Lack of communication is unprofessional

[Makoulian]

The Europeans always lose every month at least a day if you add all the maintenance hours and not only that,maintenance sometimes happens on weekends when working people have free time.It would be fair if BW would give us back something in return for all this.Let's say a free day to all Europeans.It's not much but it's the action that matters.We hear all the time that things will get fixed,I'm sure they will,even maintenance timetables will but in the mean time give us something to "ease the pain"

[Leggomy]

No. Just NO. It's not just Europeans that are screwed by this 0200 CST across-the-board crap. It's also everyone in the US who works a shift other than 0900-to-1700. I work a second shift as a surgical tech. I can deal with being completely unable to play one out of seven days. Two out of seven is absurd. For me, 2 out of 7 = 8 days a month. As someone who wants to treat SWTOR as his new serious raiding MMO, that's actually a large amount of time.

 

168 hours in a week and you are telling me its "unacceptable" to not be able to play 8 of those? Or even if you count the 4 hour emergency maint 12? That still leaves 156 hours a week or 160 hours a week. Its not the whole day its just a few hours in the morning.

[Ggrriiff]

It is called emergency maintenance for a reason. Most times you don't get days to make sure everyone knows. Most people are fine with it and I doubt even .001% would quit over something so trivial and petty.

Interestingly, I can't see anywhere that Bioware called this an 'emergency maintenance'. I suspect their marketing/PR folks really dislike that phrase and that they aren't allowed to use it.

 

Anyway, if it were truly an emergency, why did anyone get any notice? A true emergency should have resulted in immediate downtime, not a several hour long wait before they implemented the fix. If it were a real emergency then I don't see how Bioware could afford to wait until off-peak hours for the US. It therefore appears that this was important, but not an emergency.

 

If it was not an emergency, there is no reason not to give a longer notice period. If it truly was an emergency then they shouldn't have waited the several hours that they did wait.

Edited January 29, 2012 by Ggrriiff

[Newbrax]

Just lol...

 

These developers have been so up front with their community compared to other MMO's. Then you make a long drawn out post about how they ruined your weekend by taking some down time to fix the game. Give them your phone number so they can call you personally and let you know because your so special.

 

 

[..........]

 

 

Those brackets are blank to show your lack of common sense.

[Evertal]

Would be nice if BW could give some more info what the emergency was about because surely it could not only be that stated in the patchnotes. Patching on a weekend is unheard of in MMO history and not only because of prime time but also because most BW employee goes home for the weekend so communication or if needed quick fixes because patch broke something else will then get delayed untill monday.

[Leggomy]

Would be nice if BW could give some more info what the emergency was about because surely it could not only be that stated in the patchnotes. Patching on a weekend is unheard of in MMO history and not only because of prime time but also because most BW employee goes home for the weekend so communication or if needed quick fixes because patch broke something else will then get delayed untill monday.

 

Who told you they get weekends off? BW is open 7 days a week 24 hours a day. Even over Christmas they didnt close.

[Synica]

Their devs may be open, but their customer service approach needs some work. Some serious work.

[MrOuija]

Today you brought the servers down on a Saturday, affecting not only Europeans (who are kinda getting used to not mattering in your considerations) but also Americans who settle down for their first decent length play session of the week on Friday nights.

 

 

 

 

 

1: You post a warning less than two hours before the servers are brought down. Ok, if this is an emergency, tell us it's an emergency. Don't call it 'maintenance' when you decide to pull down all the servers on a Friday night with less than 2 hours notice.

 

2: The post is highly ambiguous. If you're pulling the servers down on a Friday, put Friday in the title. If you're pulling the servers down today, in 2 hours, put that in the title to get the word out. The title gives the overwealing impression that the Patch + Maintenance are on Jan 31st.

 

3: People expect patches Tuesday 2am CST onwards. There are sometimes patches to fix those patches on wed/thus am following. If you break from that pattern then clearly inform your playerbase

 

 

 

 

Nothing to download on the patch server, all the work was done serverside. This was the reason for the server to be down for everyone? This was an issue than couldn't wait until the scheduled mainenance in 3 days? Instead of a few people having the minor inconvenience of getting dropped to the character select screen and having to log back in (I think it's happened to me twice, I wasted 30s logging back in each time) you take down the servers for everyone.

