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Dear Devs, here is the reason why so many people get angry...
trickshaw
Member Posts: 497 Arc User
Maybe I'm completely off base and Developers are totally aware of how they drive a goodly chunk of players completely insane with unscheduled down time or emergency maintenance. In which case, good for you. You troll like a master anon at /b. Perhaps they don't. If you're a Developer and you are a member of the latter demographic and not the former then this thread is written explicitly for you.
The primary cause of player distress during these unfortunate events isn't the fact that the server is down. In fact, despite popular forumite belief, your average MMO gamer is quite reasonable, intelligent and understanding. Sure, you have that initial shock of "Server Not Responding" then the follow up kick in the jar-jars as the forums fail to respond due to every nerd on the planet trying to find out if it's just him or the entire population who got disconnected. And then of course you have the supplementary realization that the servers have gone down "again" and the "AAAARGH!" that follows.
But shortly after that initial 2 minutes of aggravation the coherent side of 99 out of 100 people's brain kicks in and they either move on with their day or wait patiently for an update.
This. This right here is where you, as Developers, completely and unequivocally--every... single... time--drop the ball with damage control. Somewhere along the line during the last 15 years someone decided that it was good policy to keep their player base utterly in the dark in hopes that rhetorical idiocy, like the following example, would placate the population. Allow me to illustrate by using one of the most insulting public addresses I've seen since the Gulf Oil Spill.
It reads as follows,
"We have a plan of action. We're verifying the exact timeline, then we'll be triple-checking the planned forum post with all key stakeholders before posting. We're not finished yet, folks, but we're getting closer -- thank you all for your patience."
Allow me to break this master piece of stupidity down for you, the Developer, so you "see" what we "see" when we read this kind of HAMSTER.
"We have a plan of action." --- Yeah, no kidding. We kind of figured you would. Instead of telling us the obvious how about you tell us WHAT the plan of action is and why it took 8 hours to figure out a plan of action?
"We're verifying the exact timeline..." --- Really? You're just NOW doing this? As opposed to 8 hours ago?
"...then we'll be triple-checking the planned forum post with all key stakeholders before posting." --- Who are these "key stakeholders"? Are you talking about the players? You know... the most "key" of all "key stakeholders"? Share holders? Gods don't tell me you're going to have a share holders meeting before you decide to post a time line. Are you referring to lead developers or some big wig at PWE?
"We're not finished yet..." --- Are the servers back up? Nope. Then yeah, I figured that part out for myself thanks.
"...but we're getting closer." --- I should hope so. Although it would be pretty funny if you were getting "further away".
And the best part...
"...thank you all for your patience." --- Ok this one sentence pisses people off more than the entirety of moronic rhetoric that came before it. 1.) No one is being "patient" because you are doing a horrible... H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E... job of keeping people in the loop and 2.) This single sentence is so patronizing it infuriates more than it placates.
Allow me to give you an example of what a proper public statement would be in order to placate your players:
Step 1 - AS SOON AS THE SERVERS GO DOWN
"Alright guys, here's the situation: People, as many of you are aware of, were duping Astral Diamonds effectively destroying any semblance of value that currency held in-game. To contain the damage as early as possible we brought the servers down. For now, we're going to have a meeting to figure out the best course of action to take in order to correct the damage, ensure this doesn't happen again and to punish those who were blatantly perpetrating the problem to begin with. Shortly after the meeting is over, I'll come back on here to let you guys know what the plan is and an ETA for server restoration.
BE ADVISED: This will be quite the endeavor and the server(s) will likely be down for quite some time.
I should have word for you within the hour."
Step 2 - AS SOON AS THE MEETING IS OVER
"Ok everyone, here is our plan of attack. We've decided that the most cost effective and time efficient way of handing this situation is as follows:
One team is being assigned to fix the mechanical issues within the games code which allowed for this problem to occur to being with. Another team is tasked with finding the point in time when this problem became main stream and started to negatively impact the game on a large scale. This will be the point in which we roll everything back (or as near as we can get it). Finally, we have a third team dedicated to tracing down the perpetrators of the "economic crash" to ensure that they are properly dealt with as per our Terms of Service.
