoys the massive effort the game team has put into this release. I’ll see you online tomorrow.
At least they are trying to make an attempt to make sure the game is running smooth before everyone plays with the new content. I would rather wait a long time and get a good game than, getting it rushed out and being crappy.
What no SmokeJumper this time.
A little bit of down-time isn’t the end of the world. Thanks for taking the time necessary to get it right, even if it’s longer than expected.
The truth is, people will complain either way, complain if it takes longer, and complain if it’s on time and things aren’t as good as they could/would have been… So just take your time.
Thanks.
This guy should do all the PR related stuff with EQ2 from now on.
Gotta agree with Necromancer.
Rolling out the CTO to make an announcement is impressive and I’ll take bad news from him a lot easier than I would from SJ as we all know what BS comes out of his mouth at times.
I appreciate Mr. Lawrence explanation. Especially the detailed run down. As well as agreeing to have these non-punctual issues resolved, and hopefully done with. Hope its not another false SOE promise.
“the results would be not as well tested as they should be before release.”
You dont say…
Hmmm somewhat of a pleasant change tbh from the standard “dont expect the servers up until morning”….aint too happy with the game being down but having the CTO come out and address the community to give us a real heads up/appology is refreshingly new and hope they continue with this kind of update in the future.
Downtime already being more than 24 hours is annoying but this Lawrence’s explanation appears honest and apologetic rather than the usual insincere platitudes. One wonders though whether they plan further than the next update when doing things like pretending the X server was a separate game.
@Daalilama 100% agree. I really do feel they tried to combine too many things into one. They should have left the free to play stuff for January.
Definately better than the past here. yeah it sucks our game is down but what a heck of an improvement on the communication end of things so for that I give cookies and milk to all of SOE and Espresso & Cider to all those working the late shift to have this thing up for us by morning. And to anyone that deals with the trolls I give you a shiney new whip and a fresh pint. :-)Enjoy the night and God bless.
Very nice announcement, it’s always good to have the real people in charge explaining what they’re doing.
been there done that TWNS is never fun. They have my sympathy and goodwill.
(Techies Worst Nightmare Syndrome) couldnt Google it, used to be common IT slang, getting old feeling ancient.
while it may in part be his fault, at least he had the courage to step up to the playerbase (which can be rather vicious at times) and take all the blame. cant help but feel this poor guy was rushed through all his prep work. seeing as how the official launch date wasnt announced till days prior, web casts seemed to also suggest some devs thought it wasnt all ready.
I’ll admit that this apology was well written and appears sincere however, the lack of preparation makes me wonder how committed SOE is to this game anymore. . . Considering this xpac is not releasing any new content and considering they have done server mergers before, I thought they would have their stuff in order. This is one of the prime reasons ppl are talking abt leaving EQ2 for Star Wars.
Holy cow, some actual honesty for a change. A nice change and I appreciate it. I’d much rather it be down longer and they get it right.
maybe they got the point on customer relations a bit but did they learn to not be so greedy i know quite a few silver accounts that feel like the goldies got treated good ans the silvers got crapped on
Im sure we gonna survive some more hours without the game. Just keep doing a great job !
“I’m sorry”
Rich Lawrence, CTO with SOE
Ah one more chapter to add to the Sony story.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/what-is-sony-now-11172011.html
“An earthquake followed by a tsunami had devastated eastern Japan.
He considered returning to Tokyo but decided against it. “They didn’t need me there,” he says now, taking a sip of tea in his Fifth Avenue pied-à-terre. Stringer doesn’t speak Japanese and concluded that he’d be more hindrance than help.”
“Obviously we didn’t anticipate it being this long.”
Rich Lawrence, CTO with SOE
“you can’t expect people to be patient.”
Sir Howard Stringer, Sony CEO
Thanks Twist for the perfect amount of honesty. I used to have to work long hours myself and in the end, it wasn’t worth the risk of falling asleep at the wheel. Thank your folks for the devotion but I would rather not play a game with blood on it.
