I appreciate the angle you’re coming from, and no disrespect intended, but this issue is compounded by a general lack of understanding of internet based services, connectivity and reasonable levels of access.
Many people are blissfully unaware of how IT and telecoms works, but there is actually a huge industry powering these type of services. I have spent several years in that career, knowledge of disaster planning, backup connections, redundancy, SLAs, contingency plans are essential skills. Planning for failures, even multiple failures happening at the same time (despite odds worse than obtaining the gauntlet gold crew!) are expected to be planned for.
...
DB chose the level (or lack of) redundancy. Eg Mirrored servers, backup internet connections via differing technologies (not reliant on the same backbones). Sure that comes at increasing costs, but that’s not the customers problem.
You're welcome to make comments about us not understanding this particular industry as well as you do, and you're right that I don't know the first thing about this industry, but I'm also not convinced you understand how business works in general.
If DB's expenses go up, you better believe our costs will go up - they chose a price point that allowed them to get the redundancy they could afford considering how much they charge their customers. I'm sure they could probably pay to have the single best damned redundancy service any company could offer, but I'm also sure that the only way they could afford that is by increasing the price points that we pay because that money needs to come from somewhere, and frankly I'm not sure how many of us would be interested in paying $500 for a monthly dilithium pass.
I agree, there is a balancing point. Most of these necessary infrastructure costs should have been anticipated in their business model before the game even launched.
Chasing down the last .9’s on guaranteed service availability of course costs exponentially more the further you go, but I’m not seeing any indication that any consideration or thought has been given at all over what required for just basic service.
This isn’t a cheap game, no matter how you dress it. We don’t own anything we see in game, we’re merely granted access to pixels on screen for as long as the game runs.
Blaming a SINGLE connectivity provider, based on a server in a SINGLE location, is way below what I feel should be expected here. If DB’s ‘reasonable’ backup is a 56K modem, then I’m afraid that most would agree that falls very short.
Again, don’t forget, I’ve said many times, if DB owned up and accepted responsibility, I’d be perfectly happy provided they were offering to put out an ingame message saying so, some reasonable gesture of goodwill to all and an offer to assess individual issues one by one. They’ve done the latter, but still persisting with the “it’s a global internets issue everyone!!11!1 OMG the internet isn’t our fault” line.
I am now caught up on this thread, and I feel a sense of loss here, like this was a lost opportunity.
I think most of us realize that this was in no way the fault of DB (I understand there is not consensus on this, but to paraphrase Meatloaf, "14 out of 15 aint bad!") and under no obligation to do anything for anybody, but man, I'm not gonna lie, this feels like the perfect opportunity to mend a few fences and win back some goodwill, and now it seems that this opportunity has been wasted.
Even if it was just something like, "Hey Captains, while this was not our fault, we value you and to try and pick up your spirits, here is a 4* citation. We are truly sorry that this happened and we are working to identify the issue to take every step to assure it does not happen again."
Nobody is going to stick their noses up at a free 4* citation (well again, to paraphrase my earlier paraphrase, I'm absolutely certain 1 out of 15 will!) and it would have IMO gone a great deal toward establishing a greater sense of community and goodwill.
Second paragraph is a good summary of my point, if anyone had trouble following me. {I occasionally wander off-point.} Excellent opportunity to Foster and revitalize Goodwill.
"This was totally beyond our control, but we know it impacted a lot of players during a Fraction Event. Here is something For everyone's inconvenience."
Ones and zeros are free. Happy, satisfied customers are priceless.
Ah, but friends, if they did that you might not buy the great value $9.99 offer to fully fuse K'mtar!
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the Provider who does this game also does EMERGENCY CALL CENTERS and apparently did not have redundancies in place.......
They do not. The outage is at CeturyLink.
Was going by what someone else had posted. So, people didn't lose 911? That is good.
No CenturyLink is a major provider to 911 services. Numerous states lost it per the morning news. What I thought originally as being the Western portion of Washington state, turned out to be all of Washington state. Out cellphones woke us up when the emergency notifications went out.
The entire internet is build like a set of various connecting highways. If some major ISP/router somewhere in the chain goes down, it's not DB's fault, unless AWS itself goes down, or one of their servers crashes.
since we are using the highway example, if you hire a cab driver to pick you up at your house at a certain moment, at a given hour, anď he can't get there on time 'cause the road he was going to use is inadvertenly closed, should he be held responsable? (To you who hired him)
Yes, he should have planned a different route.,...
I hope the people who were affected receive sufficient compensation from their tickets. The passion of the posts shows how important this issue was to many players.