 

This was not a problem that couldn't wait 72h in my opinion, and I don't think many would disagree. The problems in Ilum continued for days while every forum had people screaming at you to put a stop to the insanity before you finally turned the taxis off. I haven't seen mention of this problem so can't understand why it was such an emergency

 

 

 

Quote box purposefully blank. This represents your utter lack of communication with your customers. Potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of us expecting the servers to be online and finding them unexpectedly taken down. No reason given, no communication at all other than to turn off all the comments on the forums in your customary 'lalalala-we-can't-hear-you' downtime policy. No updates given until a few minutes before the servers were due up, and then just a 'they're still down, they're not coming up yet, and there's no eta'.

 

 

 

 

If servers have to come down, then fine, they have to come down. That's no excuse for mishandling the situation and making things WORSE. For a multinational company running a worldwide premium MMO, you simply can't treat your customers like mushrooms all the time. You must have a Customer Services or Community Relations team, and they are failing in their responsibilities. It only takes a few minutes to update your subscribers on situations and it goes a long way to quelling resentment. Please improve your service in this area.

 

Whole-heartedly agree.

[Avanaco]

168 hours in a week and you are telling me its "unacceptable" to not be able to play 8 of those? Or even if you count the 4 hour emergency maint 12? That still leaves 156 hours a week or 160 hours a week. Its not the whole day its just a few hours in the morning.

 

Wow, do you have a job?

 

Let me spell it out for you. I go to work "in the evening" and get off work "in the morning" as you put it. That means that I only get to play as much as any other career person on a NORMAL day. When the servers go down at 0200 CST once per week, I get 6 out of 7 days of play time. As I said, one day out of the week with absolutely no game time I can deal with. When they go down at 0200 CST twice in a week, I get 5 of 7 days play time. This has happened twice since release. You do the math.

[Leggomy]

Wow, do you have a job?

 

Let me spell it out for you. I go to work "in the evening" and get off work "in the morning" as you put it. That means that I only get to play as much as any other career person on a NORMAL day. When the servers go down at 0200 CST once per week, I get 6 out of 7 days of play time. As I said, one day out of the week with absolutely no game time I can deal with. When they go down at 0200 CST twice in a week, I get 5 of 7 days play time. This has happened twice since release. You do the math.

 

So you get to play 5 days out of 7 and still complaining? I work way more and have other issues Im lucky to have time to login 2 days a week. You should count yourself lucky you have so much free time.

[Saoul]

168 hours in a week and you are telling me its "unacceptable" to not be able to play 8 of those? Or even if you count the 4 hour emergency maint 12? That still leaves 156 hours a week or 160 hours a week. Its not the whole day its just a few hours in the morning.

 

I everyone could play 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, your argument would work. Most people have works, families, lives that inhibit gaming time quite a lot. Say you have a total window of 10 hours of gaming per week.

 

If you are one of the unlucky people, and half of those hours are taken away every week due to Bioware's maintenance routines, it's not so strange if you would consider taking your money elsewhere. But, since you do like the game and don't want to give up on things right away, you first try to convince Bioware to change this routine. As we've seen in this thread the forums are monitored by Bioware staff, so you make your voice heard here. Make sense?

 

Also, thank you Stephen for acknowledging the problems. As a developer, and someone who has to roll out patches regularly myself, I know what a great balance act it is. The Old Republic is a great game. Naturally it has some baby-MMO problems, but at least you can see it like this: if people didn't care about the game they'd just quit and not bother complaining about things. Most of us want this game to make it big and live on for many many years to come.

[Fargond]

To those of you in Europe, I want you to know that we'll be discussing maintenance windows and how we can improve their timing this coming week. We may not have an update immediately (and not before the scheduled maintenance on January 31st) but we have been paying attention to your opinions.

 

Thanks again for the feedback - it helps us know where to improve.