Wow no SJ saying anything, maybe they are finally going to realize something. I love the honesty of what all he said, it sounds right, I know from a mater of fact of how database migrations can be a pain in the rear. Been down that road before, and I sure don’t miss the days of cleanup after a large scale conversion.
I am glad they decided to get it right instead of releasing it in a state of flux.
I wonder why, knowing that expansions always have issues to work out, that Sony would do a merge of F2P with Live at the same time. Poor thinking on someone’s part. The merge could have waited another 2 weeks or so. I am impatient but can wait for a working viable game.
This is the best response I’ve seen SOE ever release. Maybe there is light at the end of this deep dark tunnel that they’re dug
I look at it this way, there is always downtime whenever an expansion launches, there is usually downtime when a GU goes live, and there is usually a brief downtime when holiday events go live. Now combine an Expansion launch, major GU, and Frostfell with the new free to play system as well as combining the Freeport server into the rest of the normal server rules sets… what could possibly go wrong?
That said, I appreciate the honesty and openness of this letter. It actually came out and said what happened and had good reasoning behind some of the issues. Cheers to the man for putting this out there.
Now I can’t help but notice that good old SmokeJumper had nothing to do with this letter. Anyone else pick up on that? Maybe someone is taking the hint that people don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth anymore?
I posted some time ago I suspected the problems were the complexity of all the account mergers and character allotments … when it was so arcane that most people couldn’t understand how that was going to work (and SJ had to do all that math), you know that’s a lot of data crunching going on, and they don’t have a supercomputer out there.
It was very nice of the technical side to post and apologize. Nothing much they can do, a mistake was made on how their hardware/software was going to handle this conversion, so they owned up to it. If you think about this process in terms of having to launch an entirely new game, which is basically what they are doing, then an extended amount of time is not unreasonable.
Everyone here who works a job has probably been in a similar situation at some point, where you couldn’t deliver as promised for whatever reason. SOE has handled it so far with good grace and dignity, and has been as transparent as they can be. You can’t fault the customer service, so far.
The changes to the fundamental philosophy of the game, however, I still find disturbing — five AAs automatically at level 10, AA exp when you log in, as well as fixing the admitted coin limit exploit to make sure people have to buy higher tier accounts are all handwriting on the wall showing more easy mode for casual players and pay-to-play directions. I am concerned they are taking all the challenge out of the game, starting now.
Ah well, I am getting my house clean, anyway! No Norrathian distractions.
as gamers /adult gamers we realize that programs take awhile to install switch download etc but as far asthe game it is for adults and mature teens and i hear way to often that some silly thing has been added to the game like gambleing nobody came here to gamble or to unlock bags or pay for a toon to have sony take it back cause they cant produce content to play and if i wanted to make the dungeons for sony i might as well make MY OWN GAME if they want players to join they should stop making me pay for my characters and make me pay for game content like more dungeons or more zones or even the same zones with more lvls and more aa and more aromor to earn by questing not by buying it from sony
@Trueflight — maybe this letter was a tactical decision to show the entire team was working on this. This is the Chief Technical Officer, not the Producer of the game, so we are getting the explanation from the guy specifically in charge of doing the technical aspects of the conversion.
I think it was a good move. I am sure SJ probably has little to do with the nuts and bolts of the conversion, anyway, that would be the CTO.
If it was an accounting problem, perhaps we would have heard from the CFO, whoever that is!
SJ had to explain why spending $40 on a race, particle effects on weapons, and DYOD was a good idea. He also had to show team spirit and commitment to the game. Which he did, more or less.
oops, wish I could edit … $40 on a new class. Sorry.
ok the asstards locked my wifes main toon and thats fkd up sony probably just lost 4 accounts if they dont fix that crap my wife only rally played the 1 toon and they just locked it and wwe r both highly pissed off
Glad to hear from someone else other than “smoke and mirrors”. It is concerning though that the CTO had to post as to me this implies something is more seriously wrong than usual.
Found an interesting read about SJ, if he holds true to form (average time with a company) we should have less than a year left with him before he moves on-
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgeorgeson
Unexpected shit happens all the time despite how flawlessly you planned things. Sometimes things just don’t fall into place once executed. We as a player-base are obviously excited about this add on and we love and want eq2 at its best that why regardless of the strong emotion shown about our disappointment we still empathize with the company.