Yeah, I've got to say, very unsatisfactory response. We even told them what to do. Communicate, be honest, and turn a loss into a win.
So what is our expected resolution? We overload CS with tickets, wait days for an answer, and roll the CS RNG and see if we actually get something, or get told to go rub your genitalia vociferously against a cactus?
Considering the issue is not at DB, but a CenturyLink outage that has closed 911 centers in Multiple states. I am not sure there should be any compensation. DB has no control of this issue.
I disagree. DB have full control over what provider they use for external connectivity. They also have full control over what backups are in place for when something fails.
They have control over who they use. But who does Your provider use to get the their provider. I have Centurylink for my landline only. Everything else uses either Verizon or a local Cable provider. I never had connectivity issues. but I was woken ope in the middle of the night by my cell phone as the alerts went out about no 911 service in the state.
Any internet based business whuch doesn't have a solid SLA with their provider will not be in business very long (as long as there is competition in the market).
I seem to have a better SLA with my ISP and I am a home user!
But if you had CenturyLink at home you'd be down too. Also may providers lease their service lines from someone else so even if you had a redundancy, that may have been down too. It doesn't matter how much redundancy you have in place, at some point you can't switch over when so much is down and so many companies lease from other companies, etc. Its crazy and this was definitely an extreme case that impacted Phone and Internet across the country.
I had an ISP outage last year. I phoned up to complain and they gave me a free month and paid for data top ups for our mobile data plans.
This was caused by a local switching problem that was beyond their control.
This is good customer service.
They did not take the attitude that as the problem was not their fault I could go spend some happy time with myself.
They actually gave me financial compensation. DB won't even offer some in game currency which has no cost to themselves at all.
I would expect a business customer would have a better SLA with their provider thsn I do with mine because their business depends on it
in all seriousness, they never scaled their database structure very well. This is why Nod harped on the fact that they can't just freewheel add blanket slots. they take major major performance hits when this happens. It was inferred fixing the problem would almost be a page 1 rewrite of their system, and then you'd just kiss the game goodbye
I would expect a business customer would have a better SLA with their provider thsn I do with mine because their business depends on it
again, i'm sure the AWS ISP's were solid. it's not DB's or AWS' problem when some random downstream border router dies. anytime a backbone provider goes down, EVERYONE feels some kind of pain.
Poor showing DB. At least make Warship EMH a reward for the first 1,500 or 2,000 in the event.
That way you aren’t rewarding every single person, but definitely many people who were disadvantaged and falling just outside the 1k.
in all seriousness, they never scaled their database structure very well. This is why Nod harped on the fact that they can't just freewheel add blanket slots. they take major major performance hits when this happens. It was inferred fixing the problem would almost be a page 1 rewrite of their system, and then you'd just kiss the game goodbye
They need a better DBA then. I'll admit, MySQL (If that's really what they use) is the database that is most foreign to me, but almost every other real one out there (Postgres, Oracle, MSSQL with MVCC enabled) would require some of the most brain-dead designs to make this problem unmanagable.
You may have to pay some cost for the disk space/IOPS involved in the indexes required. You may have to do some rewriting of SOME queries.
But, that cost is often still cheaper than actually fixing a bad design.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the Provider who does this game also does EMERGENCY CALL CENTERS and apparently did not have redundancies in place.......
They do not. The outage is at CeturyLink.
Was going by what someone else had posted. So, people didn't lose 911? That is good.
No CenturyLink is a major provider to 911 services. Numerous states lost it per the morning news. What I thought originally as being the Western portion of Washington state, turned out to be all of Washington state. Out cellphones woke us up when the emergency notifications went out.
I finally saw the news report on the outage. It covered about half of North America, and about 1/3 of Europe & UK. They said it would take "4 hours to get back online" and 14 hours later still not. Inexcusable.
However, there was absolutely nothing DB could have done about it, so my 2¢ is that players that are upset about the outage need no compensation from DB, and I doubt Centurylink will take your complaint about a game outage.
I do agree though that DB could gain a lot of smiles by a goodwill gesture.
I'm a bit confused as to the extent of this impact. Are the people where CenturyLink went down in the USA affected? Or was it mostly Europe as per the early reports? I'm in APAC and not felt any lag beyond the usual, but that's due the terrible network service in this country!
Also, does CenturyLink provide a connection from DB to consumer, or DB USA to a kind of DB exit point in Europe? Does it handle all the traffic from MA to Europe, or if, for example, the European consumer has a provider using a different ISP exchange into the USA, then they can still connect? Very curious about the relationship here and if DB have dedicated bandwidth with CenturyLink or if they were just caught out by a middleman going down.