Rest assured we are extremely sorry about the inconvenience but please be patient and we will get this resolved as fast as we can. With that said, be advised that there is no ETA on the servers coming back up and we expect this to be a long day if not night so those of you who were planning on spending the day in Neverwinter, as grateful as we are for your patronage, should not expect to get online today.
Again, we apologize for this outage and we will do our best to expedite the process but we are committed to ensuring that this doesn't happen again and in order to do that we're going to have to work on this for the better part of the day if not in it's entirety. If anything changes I will make sure to update you post haste but until then thank you again for playing Neverwinter!"
And then post this EVERYWHERE.
RIGHT on your FRONT page as well as in the Launcher so anyone who comes by can see it without ever setting foot in the forums.
Do you see the difference there?
Players, if given I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N, will happily give you as much time as you need in order to rectify the problem. Yeah, can't play today, that sucks but at least I know --WHY-- and I know not to waste my time sitting by the 'puter or double checking twitter every 10 minutes. No gaming today, hey guys let's go catch a movie instead or maybe I'll get tomorrow's chores done today so I can game tomorrow instead?
It's that easy.
That simple.
Information. Honesty. That's what people want; not rhetoric and patronization. We get enough of that from the leaders of our respective countries. We don't need that HAMSTER in our virtual escape. I guarantee you... guarantee... that the next time something like this happens--and it will--if you follow what I just outlined for you, players will not only be GRATEFUL but you'll cut down on misinformation, speculation and rage threads on your forums.
Plus, the white knights who get off on patrolling your forums and being complete jerks to anyone asking for info won't have anything to do and, to be perfectly frank, that's just hilarious in my book.
You can thank me for my consultation with Astral Diamonds in-game. 1 billion should suffice.
P.S.
It took me, literally, 20 minutes to type this in it's entirety. Unless your PR staff is populated entirely of special needs chimpanzees it shouldn't take E-I-G-H-T hours for someone to post something remotely resembling a coherent update on progress.
THAT is what really ticks people off.
The primary cause of player distress during these unfortunate events isn't the fact that the server is down. In fact, despite popular forumite belief, your average MMO gamer is quite reasonable, intelligent and understanding. Sure, you have that initial shock of "Server Not Responding" then the follow up kick in the jar-jars as the forums fail to respond due to every nerd on the planet trying to find out if it's just him or the entire population who got disconnected. And then of course you have the supplementary realization that the servers have gone down "again" and the "AAAARGH!" that follows.
But shortly after that initial 2 minutes of aggravation the coherent side of 99 out of 100 people's brain kicks in and they either move on with their day or wait patiently for an update.
This. This right here is where you, as Developers, completely and unequivocally--every... single... time--drop the ball with damage control. Somewhere along the line during the last 15 years someone decided that it was good policy to keep their player base utterly in the dark in hopes that rhetorical idiocy, like the following example, would placate the population. Allow me to illustrate by using one of the most insulting public addresses I've seen since the Gulf Oil Spill.
It reads as follows,
"We have a plan of action. We're verifying the exact timeline, then we'll be triple-checking the planned forum post with all key stakeholders before posting. We're not finished yet, folks, but we're getting closer -- thank you all for your patience."
Allow me to break this master piece of stupidity down for you, the Developer, so you "see" what we "see" when we read this kind of HAMSTER.
"We have a plan of action." --- Yeah, no kidding. We kind of figured you would. Instead of telling us the obvious how about you tell us WHAT the plan of action is and why it took 8 hours to figure out a plan of action?
"We're verifying the exact timeline..." --- Really? You're just NOW doing this? As opposed to 8 hours ago?