[Comments about Paganism removed. – Ed ]
It’s always a good thing to come out and inform the users. I’m cool with the down time to ensure a more quality product. Got so much done around the house last night anyway, and ranked up in MW3 on my PS3 for awhile…woot!
Dalimar of Vox
[Comments about Paganism removed. – Ed ]
This is still smokejumpers fault all the way till the end, and I do blame him and so should soe, this was all his entire idea. I got to say several bad business back to back, and he needs to be held accountable. Hopefully they will, however all I have to do is look at history and look at smedley after what he did to swg and realize they reward failure.
I just hope when all is said and done we don’t have the nge handed to eq2.
Woke up anxious to play the game and it was still down BOOOoo
Rich Lawrence for the new PR Rep!
Actually described what was going on woah….
Did not address the gaming community as they were 5th graders!
Seemed to put his own emotions to describe what most are also felling, waiting to play!
I dare to say this post eased my pain of not getting to play before work.
SOE can basically do anything they want. The game is dieing why care? And the lame excuse of we are making sure we get it right… Companies can mistreat consumers all they want it seems.
I agree with all the posters above that hope is not a strategy! And hope was exactly what they had when they decided to all these database merges at once. Clearly there was pressure from the higest levels to deliver the product right now, and caution be damned. I think the team really does work hard under circumstances that are now less than ideal.
@dragonhearted, I tend to agree with you. SJ was brought on to convert this game to Free to Play, as was suspected. He did completely spin some fictions about it, but in the end, he has done so. As soon as the dust settles, if not before, he will be moving on. I don’t think he’s particularly interested in doing old school type content and end game play. I think he is good at making an old MMO into something shiny and new that makes money through small purchases by the players. As far as Management is concerned, he did his job so far.
As a gamer since 1999 (which is not as long as some people have played) I am now firmly an old-schooler with anachronistic ideas about game play. It’s not where the industry is going. Those of us who like a complex, challenging progression game are getting fewer and fewer. The majority of gamers seem to want easy mode, since that’s what sells. Look at the titles that have come out recently — and look at the titles that have failed. Like it or not, WoW did change the gaming landscape to one of casual gameplay. Now SOE is saying, we think people want to pay for services with real cash, and we can make more money that way than just adding content to our older million dollar title. The fact is, most people have more money than time or patience to progress.
well even though i have not played this game long i have played rp games since their birth atari didnt really have rp games but nintendo did and sony has had a few goodies but the crap going on here is about all i can handle if things are not straightened out about the toons that they locked on me and my wife the to hell with sony
Credit to Twist. That can’t have been easy to write.
Bricks to the fools that made the call to push all this out now, though. Everybody saw this trainwreck coming, why couldn’t TPTB?
Twist proves what I’ve said–there’s damn fine people on staff with SOE, even now. It’s the leadership that should be deep sixed ASAP.
People complaining about the extended-extended downtime need to consider that this process is MUCH more complex than any previous expansion, or any server merge. It is obvious the expansion was ready to go by the fact that many of us (myself included) could patch as of yesterday afternoon. In a server merge, one set of data from one server is added to the data for another server (and a script runs to check for duplicate names and such). A server merge only affects players on the respective two servers (a small percentage of the total player-base), and other than moving/reflagging data, the majority of a person’s account is not actually touched.
In this F2P conversion, every single account that has ever played EQ2 is being touched and modified. This needs to be a very careful and delicate process, as people are, of course, very attached to their accounts and characters. Any error which caused someone to (even temporarily) lose access to something they were entitled to would cause an uproar. The complicated scripts they developed in response to people’s fears they would lose their characters/slots likely also added complexity and time to the problem.