I'm a bit confused as to the extent of this impact. Are the people where CenturyLink went down in the USA affected? Or was it mostly Europe as per the early reports? I'm in APAC and not felt any lag beyond the usual, but that's due the terrible network service in this country!
Also, does CenturyLink provide a connection from DB to consumer, or DB USA to a kind of DB exit point in Europe? Does it handle all the traffic from MA to Europe, or if, for example, the European consumer has a provider using a different ISP exchange into the USA, then they can still connect? Very curious about the relationship here and if DB have dedicated bandwidth with CenturyLink or if they were just caught out by a middleman going down.
Good questions. It does not affect my Samsung phone with Sprint, nor my home internet, which I think is Cox. For that, I've not heard complaints from coworkers or Customers here in Arizona. My parents are in Washington State. I'll ask them tomorrow, since I read earlier that Washington is affected.
At the end of the day it is still a performance issue I would have thought at least sorrytons would have been widely accepted.
Honestly there have been other direct outages in the past where we received these and I wasn’t affected eg not online at the time.
After mulling this over a day or so, I ask myself, Am I upset about my rank, missed out on extra cadet missions and x2 ad rewards for extra boosts, delayed sending out new voyage etc? Absolutely but would my rank be different with thousands more competing as well no one could possibly know. My delayed voyage yielded a 4th star on Noah ok that’s a win there, boosts yeah that’s a bit of a loss there as I was quite low on those and really could have done with those.
In short do the basic thing give sorrytons at the least as a gesture of good will.
[was on Sabbatical/Hiatus] Currently a trialist at Galaxy SquadronSTAY SAFE and KBO
Let's be clear. Prevention is always better than cure. And most players don't want compensation, just a level playing field. So the best way to deal with a known outage that was affecting alot of their players would have been to simply delay the start of the event until it was sorted. There is precedence for this - back in the early days, I remember the first(?) Galaxy being pulled because it wasn't working correctly.
I know the horse has bolted now and it's too late to close the proverbial stable door. But that is all people have ever wanted - a level playing field.
I am possibly more upset over the fact that I had finally decided to give DB another chance, despite mistake after mistake, by opening my wallet again. I wish I hadn't bothered because I was unable to use the bonuses I bought for an event I wanted to win. The very same happened last Christmas with Mirror Bev. I decided to trust DB again and the the trust was misplaced - you Americans have a saying "trust me once, fool on me. Trust me twice, fool on you". I am foolish and only have myself to blame.
A business that makes their customers feel foolish will struggle. I actually wanted DB to thrive.
I would expect a business customer would have a better SLA with their provider thsn I do with mine because their business depends on it
again, i'm sure the AWS ISP's were solid. it's not DB's or AWS' problem when some random downstream border router dies. anytime a backbone provider goes down, EVERYONE feels some kind of pain.
Believe me AWS would not have been down for that length of time. They would have redundancy in place (or certainly should do)
Our company uses Azure and if many of our big European customers could not access our platform for several hours we could be looking at very large compensation bills
Poor showing DB. At least make Warship EMH a reward for the first 1,500 or 2,000 in the event.
That way you aren’t rewarding every single person, but definitely many people who were disadvantaged and falling just outside the 1k.
I am not sure about others but I bought event packs to prepare for this event but as I missed the first 15 hours of the event I am not even going to bother fighting for top spots because it just won't be possible
Many of the people who suffered from this event are at a great disadvantage at getting the top 2500 spots so increasing the reward level would be a further kick in the teeth
Comments
I agree, there is a balancing point. Most of these necessary infrastructure costs should have been anticipated in their business model before the game even launched.
Chasing down the last .9’s on guaranteed service availability of course costs exponentially more the further you go, but I’m not seeing any indication that any consideration or thought has been given at all over what required for just basic service.
This isn’t a cheap game, no matter how you dress it. We don’t own anything we see in game, we’re merely granted access to pixels on screen for as long as the game runs.
Blaming a SINGLE connectivity provider, based on a server in a SINGLE location, is way below what I feel should be expected here. If DB’s ‘reasonable’ backup is a 56K modem, then I’m afraid that most would agree that falls very short.
Again, don’t forget, I’ve said many times, if DB owned up and accepted responsibility, I’d be perfectly happy provided they were offering to put out an ingame message saying so, some reasonable gesture of goodwill to all and an offer to assess individual issues one by one. They’ve done the latter, but still persisting with the “it’s a global internets issue everyone!!11!1 OMG the internet isn’t our fault” line.
Ah, but friends, if they did that you might not buy the great value $9.99 offer to fully fuse K'mtar!
