WesleyJanson Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I cant count the number of times i tried to log into WoW and couldnt due to maintenance. Instead of getting all pissy i played something else or went to a buddies or something.If you quit over a 4hour maintenance you have some serious issues imo.Get a life. I know youll probably say something like "they keep screwing EU players on maintenance". I understand maintenance is annoying but unsubbing.... come on. "Get a life" he says while posting on an internet forum about a Star Wars MMO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ScartStorm Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I cant count the number of times i tried to log into WoW and couldnt due to maintenance. WoW has had rolling restarts for years now and servers only come down on patch day, which is announced weeks in advance. If you can't be bothered to read that information, that's your issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HellfireMS Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I assume my post will get lost in the ocean of other replies but it appears this is the place Bioware would like us to give our feedback, so here goes. If you take the time to read this post then feel free to comment. First, its worth noting that in general I avoid forums as I like to consider myself a well balanced person who can understand multiple points of view. A trip to the forums always shows people with insanely polar opposite views so whatever you post will always get shot down and abused. However, this issue I felt was worth commenting on. I should also note that I think this a great game and that I will definitely continue playing. During the down time today I took the time to head out to the food market earlier than usual so I am no social reject who compains insanely just because I am missing 4-6 hours of gameplay. However, I do think you have handled this situation very poorly bioware/EA and would highly reccomend you take some time to do a lessons learnt about this week and gather feedback (Regardless of how negative it is) from this forum about your actions. My key thoughts are: 1) You cannot continue to annoy the EU playerbase with matinanance times that are extremely inconvenient and now starting to eat into good ol prime time. For example, I know a lot of people that consider the morning / early afternoon slot on a saturday as a great time to play as we try and wind down from a long week at work. 2) Improve your communication with the playerbase. Details as to why servers are going down on a saturday is very limited and gets people guessing. This just causing mass arguments on the forum. If you had said up front that there was a major exploit in the game that needed fixing immediately then people would be much less upset at your actions. 3) I still see no real reason why you cannot split the maintanance times for EU and US. The Eu servers and all their staff are based over in Ireland so there are no logistical issues. If you are concerned it will cause population issues on servers during the cross over period (i.e. US logging into EU during their downtime) then simply put some control mechanisms in place to mitigate that issue (which I feel will not be significant anyway). As a rational person, I will not scream "quitting" over this issue but I have to admit it has got me annoyed. if you have managed to annoy me then I am pretty sure that the vast majority of irrational people who play MMORPG will take much more drastic action. This is why I have seen quite a lot of quit posts and whereas I dont agree with them, for me that is a negative for the game I love playing at the moment as I want to see it be as prosperous as possible. I hope you have found some usefull feedbacak in this post. I will never know if it has been read or included in any future learning but at least I feel I have done my bit =) Regards Well said, well said...! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConzarCR Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 Downtime on a Saturday is quite frankly ridiculous, and why is it always EU that gets it on their prime-times? Why aren't the maintenance windows scheduled around server peak times? EU servers should get their maintenance in their evening and then US could get theirs 7 hours later. Seeing as the maintenance window is less than 7 hours is this not sensible? In addition, you get 3 hours of early-exploiters breaking the game on only (approximately) half the servers before you go and deploy a patch on the next set of servers if you put in an unforeseen exploit. Plus less EU players whining about not being able to play. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CedrionKatar Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 2) Improve your communication with the playerbase. Details as to why servers are going down on a saturday is very limited and gets people guessing. This just causing mass arguments on the forum. If you had said up front that there was a major exploit in the game that needed fixing immediately then people would be much less upset at your actions. Definately more communication is needed. According to this forum the message about the sever going down for a patch came at 12:04AM GMT. So someone like me who had to get up early this morning and so went to bed early last night only found out the servers were down when I tried to logon after doing everything else I needed to today. That's not fun but okay it's an emergency patch, except I couldn't find out what the problem was and the patch notes seem to be a fairly minor issue. I was actually hoping it would be some sort of server fix for the massive server lag the European servers had a couple of days ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bramblerose Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 The biggest fail of today's downtime was the lack of the communication to explain why the downtime was needed so urgently, i think if there been an explanation as to why it was needed from the start it may of caused less upset for alot of people. I still haven't seen an explaination for why it was needed urgently. Did I miss it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PjPablo Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I still haven't seen an explaination for why it was needed urgently. Did I miss it? Communication with the player base appears to be beneath them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UKMStrider Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 To be perfectly honest about this, losing a few hours of game time on a Saturday isn't really such a catastrophe, at least not for me. Yes it was bloody annoying, but understandable. If Bioware feels the need to pull the plug on their servers during peak EU hours, I'm sure they have a very good reason for it. My concern is the complete lack of communication over this. When I tried to log in this morning and saw the Server