In addition, this transaction likely involves millions of accounts, and while you can estimate the time it will take, you will never really know for sure until you do it. As someone mentioned on the EQ2 forums, even an underestimation of a few seconds in their calculation could make a huge difference in the time it will take. I’d like to take it a step further and do some math:
Let’s say for example, that there are 1 million accounts that need to be adjusted (likely an underestimate). Then let’s say you estimate it takes 1/20 of a second to make all the necessary adjustments to an account:
1,000,000 / 20 (number accounts you can do in 1 second) = 50,000 seconds
50,000 / 60 (number of seconds in a minute) = ~833 minutes
833 / 60 (number of minutes in an hour) = ~14 hours
Now let’s say on the real hardware, things take slightly longer than you expected, and it turns out to take 1/10 of a second to adjust each account. (Keep in mind, we’re still talking in small fractions of a second here.)
1,000,000 / 10 = 100,000 seconds
100,000 / 60 = ~1667 minutes
1667 / 60 = ~28 hours
As you can see, even a few extra fractions of a second can drastically change a time estimation. Even if they over-estimated the amount of time it would take when making their downtime announcement, it is still possible they didn’t overestimate enough. Could they have done better? Probably…but as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Since the F2P conversion seems to be the only issue, I would suspect this would have happened even if they split up the expansion and conversion onto separate dates. The only difference would have been having two days of significant downtime instead of one 😉
While it’s frustrating not to be able to play (I was looking forward to being able to check out all the new stuff), I understand that even “The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry.” I’m sure they’ve been working like crazy the past few weeks to get things as ready for this update (they’ve said as much), and that they are still working their behinds off trying to get the servers up as quickly as possible. (If we think we’re suffering by not being able to play a game, think about the folks who’ve been at work for 30 hours straight and had to call their families to let them know they don’t know when they’ll be home.) I feel for them, and I’m sure if they knew a way to avert this problem ahead of time they would have done it. (If for no other reason than, heck, they don’t want to be stuck there all night right before the holidays trying to fix it.) I’m sure they want to make sure this doesn’t happen again just as much as you do, and luckily for both of us, this conversion should be a one-time thing.
I’m really glad they are communicating with us about what’s going. Having the CTO of a major company make a post is a big thing. It seems like they are trying to do better with communication this time around, and I only hope the temperaments of some on the forums/fan-sites don’t scare them off too much 😛 It’s hard to keep doing the right thing when all you get is flack for whatever you do.
I’d like to thank everyone who is working long hours to get the servers up and running and make this game better. I’d like to thank the community folks (and Rich) for trying to keep us updated, bearing out the flames, and keeping their enthusiasm.
I look forward to being able to play tonight 🙂
@Dragonhearted, thanks for the SJ info. Maybe they blocked out the final bit of text in his resume where after each place of employment “George successfully completed his mission, then, inciting white hot rage across the playerbase, was run out of town by screaming mobs brandishing pitchforks and torches.”
I’m glad Rich showed up to post something worthwhile. Kudos, bud! If it had been that worthless spin doctor, SJ, it would have had the effect of throwing a bucket of gasoline on a burning house.
This all could have been done much better. Why compile so many complex actions on one date? Was someone trying to show his epeen at work? The only thing accomplished here was yet another painfully tangible example of how whatever SJ touches doesn’t turn to gold..but to a brown and squishy morass.
That all said, I expected a full day write-off of access to the game. But, now we’re on Day 2. Dollars to donuts when they turn everything back on there is going to be unannounced, emergency downtime shortly thereafter.
I suppose the brighter side of this amazing launch is with more downtime, and an increasingly annoyed customer base, there will be a greater chance to toss out an appeasement like a couple days of double xp to make up for lost time.
Which is why old accounts should have been purged years ago, and should be purged every year. Does that mean delete them? No, but moving them to an archive is a much better alternative than keeping millions of records around for a game in which less than 200,000 people still even play.
Sadly, this would actually increase the performance of the game, not just this conversion. They’ve had database issues for years, and the lack of a properly maintained database has been the source of many bugs, sadly, for years.
[Comments about Paganism removed. – Ed ]
All you have to do is look back at the failures this company has had over the past year. Like the downtime for hacking, other downtimes for other updates. Consistant downtime all year long for patch after patch to fix dov. I gave up expecting quality updates back before dov.
Not only the simple honesty but the clarity of this post is appreciated. No “grandfathers”, “cliffnotes” and other strange terms; just straightforward English explaining just enough for most people to understand that they really are trying their best to fix things.