No CenturyLink is a major provider to 911 services. Numerous states lost it per the morning news. What I thought originally as being the Western portion of Washington state, turned out to be all of Washington state. Out cellphones woke us up when the emergency notifications went out.
Why not both?
He shouldve used google...
So what is our expected resolution? We overload CS with tickets, wait days for an answer, and roll the CS RNG and see if we actually get something, or get told to go rub your genitalia vociferously against a cactus?
PM for details.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
I had an ISP outage last year. I phoned up to complain and they gave me a free month and paid for data top ups for our mobile data plans.
This was caused by a local switching problem that was beyond their control.
This is good customer service.
They did not take the attitude that as the problem was not their fault I could go spend some happy time with myself.
They actually gave me financial compensation. DB won't even offer some in game currency which has no cost to themselves at all.
I would expect a business customer would have a better SLA with their provider thsn I do with mine because their business depends on it
until the wet paper mysql server dies
in all seriousness, they never scaled their database structure very well. This is why Nod harped on the fact that they can't just freewheel add blanket slots. they take major major performance hits when this happens. It was inferred fixing the problem would almost be a page 1 rewrite of their system, and then you'd just kiss the game goodbye
Second Star to the Right - Join Today!
again, i'm sure the AWS ISP's were solid. it's not DB's or AWS' problem when some random downstream border router dies. anytime a backbone provider goes down, EVERYONE feels some kind of pain.
Second Star to the Right - Join Today!
That way you aren’t rewarding every single person, but definitely many people who were disadvantaged and falling just outside the 1k.
Called it...
They need a better DBA then. I'll admit, MySQL (If that's really what they use) is the database that is most foreign to me, but almost every other real one out there (Postgres, Oracle, MSSQL with MVCC enabled) would require some of the most brain-dead designs to make this problem unmanagable.
You may have to pay some cost for the disk space/IOPS involved in the indexes required. You may have to do some rewriting of SOME queries.
But, that cost is often still cheaper than actually fixing a bad design.
Squadron Leader - [TFA] Bateson’s Bulldogs
I finally saw the news report on the outage. It covered about half of North America, and about 1/3 of Europe & UK. They said it would take "4 hours to get back online" and 14 hours later still not. Inexcusable.
However, there was absolutely nothing DB could have done about it, so my 2¢ is that players that are upset about the outage need no compensation from DB, and I doubt Centurylink will take your complaint about a game outage.
I do agree though that DB could gain a lot of smiles by a goodwill gesture.
Also, does CenturyLink provide a connection from DB to consumer, or DB USA to a kind of DB exit point in Europe? Does it handle all the traffic from MA to Europe, or if, for example, the European consumer has a provider using a different ISP exchange into the USA, then they can still connect? Very curious about the relationship here and if DB have dedicated bandwidth with CenturyLink or if they were just caught out by a middleman going down.
Good questions. It does not affect my Samsung phone with Sprint, nor my home internet, which I think is Cox. For that, I've not heard complaints from coworkers or Customers here in Arizona. My parents are in Washington State. I'll ask them tomorrow, since I read earlier that Washington is affected.
Hahahahahahaha. They will never live that fiasco down.
If you were affected by the outage, Shan has requested that you submit a ticket.
They have also added a big yellow box to the top of the forum, repeating this request.
Oh man, is Nickelback playing in town again?
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
Honestly there have been other direct outages in the past where we received these and I wasn’t affected eg not online at the time.
After mulling this over a day or so, I ask myself, Am I upset about my rank, missed out on extra cadet missions and x2 ad rewards for extra boosts, delayed sending out new voyage etc? Absolutely but would my rank be different with thousands more competing as well no one could possibly know. My delayed voyage yielded a 4th star on Noah ok that’s a win there, boosts yeah that’s a bit of a loss there as I was quite low on those and really could have done with those.
In short do the basic thing give sorrytons at the least as a gesture of good will.
I know the horse has bolted now and it's too late to close the proverbial stable door. But that is all people have ever wanted - a level playing field.
A business that makes their customers feel foolish will struggle. I actually wanted DB to thrive.
Believe me AWS would not have been down for that length of time. They would have redundancy in place (or certainly should do)
Our company uses Azure and if many of our big European customers could not access our platform for several hours we could be looking at very large compensation bills
I am not sure about others but I bought event packs to prepare for this event but as I missed the first 15 hours of the event I am not even going to bother fighting for top spots because it just won't be possible
Many of the people who suffered from this event are at a great disadvantage at getting the top 2500 spots so increasing the reward level would be a further kick in the teeth
Wot ? You can't say shucks anymore ?