Dinner Delimma
Let’s say you have arranged to meet a group of mates for dinner. Just for fun, your friends gave you the date & time in a different time zone… use for your amusement. They are a loyal bunch and unlikely to order before you arrive.
They are all modern, connected, tech savvy people, with multiple means of communication. Mobile phones, Twitter, facebook. You even have the phone number for the restuarant.
1/2 an hour before dinner you realise you aren’t going to make it on time, you might be 1/2 an hour late. You aren’t sure yet though.
What do you do?
The prearranged time for dinner has arrived and you realise you still haven’t made it out the door, you are going to be at least an hour late.
What do you do?
You get out to the car and it won’t start and the roadside assistance people tell you they will be there in the next couple of hours.
What do you do?
Bono’s got a bad back
Or let’s say you are a rock band that has a sold out concert coming up in a weeks time. Although the concert is in another country, you have given US timezome details… let’s face it, everyone sets their watch by PDT don’t they?
You have access to all the media, TV, radio, Twitter feeds, websites, fan sites.
However the singer has developed a medical problem that makes it unlikely they can go on stage on the night.
What do you do?
The day before the gig it’s obvious that the singer can’t perform. You know the stadium will be filled with 10,000 eager fans in 24 hours.
What do you do?
The time has come for the gig to start, fans are piled up at the gates wondering why they are inside yet. There is a poster out the front promoting the gig. It confirms the start time as now.
What do you do?
The gig was meant to start 3 hours before hand. The loyal fans are still at the gates. They’ve read the posters at the front gate, checked the date and time on their portable devices just to make sure they aren’t hours, a day even a month early. They check the official sites from their browser enabled phones hoping for some indication of what’s going on, yet there is nothing.
What do you do?
Blizzards got a patch
You give people 24 hours warning that there is going to be downtime, extended downtime in fact, which itself will last 24 hours.
It’s not obvious to a large percentage of the players when this downtime is for, because although many of the servers run on a different timezone an in fact these servers are allocated for people that live in a different timezone, you don’t bother to at the very least mention the times for those servers.
You have a variety of communication methods at your disposal, from the designated downtime forums, to realm specific forums, to Twitter and even mobile applications that could carry updates directly to those effected.
Server maintenance is occuring, however something doesn’t look right. There is a good chance that you won’t meet the advertised uptime.
What do you do?
The advertised uptime arrives and you still aren’t sure when the servers will be up. It could be in 5 minutes, but past experience has shown that when working with computers 5 minutes expected = 30 minutes actual.
What do you do?
An hour has gone by and you still aren’t sure whether you can get the servers up any time soon. You note the forums are filling with queries about the situation.
What do you do?
2 hours past advertised uptime and things stilldont look good. Maybe it was the spilt coffee, maybe it was the corrupted data restore. Whatever it was, it’s obvious you won’t have the servers up immediately.
Meanwhile the gentle queries on the forums have been replaced with hate messages and statements along the lines of:
What do you expect from this company?
What do you do?
3 hours have gone by and you have had some success. You have many of the servers undergoing extended maintenance up now… With the minor exception of a world region – the region that is now in prime playing time.
They are becoming feral in the forums, afterall, this is further evidence that the company doesn’t care. Promised local servers – didn’t deliver. Gave local “labelled” servers but provde info in US terms. Execute all maintenance during primetime hours – sure they pay for 7 days a week access, same as everyone else, but let’s give them 6 days for their money.
Now, apparently guinea pigs for a expansion install, they are left to lose two primetime session for the week.
You could tell them, but…
What would you do?
My guesses and answers.
Dinner - you may not tell them immediately, after all, what’s 1/2 an hour (I have mates that will kill you for that half hour without warning, but whatever). I dare say most people would at least drop a short “I’m running late” to someone.
When it’s apparent that you are going to be really late, I expect most people will call to apologise and arrange another occasion.
Worst case, assuming you can’t contact individuals, you might call the restaurant (well, I would).
Bono’s Back – you annouced it ASAP, most of the time you do. You may not cancel it immediately, but you let people know it could happen.
Worst case, you utilize the media to get the word out that the gig is cancelled, aplogize and offer an alternative date (or indicate if there will be one).