"...then we'll be triple-checking the planned forum post with all key stakeholders before posting." --- Who are these "key stakeholders"? Are you talking about the players? You know... the most "key" of all "key stakeholders"? Share holders? Gods don't tell me you're going to have a share holders meeting before you decide to post a time line. Are you referring to lead developers or some big wig at PWE?
"We're not finished yet..." --- Are the servers back up? Nope. Then yeah, I figured that part out for myself thanks.
"...but we're getting closer." --- I should hope so. Although it would be pretty funny if you were getting "further away".
And the best part...
"...thank you all for your patience." --- Ok this one sentence pisses people off more than the entirety of moronic rhetoric that came before it. 1.) No one is being "patient" because you are doing a horrible... H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E... job of keeping people in the loop and 2.) This single sentence is so patronizing it infuriates more than it placates.
Allow me to give you an example of what a proper public statement would be in order to placate your players:
Step 1 - AS SOON AS THE SERVERS GO DOWN
"Alright guys, here's the situation: People, as many of you are aware of, were duping Astral Diamonds effectively destroying any semblance of value that currency held in-game. To contain the damage as early as possible we brought the servers down. For now, we're going to have a meeting to figure out the best course of action to take in order to correct the damage, ensure this doesn't happen again and to punish those who were blatantly perpetrating the problem to begin with. Shortly after the meeting is over, I'll come back on here to let you guys know what the plan is and an ETA for server restoration.
BE ADVISED: This will be quite the endeavor and the server(s) will likely be down for quite some time.
I should have word for you within the hour."
Step 2 - AS SOON AS THE MEETING IS OVER
"Ok everyone, here is our plan of attack. We've decided that the most cost effective and time efficient way of handing this situation is as follows:
One team is being assigned to fix the mechanical issues within the games code which allowed for this problem to occur to being with. Another team is tasked with finding the point in time when this problem became main stream and started to negatively impact the game on a large scale. This will be the point in which we roll everything back (or as near as we can get it). Finally, we have a third team dedicated to tracing down the perpetrators of the "economic crash" to ensure that they are properly dealt with as per our Terms of Service.
Rest assured we are extremely sorry about the inconvenience but please be patient and we will get this resolved as fast as we can. With that said, be advised that there is no ETA on the servers coming back up and we expect this to be a long day if not night so those of you who were planning on spending the day in Neverwinter, as grateful as we are for your patronage, should not expect to get online today.
Again, we apologize for this outage and we will do our best to expedite the process but we are committed to ensuring that this doesn't happen again and in order to do that we're going to have to work on this for the better part of the day if not in it's entirety. If anything changes I will make sure to update you post haste but until then thank you again for playing Neverwinter!"
And then post this EVERYWHERE.
RIGHT on your FRONT page as well as in the Launcher so anyone who comes by can see it without ever setting foot in the forums.
Do you see the difference there?
Players, if given I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N, will happily give you as much time as you need in order to rectify the problem. Yeah, can't play today, that sucks but at least I know --WHY-- and I know not to waste my time sitting by the 'puter or double checking twitter every 10 minutes. No gaming today, hey guys let's go catch a movie instead or maybe I'll get tomorrow's chores done today so I can game tomorrow instead?
It's that easy.
That simple.
Information. Honesty. That's what people want; not rhetoric and patronization. We get enough of that from the leaders of our respective countries. We don't need that HAMSTER in our virtual escape. I guarantee you... guarantee... that the next time something like this happens--and it will--if you follow what I just outlined for you, players will not only be GRATEFUL but you'll cut down on misinformation, speculation and rage threads on your forums.
Plus, the white knights who get off on patrolling your forums and being complete jerks to anyone asking for info won't have anything to do and, to be perfectly frank, that's just hilarious in my book.
You can thank me for my consultation with Astral Diamonds in-game. 1 billion should suffice.
P.S.