Most agree that they’d rather wait a bit and have things working properly than rush them and have a mess. The sad thing is that we usually end up with both. If they weren’t ready, why pick this date? Why not leave it a week, a fornight, a month? Not many would have been been surprised if Age of Destiny had appeared in February, a year after the last expansion.
Some say that the rush was influenced by the imminent appearance of the new Star Wars game. Really? Even if that were the case, there’d surely be more to gain by getting things done properly and releasing Age of Destiny just about the time the Old Republic’s shine wears off, rather than all this downtime, which won’t even be followed by a proper expansion.
When they did the server merges a few months ago, they did the first one, got that running properly, then went onto the next one. By the time the last one was done, the operation was so smooth that many people didn’t even notice it happening. Why then didn’t they follow a similar procedure this time? Why does the X server merge and all the aspects of a major game update and the Age of Destiny all have to happen at once? No doubt there are interdependent bits but there must be a way to break it into stages so you don’t end up this kind of mess. Brilliant as these people might be, they’re still human and aren’t likely to come up with creative solutions on the third day of half a pizza and 2 hours sleep.
They know they could have done it better:
“I’m committed to changing how we do this type of operation going forward so that it has much less visible impact on you the players – we will trade more back end prep time and resources against less publish downtime, basically.”
What I wonder is, what will the team sacrifice to get these changes made? Tradeoffs are going to occur, but what will the impact be?
Sadly SOE seems to have a lot of experience now apologizing to their customers. Mistakes happen, but this kind of massive mis-calculation is very troubling. But then again, who wants the game to fold? Not me. We can complain all we want, but if the end result is the title is shut down, that’s not what anyone wants to see, either. The result of this latest debacle is that we continue to lose trust in SOE’s ability to run the game so it’s playable. I hope they can pull this one out and restore our trust in their title, with the result being a fun, playable multi-million dollar game that we have come to expect.
Any chance of an update after a hard nights work on the servers.
In the corporate world where I worked for over 30 years, if this kind of issue occured, someone was held responsible. Who is being held responsible?
If we see no changes in the management team, you are condoning this type of ill-fated planning. If you (SOE) want to continue your current trend, then please continue on; however, I strongly encourage you to send a strong, clear message to your management team.
I shall henceforth refer to 2011 in EQ2 as The Year of Downtime.
Seriously, this just gets ridiculous past a point.
I usually don’t respond to people, but asking for folks to be fired right before the holidays, during these harsh economic times is pretty harsh, bud. Screw up or not, think about if you were in their shoes….working 30+ hours straight to get things running while people are calling for you to get fired. We’re all human and no one is perfect.
That’s all from me.
I know there’s a vocal group that wants to see heads roll, but I doubt that will happen. I am not sure what firing people would accomplish, anyway. I am not much into punative punishments. Realistically, I think this is going to be chalked up to the cost of doing business, with the resulting revenuefrom f2p making up for a couple of days of customers complaining.
You know they are just going to throw us a bone, hopefully it’s double or triple station cash, I am sure it will be a double exp weekend/week/month!
They already said they had some items for us to claim when the servers came up.
@Ayeri, we are all human and no one is perfect, and no one is going to die from this ridiculous miscalculation, but there is still corporate responsibility and doing your job right. Heads have rolled for less in other companies, certainly. They are losing money every minute that we can’t play (no purchases with cash). Luckily, the make-up prizes don’t cost them anything.
I just want to add — the unfortunate truth is, the people who get fired are usually the ones least at fault in these situations, as most upper level manangers know how to cover their behinds pretty well. And I am not sure SOE would want to air dirty laundry by publicly firing or reprimanding SJ or Rich, or whoever is actually responsible. Maybe later there will be a quiet personnel change, maybe not. That’s real life. It has to be something pretty bad, like what happened at Penn State, for instance, to have a real public firing and shake up in management. This isn’t that bad or important.
Lol I am not making excuses for SJ and team they blown it again this time. I just feel for the average guy who is having to fix this mess, been there done that. The true problem is with management and not some of the lower level workers.