Down message the first thing I did was head here to see what was happening. Lo and behold, no information other than the bog standard maintenance message and, salt in the wound, they'd locked down the forums. I find this to be strongly reminiscent of the days following the release of the NGE in Star Wars Galaxies where anyone who voiced a complaint had their forum account banned and SoE tried to black everything out. Okay, maybe not so extreme as that, but certainly worthy of a flashback. Lessons can be learned from Sony Online Entertainment and how they treated their customers and I sincerely hope that Bioware do not follow their example. As paying customers I believe that we all have a right to be kept fully up to date on any issues like this along with a full explanation as to why they are occurring. This would go a long way towards quelling any discontent and knee-jerk subscription cancellations. Most of all, though, I also believe it is every customers right to be able to complain. A four hour loss of game time during peak hours with little or no explanation can make, and indeed has made, a lot of people very angry. Refusing them an outlet for this anger can be very detrimental in keeping said customers. Personally I managed to vent out my frustration on several attack choppers in the Caspian Border map of Battlefield 3. Though I would have preferred to have been able to pop onto the forums for a good rant before forgetting all about it and logging happily onto my Trooper. All that hogwash aside, though, still loving the game and having a great time with my guildies. Keep up the good development work, chaps, but perhaps a little more work on the customer service side wouldn't go amiss. Cheerio! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JerokTalram Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 It is my understanding that the NA and EU servers are in separate locations. Isn't having maintenance at the same time doing it the hard way? No, not with something called the internet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 Communication with the player base appears to be beneath them. This is the real problem. Downtime is ok if you make it clear why and what you're doing. Players can usually rally behind developers if they show they've thought problems through. Arrogantly proclaiming 'we're doing this, tough' and not even bothering to empathise with your playerbase is not the best approach to pick. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheneria Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 thanks for the fixes but why didn't you fix the pvp win bug just got it again today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
muleDArule Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 First of all I'd like to point out, that it's me paying you not the other way around. Therefore my feedback can be as much as "this system sucks. Fix it". Negative feedback of this sort is all a company can expect. I don't have to tell you how to fix your game. It's your job to fix it then and come up with ideas, that actually make sense. Which you so far often fail to do. Second of all you really need to tone down your expectations. From day one you disregard any constructive feedback whatsoever, literally [self-censored] your customers in the face. The rage, insults and rude behaviour is the effect of your doings, so deal with it. Dealing with it by deleting posts and closing threads will only hurt you, as people need to vent their rage somewhere. They'll either unsubscribe or start venting on other forums, which are read not only by your current customers, but also the potential ones. That's how black PR works. Third of all there is no constructive feedback to give in the subject of the maintenance system. It's obviously and carefully planned to cater your american customers disregarding Europe entirely. Server statistics show, that EU servers are a couple times busier during maintenance hours than the american ones. You could at least have the balls to admit it instead of feeding us with your worthless [self-censored] about "performing maintenance in off-peak hours". There's nothing worse than lying to your customers in the dumbest possible way and expecting them to believe it. We feel like you think we're [self-censored]. We are not. Therefore stop pissing us off with your pathetic lies and admit, that you don't give a flying [self-censored] about your european customers, which are basically half of your playerbase (based on server stat graphs). We'd have a clear view then, unsubscribe and watch your pathetic game crumble to dust while playing something we can actually play whenver we want. Fourth of all today's maintenance was a bad joke. There are no critical updates in your patchnotes, I can see no fixes like "fixed an exploit, which allowed the attacking side to leave their spawn area before the game begins" or "fixed an exploit, which allowed players to run with the speed of light carrying the ball in huttball games". All I see are quest fixes and some class balancing changes. This could have been done any other day, but you had to pick saturday, which is, for a lot of us, the main part of the week we can play the game. Last but not least you will not tell me how to give you feedback and I'd strongly advise you (trying to be constructive here) not to control the community on your forums like that, because that will only cause people to create unofficial forums, where they can flame you any time they feel like they need to do it. Accept the fact, that forum is a place you can actually check how the playerbase feels. In case you can't see it alread I'm going to give you a clear message: We're pissed off. Shame I bought 60 days in advance. Regards, Kalantris quoted this because it belongs on every page. page23 BioWare post page30 Kalantris post Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GHeissi Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 This is the real problem. Downtime is ok if you make it clear why and what you're doing. Players can usually rally behind developers if they show they've thought problems through. Arrogantly proclaiming 'we're doing this, tough' and not even bothering to empathise with your playerbase is not the best approach to pick. "We are aware of this issue and are working on it". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