All this long before anyone is standing at the gates.
Bastard Blizzard – FUCK YOU! We don’t have to tell you nothing!
- You can sit by your login screen for the next 4 hours and suffer.
- We will not allow you to make alternative plans for the evening.
- We will not allow you to contact your guildies to tell them the nights raid is off.
- We will screw you and love every minute of it.
The forums?
Ha! Deadshits. Haven’t you realized yet we don’t give a toss about the forums. We just give them to you so you can piss each other off. We want todo the same, so rather than updating the downtime forum, or answering realm forums, well just let’s you rip each others heads off.
As for doing something like listing the server times for downtime?
You fucking stupid?
Why would one of us look up the World Clock, or even refer to the server time when we can get tens… No hundreds of thousands of you to do it yourself?
We have enjoyed our RMT experiments, are loving that you will pay $3 more a month for a crappy AH interface, know we can gouge you for extra character slots, but there was one more thing we needed to know.
How much server bullshit will you put up with when we release untested crap on half arsed servers?
FUCK YOU AND THE SPARKLY PONY YOU FLEW IN ON!
Gnomer and Out!
Shame post 700 is such a rant, but after losing 4 hours of my life (that could have been used better is I had just known) waiting for an indication of when servers would come online… I’m a little pissed off.
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hmm, i wonder how you REALLY feel, though?
; )
I know, I shouldn’t beat about the bush.
This makes my recent subscription cancellation seem even more timel
nice post, I like the blog
-Mike Boozer, http://somebodyhadtosayit.com
Bah, Prelimar stole my line!
Pity you lost all that time, you coulda done other… stuff… instead. >_<
Have a cupcake. I swear Blizzard hasn’t pissed on it.
Don’t sugar coat your emotions…
Man I really enjoyed that.
I logged onto Argent Dawn to finish the DK starting zone slightly bitter that 90% of the servers were up… just not the Oceanic ones and the rest of Bloodlust.
Almost every single person in my raid was logged into our website patiently waiting to see if we could salvage our raid night (Who’s Online… love that feature).
And to make matters worse, when someone else I don’t know, also clearly an oceanic players, complained that our peak play time was once again effected by downtime unfairly nobody but me was sympathetic. The responses were “Stop QQing” “You’re making too much of it” “I don’t think it’s that bad”
It is that bad. Barthilas came back up with about 20 left on our raid block. That’s approximately 20 players sitting at their computers staring at a Realm Status icon.
I contemplated AD… But the my Bloodlust nightmare came rushing back.
I’ve worked in IT long enough (22 years is long enough I think) as a sysadmin and tester to know that things don’t always come up when they should.
I can live with that.
I’m just angry that Blizz didn’t spend 5 minutes saying:
“Oh damn, something isn’t quite right, it will be right ASAP, but how about you grab dinner, snuggle your partner, do the ironing, watch repeats of Top Gear… Anything, but sit in front of your PC.
We will let you know when we think things will be online and current estimates are 2-3 hours”
Sometimes things slip past the radar. It’s not intentional.
On Blizzard’s behalf, though, they’re nowhere near as bad as 989 Studios (and later Sony) was on EverQuest. EQ was notorious for shutting servers down for scheduled maintenance (on Tuesday) and then leaving the servers down for several DAYS without actually telling anyone. On the Prexus server, we had a maintenance “day” that ended up lasting for nearly two weeks before the servers came back up and people were able to play again.
There were no forums.
There was no news page at the login screen.
Nothing to indicate when the servers would be coming back up on the website, even after days of being down.
And this sort of thing wasn’t a one-time-only deal, either.
I dare say it wasn’t intentional… but it’s a frequent oversight, and they only need to read the forums to flag that as a customer service easy win.
As for “relatives”, I don’t doubt for a minute that Blizzard are better than most, if not all that came before them (and probably many that will come after).
But it is a matter of relative.. Exxon was relatively nothing to the current Gulf issues.
Still.. they had one thread in the downtime forums for this.
One line of text would have sorted 10′s of thousands of people.
I guess I’m also a believer in “Just because it could be worse, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak up”
[...] One of my favorite targets is Blizzard’s inability to communicate even the simplest, yet most important things to players &#…. [...]