I agree with Anaogi, 2011 should be known as the year of downtime. Do I expect the server up today NO! I think if soe were smart they would go ahead and tell folks expect it up Thursday, and if it gets fixed before then that works too.
We all have a right to be angry at the total incompetence that got us in this situation. However we had problems for the past year and then some. SJ still needs to be held accountable this happened again on his watch as the rest of the down time we had this year. It is called poor management.
However SJ was hired to take us free to play, and I am sure eq1 is next on the list and possibly vanguard. I would bet they will let him finish his free to play work and he will move on to the next phase in his career. I honestly dont expect him to stay around much longer.
If I were some of the folks playing eq1 and vangaurd I would be watching this and going omg.
Game just came up, was able to finish a rush order and then went down again. Mains were unlocked but 5 baby toons (paid for char slots) were still locked.
Keeping fingers crossed:)
Thanks for the update Awing, I wasn’t even checking at this point — it’s only 8am pacific.
I just tried, I got the “trying login servers” message.
At the end of the day you have to remember that test runsor estimates are done in sterile, controlled vacuums. Once it is rolled out in truth everything becomes subject to Murphy’s Law. That is why shuttles explode, cars accelerate by themselves, and computter code doesn’t always work they way should. No one died be be because EQ2 didn’t come up on time, unlike cars and shuttles so take a deep breath, chew on the bone the toss you and let’s all pretend to be adults.
Was just reading on facebook that the game crashed while someone was in the middle of a sc purchase, might be wise to hold off on buying anything through sc for a bit, until system seems stable. Just a thought.
[Comments about Paganism removed. – Ed ]
SOE screwed up and they’re admitting it. Deal with it. It’s not pretty, but we’re all used to it by now. You say you’ve been in the corporate world for 20 years. I think you’re lying, because you come across like a petulant child. Anyone who’s worked on large projects knows that little things can set you back a long way, especially in software where milliseconds multiplied by millions of records can soon add up.
I didn’t see that comment, not on the official eq2 facebook page?
From the official forums posted 8:12am (probably pacific time):
“They are very close to completing the maintenance and just doing some final testing. Things are looking very good and they’ll have another update shortly.”
And, Facebook fail, SOE — you haven’t updated FB at all this morning. All the apologies in the world don’t make up for lack of information when you have a lot of impatient customers. I would just like to see what’s going on, so I can plan accordingly.
It is way past time for ranting and raving, indignation, and also personally, for having any trust in SOE’s ability/determination to provide a quality product! 7 years of inexplicable/poorly managed server outages, bugs, nerfs, and half-baked ideas/changes is more than enough for me.
No longer have faith/interest in this game. EQ2 was magnificent at Launch in 2004 & remained the absolute best MMO experience that I have had through Kunark. Since though, the decline of a once great game has been tragic. In it’s current state of seeming directionless disarray I no longer care… account cancelled 12/7/11.
Sincerely hope SOE sorts game out for the rest of you, if you are still loyal to the game you sure do deserve that at least!
My biggest concern right now is that I have the correct launcher … I am not technical and my box is set up by a technical person, so I hope I have the right launcher and don’t have to go messing around with stuff.
wow, so many peeps in withdrawal here. I for one am thankful for the communication they are doing. It is way better than the mess that happened before. Looking forward to the servers being up, but not freaking out just because it is down for a day. sheese.
QUOTE: I look at it this way, there is always downtime whenever an expansion launches, there is usually downtime when a GU goes live, and there is usually a brief downtime when holiday events go live. Now combine an Expansion launch, major GU, and Frostfell with the new free to play system as well as combining the Freeport server into the rest of the normal server rules sets… what could possibly go wrong?
WELL SAID, TRUEFLIGHT!
I am a little surprized SOE took on such lofty goals. What were they thinking? Or perhaps they weren’t. Sounds like some corpoate suit has been calling shots from an armchair light years away from the front lines.
I don’t mind the downtime, much. Like many others I would prefer to see it done right the first time. While the sincere apology is appreciated, and a nice change from the past, is it a sign of true reform or is it just a change in marketing strategy. After all, it worked for Tylenol.