duelpad Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I'm not going to make out like it's the end of the world or cancel my subscription, but I'm a bit disgruntled about the fact the game was brought down on a Saturday of all days. Oh well. Back to killing ex-Havoc traitors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LordRaevin Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I remember back in my World of Warcraft days community managers actualy came into topics to discuss the issues, guess BioWare didn't get a grasp on this concept yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikkeos Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 It actually makes perfect sense. You may think only a few hundred would swap servers, which would be a rather large sudden load, but in actuality it would be thousands upon thousands. Yes, people are like that and just want to play, as shown by the plethora of whine posts in this thread. You would have to Region Lock the server to prevent this sudden load, since it would affect the natural player base of that region degrading their game play. Just look at any MMO where the majority of the servers go down, the others that are still up suddenly are flooded with people making alts leading to possible and eventual instability of the server. It's happened in Aion, Rift, even the "King" WoW. Even FTP MMO's and similar genre's had this happen, resulting in them making separate clients to region lock their customer base. Negative. Most people playing during that time already are on the servers that will be available due to, you know, people being online to play with. I've been working weird shifts, and playing on an EU server during graveyard time ain't no fun if you like meeting others. I usually played on an American or Asian server, depending on my current work schedule. And I usually met a lot of people doing the same. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iampiano Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 Whoever's making the decisions over there at H.Q really needs to find a new job. You're costing Bioware alot of money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mandrax Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I cant count the number of times i tried to log into WoW and couldnt due to maintenance. Instead of getting all pissy i played something else or went to a buddies or something.If you quit over a 4hour maintenance you have some serious issues imo.Get a life. I know youll probably say something like "they keep screwing EU players on maintenance". I understand maintenance is annoying but unsubbing.... come on. I can count the times on one hand too with WoW, not bad after playing for nearly seven years. I have been playing this for barely seven weeks and I've almost caught WoW up for the amount of times I can't access the game when I want to.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Izorii Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 It did seem a bit stupid. Not to mention I didn't see anything added. Not only was in all satudar Morning, it then got extended into saturday afternoon. This is not good. One day earlier and there would have been no problem most people would have been at work/school. Why pick a saturday prime time for an update? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C-Bee Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 (edited) I can count the times on one hand too with WoW, not bad after playing for nearly seven years. I have been playing this for barely seven weeks and I've almost caught WoW up for the amount of times I can't access the game when I want to.... This simply means that the concept of 'emergency' is lost in BW organisation or that the game is really far from ready to be on the market. Either way, be it in product management or in pre-release development, the ball has been dropped big time. There's no rational reason have 'emergency' patches / maintenance several times every week. Release ready product simply does not need that. Draw your own conclusions... Edited January 28, 2012 by C-Bee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SaintMerc Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 (edited) At the end of the day. What the EU based players are asking for is fairness and respect. Having maintenance times that hit the EU based player every week during the day will only lead to BW/EA Losing Subs from the EU and other parts of the world who don't live in the US, and I'm sorry to say the EU and other countries are alot bigger and have more potential customers than what the US has alone. Which will leave the game based on Star wars with a world wide fan base, to only being played in the USA due to the lack of respect and fairness for the EU player base and those not in the US. We can see by the lack of response that your not going to do separate maintenance times. So do the Alternative. Example week 1 maintenance Time: 6PM CST (4PM PST/7PM EST/12AM GMT/1AM CET) until 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) week 2 maintenance Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET) Being fair to all your customers will get you in time more subs to a Great Game. Edited January 28, 2012 by SaintMerc Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timuk Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 Well lack of customer service is what will kill this game off imho. No response with all these complaints will be not just the death of the game but could take the development company down as well. I know I personally wont be buying any Bioware games again. Anyway enough is enough so I cancelled my renewal sub and submitted feedback as to why. Limited leisure time and budget - and lots of companies eager to please who actaully want my money. I may come back later in the year when people in the EU can actually get what they are paying for. BTW, no idea if it will be any good but I signed up for the "Tera" beta today after cancelling my SWTOR sub. TTFN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fuzzytoad Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 If you had said up front that there was a major exploit in the game that needed fixing immediately then people would be much less upset at your actions. Maybe I missed it, but what exploit did they fix? I checked the dev tracker and saw no explanation or mention of an exploit.. The patch notes indicate what's seemingly an issue that could have easily waited until the scheduled Tuesday downtime.. Nothing was downloaded when I loaded up the launcher and from reading other posts in the customer service forum, it appears that the fix described in the patch notes doesn't even work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mishochi Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 I must agree that losing several hours game time is not a big deal, however the way EU customers are treated is. so two things BW/EA in case you don't know them: 1. there is a life outside US 2. swtor is not the only game out there Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Writer Posted January 28, 2012 Share Posted January 28, 2012 (edited) Another idiotic decision by Bioware. A weekend patch and downtime is unheard of in any major MMO. When i cancelled my sub the other day, i got a survey and my biggest criticsm was how out of touch Bioware and the CS seem to be with the community. Unbelievable Jeff! Edited January 28, 2012 by Writer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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