 

i am hopeful

 

Thanks Stephen and crew.

[Evertal]

Who told you they get weekends off? BW is open 7 days a week 24 hours a day. Even over Christmas they didnt close.

While they certainly have staff 24/7 I bet its not the developers working off-hours but mostly CS and maintenance staff (IT).

[Leggomy]

While they certainly have staff 24/7 I bet its not the developers working off-hours but mostly CS and maintenance staff (IT).

 

You are wrong sir. They have shifts of developers same as auto plants have shifts of workers.

[Sakki]

Hey everyone; I appreciate everyone's views on this topic and I can understand the feelings being expressed here.

 

Our Live team took the decision to roll out today's 1.1.0c patch during Friday night/Saturday morning with the knowledge that it would affect a higher than usual number of players. Unfortunately, we had to make changes that required server downtime. The Live team felt those changes were urgently required and that was why the maintenance was scheduled. Generally speaking, we try and ensure all required maintenance happens during our weekly maintenance period, but this was one situation where we had to move forward quickly; to not do so could have led to severe performance issues across the service as a whole.

 

I want to address a couple of other points from the OP:

 

 

This is a little inaccurate. I'm not sure where your timing comes from, but our original post regarding the downtime was posted at 5:10PM CST (Austin time). At that point, we were unsure of the start time for the maintenance so posted without it. The post was updated with the exact timing of the maintenance at 8:54PM CST, which would give just over five hours notice of the exact timing.

 

Five hours is not a generous window of notice, and for that we apologize. In this instance, we updated with the precise timing as soon as we could, but we'll strive to improve.

 

 

Overall, this is a fair point. Generally speaking, every Friday we post details of our upcoming maintenance period to give plenty of advance notice. Because of the timing of this patch, we thought it might be easier to roll both notices into one. We didn't feel the ambiguity was too extreme, as the upcoming patch was detailed up front, but I can see how it might have confused some. We'll improve.

 

As stated, the patch was deemed necessary and urgent enough to be rolled out on a Friday night/Saturday morning (Austin time). We didn't take this lightly, and don't expect or wish it to be a regular occurrence.

 

To those of you in Europe, I want you to know that we'll be discussing maintenance windows and how we can improve their timing this coming week. We may not have an update immediately (and not before the scheduled maintenance on January 31st) but we have been paying attention to your opinions.

 

Thanks again for the feedback - it helps us know where to improve.

 

If this little post, or something alike, had come with the announcement of the downtime, you'd have had a lot less EU players raging over it. Just saying there's more then one lesson to be learned here

Aside from that, keep up the good work and keep tackling those issues.

[Evertal]

You are wrong sir. They have shifts of developers same as auto plants have shifts of workers.

 

Where did you get that insight from?

 

Judging from their application requests all dev openings are office hours. Makes little sense to have devs working in shifts, what would you achieve with that?

 

Anyway thats a non-issue.

[CanWolfShadow]

Downtime is a fact when playing MMOs.

 

Lack of communication is not however. From my POV this team is one of the most uncommunicative, least customer focused I have ever seen in an MMO. The game itself is fine. There are bugs but for the most part I enjoy it. What I struggle with is the effort put forth on support items like CS, like building community, like the way the forums are designed and managed, how maintenance is handled, etc. They seemed to have spent so much time and effort on the game itself they forgot about planning for how they were going to support it.

 

Except there was no lack of communication. The warning was posted well over 6 hours before the downtime.

 

Dev tracker. Read it.

[Leggomy]

Where did you get that insight from?

 

Judging from their application requests all dev openings are office hours. Makes little sense to have devs working in shifts, what would you achieve with that?

 

Anyway thats a non-issue.

 

So since they only have openings for people during the day that means they dont have anyone there on the weekends? How much sense does that make? If they had developers there christmas day you can bet they have developers there on the weekends.

[Mogitu]

So you get to play 5 days out of 7 and still complaining? I work way more and have other issues Im lucky to have time to login 2 days a week. You should count yourself lucky you have so much free time.