I have read that SOE will actually be looking for more customer feedback in the future. Since EQ2 is moving to the FTP strategy how will customer be defined? Will it be the player who has been in since the beginning and paid several years of subscriptions and software upgrades or will it be the new ftp customer who has lots of disposable cash to spend in the marketplace? It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but the phrase “what have you done for me, lately…” comes to mind.
13 minutes ago on facebook “An update from the team! They are very close to completing the maintenance and doing some final testing. Things are looking very good and they’ll have another update shortly.”
I’m not sorry for SOE. I am sorry for all the techies, programmers and engineers etc who are trying to sort this out at ground level cos their bosses messed up (as usual) with their decision making. They will be getting all the stress, all the grief. They will be being expected to perform miracles and then getting blamed when they can’t. I speak from personal, online games industry experience.
Rant, raqe and flame at SOE the Company, but don’t have a go at those whose fault this is NOT, but who are the ones working to fixing everyone else’s mess. I suspect a lot of them ARE pulling stupidly long hours. I expect most of them saw this coming and probably expressed their concerns but were ignored. I’ve experienced it. Its not fun.
SOE: you are idiots for releasing the xpac AND the F2P on the same day. You don’t need 20/20 hindsight to know that was insane. I’m not surprised tho, having played EQ2 since launch.
SOE techies trying to sort the problem: I for one appreciate what you are doing, trying to achieve the impossible. Remember to sleep, remember to eat and don’t forget what your families look like.
This doesn’t make me a wet liberal, it makes me a realist, with experience to back it up. The bosses have the great ideas and the little guys and gals who actually have to do the work are expected to make the ridiculous happen. Cut ’em some slack and aim your perfectly justified anger at the right people.
Now gimmie my CE goodies and my ratonga beastlord!
Wish there was a like comment on the official forums … best post today by Tillerman35, made me laugh:
RadarX: Folks we certainly understand frustration with the current downtime but I would be remiss if I did not remind everyone that the forum guidelines are being enforced. A few of you are finding this out very quickly. Please post responsibly.
Tillerman: For some reason, this makes me want to post irresponsibly. I think I’ll get drunk and take my 4G iPad out on the road and attempt to reply to this thread while holding an infant out of the driver’s side window so he can feel the breeze in his face.
[Comments about Paganism removed. – Ed ]
In the real world deadlines are missed all the time, timelines adjusted and rewritten, TTC’s (time to complete) estimates thrown out and redone, deliveries dates missed, even FedEx is occasionally late. In my job we count on our sub delivering their work so we can continue developing our plans, they are frequently late, and I end up working long hard hours to do my work on a compressed schedule because they shortened it on me. Sometimes I cannot make the shortened deadline and we make adjustments. It happens but only the most egregious failures warrant firing an employee (in thirty years I have not seen one, not a single one). Hell people die on the table due to negligence on the part of doctors and there are fewer than would be expected law suits.
This is a game. The people working on it are not conspiring to ruin your life. They are honestly doing their best. I (like them) are most sorry that their best efforts do not match your expectations, but life goes on.
lol Grimmond
is so right, real life things happen, we accept it, and in the game world expect everything perfect. Yet go to a doctor paying a fortune to sit in the waiting room, an hour later, waiting more in the examining room, lol real life is just as fun! At least Soe is trying, not to give us a mess! Even if on there track record it will be! Truth is it might not have good customer service, but they are making an attempt at it and imo thats a good start! And although in the past its been really bad, maybe this is the start of changes to come… and tbh there isnt another mmo out there imo and many others that is as good… the game its self is Uber and if there staff steps it up, then we might all get a shocking good thing out of it in the end 🙂 Cheer up, its just a game guys! And isnt life or death..for any of us!
well if they dont open the game i wanna duel somebody so get ur swords out lol
If nothing else, all the downtime is useful for seeing how wretched the EQ2 user base really is, as people who never post come out of the woodwork to rant and rave.
…Beta server is up? Wha…?
…..and up. For the love of Kibo, log in before blood is spilled over grammar and spelling! 😉
And its down again……