 

to play 5 days out of 7 means you miss out 8 days a month( if the trend would continue), thats not acceptable.

also we really dont care about your issues or however much or little time you have to play.

with a subscription fee like this game has come certain expectations.

Edited January 29, 2012 by Mogitu

[thomasgallant]

to play 5 days out of 7 means you miss out 8 days a month( if the trend would continue), thats not acceptable.

also we really dont care about your issues or however much or little time you have to play.

with a subscription fee like this game has come certain expectations.

 

you dont miss out on 2 days a week though.. you miss out on really a MAX of 16 hours to maybe 24 if you include all of the other updating they need to do... stop inflating numbers to making bioware look worse.

[Mogitu]

you dont miss out on 2 days a week though.. you miss out on really a MAX of 16 hours to maybe 24 if you include all of the other updating they need to do... stop inflating numbers to making bioware look worse.

 

to hard to understand i only continued the logic of the post i quoted?

however you do miss out on 2 days if the maintainces fall in your available playtime windows, again if following the logic of the post i quoted, which would be the case for a lot of eu players.

[WarheartZero]

OMG people absolutely amaze me! ANd I thought is was just us spoiled americans that act like rage babies! I guess are Euro friends share the same attitude!

 

If your really that upset of 1 day of EMERGENCY maintenance (hence not a big advance warning) you have personal life issues and should probably get therapy.

 

And they have already acknowledged they are working to fix the same maintenance window you share with US players! As much as you think Harry Potter is real over there, Bioware devs don't have magic wands to fix crap overnight and it's not their fault when the BOSS (EA) forces them to release a game to early!

 

I still can't believe the amount of whine for missing some hours of playing a video game LOLOLOL! And if your $15 is really ruined by this, I'm sure you can find better ways to spend it, like by helping someone else out!

Edited January 29, 2012 by WarheartZero

[kufa]

OMG people absolutely amaze me! ANd I thought is was just us spoiled americans that act like rage babies! I guess are Euro friends share the same attitude!

 

If your really that upset of 1 day of EMERGENCY maintenance (hence not a big advance warning) you have personal life issues and should probably get therapy.

 

And they have already acknowledged they are working to fix the same maintenance window you share with US players! As much as you think Harry Potter is real over there, Bioware devs don't have magic wands to fix crap overnight and it's not their fault when the BOSS (EA) forces them to release a game to early!

 

I still can't believe the amount of whine for missing some hours of playing a video game LOLOLOL! And if you$15 is really ruined by this I'm sure you can find better ways to spend it, like by helping someone else out!

 

What really grinds my gears regarding this topic is that Europeans pay more ($ vs € = ~30% more according to google) and we get to play less since the downtimes affect us more. It is principle.

[randalthorr]

If this little post, or something alike, had come with the announcement of the downtime, you'd have had a lot less EU players raging over it. Just saying there's more then one lesson to be learned here

Aside from that, keep up the good work and keep tackling those issues.

 

 

ok now

 

Did Bioware realise that it was *********** bloody 7pm on a saturday night in Australia when this **** happened. Ofcourse, they dont even *********** apologise to us in the *********** post do they. Man, I really keep forgiving Bioware for their ****** treatment of oceanics but everytime they do some **** like this, it just drives me insane. Im pissed off with myself for putting up with this ****, but damnit its Star Wars. When the game was announced , I wanted to buy it because it was Bioware + Star WArs,.... Now its just Star Wars

[WarheartZero]

What really grinds my gears regarding this topic is that Europeans pay more ($ vs € = ~30% more according to google) and we get to play less since the downtimes affect us more. It is principle.

 

I understand the frustration, but this wasn't something anyone wanted to do! It was a EMERGENCY! It sucks the EU got affected but it's better then all players getting affected by the bug! You know the saying from the "other" scifi...the needs of the many out-way the needs of the few or one! It sucks but that's reality. This wasn't BW doing something outta principle! If there's a car issue you get it fixed before it gets worse!

 

I think BW made the right call and fixed a issue as soon as possible as they should with any major issue! I have no issue being down if it fixes the greater game! I'm a realist.

 

People gotta pick their battles better.