It took me, literally, 20 minutes to type this in it's entirety. Unless your PR staff is populated entirely of special needs chimpanzees it shouldn't take E-I-G-H-T hours for someone to post something remotely resembling a coherent update on progress.
THAT is what really ticks people off.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by trickshaw on
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Comments
Reading the Twitter feed on and off for half a day... It just comes off and more and more incompetent the more they repeat the same information. Which is, we don't have any information...
I'm not saying they won't admit SOMETHING is wrong...I'm saying they won't admit it's something they DID or DID NOT do that caused it.
But as someone that works in IT, and is a part of the damage control team for a large network, I know what it means when there's no communication.
It means A) Someone royally screwed up,
So apparently, that's the status quo on these teams. It's likely there aren't enough people with sufficient expertise to do the work, and this method of "communication" is to compensate.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to personally slander any of the, I'm certain hard working and underpaid, staff at Cryptic... But silence speaks volumes.
I certainly feel bad for the community manager whose job it is to cover for them while they frantically try to empty a leaking boat of water.
-
This "handle with mittens as if you're all children" approach is just demeaning. I mean **** sake I'm an adult, I pay taxes, drink and work: Treat me as such. Tell me the problem, apologize and solve it and I'll accept it.
Tell us you'll do your best to earn back our trust, and we'll accept it. Don't take words out of our mouths and say "Thank you for your patience" because that's telling me how I am or should think.
But alas apparently this artificial "politeness" customer-service bull**** is here to stay.
Lack of proper information in a timely manner is the #1 cause of hysteria.
It wasn't until HOURS later that they finally added a notice to the launcher about the servers being down. There's still no message on the main news page. The only post here on the forums is a thread stating the AH and AD exchange are offline; nothing about the servers being down in the title.
This is unacceptable.
I recall the last time serves came down without ingame warning for 'scheduled maintenance' that they'd better communicate these things. It hasn't happened.
I honestly don't know why it's so hard for some companies to notify their users of things. And if I don't stop here, I'll get into a rant about how many times I've lost my character names on games that merged servers and never bothered to e-mail anyone, or do it days/weeks later. Ugh.
PC specs: http://forum.daow.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4#p99
If they had given us the information in the way that you had said it, I would be happy with it, and would have done something else with my time today, instead of wasting it on the forums waiting for news that the servers are coming back up.
They should hire you as their PR guy...
WTB Big-Giant Robot Camels, tbh...
I'd be interested to know why you feel that way.
I doubt this will happen but hey there's not much else to play at the moment.
Further, we're in beta. Beta stands for Better Employ Those Alternatives... because the turkey is not done. It has been cooking a long time, but it is just not done. That's why we all become forum jockeys when the game goes down. That's why (I imagine) Blizzard disabled forums during maintenance times.
You cannot presume you are the mighty voice of the collective. We're all having withdrawal symptoms and no amount of information is going to fix that aspect of our addiction. Your advice is good in terms of business practice, but sometimes these kinds of things are just implied:
1) Big problem, long time.
2) We don't advertise what the issue is because we don't want people to explore more loopholes = more downtime = more of these threads.... = = = = = .....
3) People will still complain and threaten because we, as consumers, mostly in 1st world countries, have 1st world problems, and we feel as though we are the most important people on the bus. We're not.
You seem to think that out of the entire group of people running this operation, not a one has a capacity for professionalism and communication. While I agree that there is not enough information and it is rather annoying, I will not tout myself the be-all of all and tell a business that makes more money in one second than I do in one year how they should do things my way. Now, if you are a self-made trillionaire, then kindly ignore me, because your voice might just actually matter a bit more than I am seeming to allude to here.
Short Code Copy/Paste: NW-DJC4R9H3R
Oh well, I'm not really going to fault our community manager person doing the Twitter. They're probably told what they can and can't post. It's most likely the execs pulling the silly, lame-tastic decisions they did during this downtime.
The worst part: this whole Sunday downtime due to "exploiting" will...
1.) show that Cryptic cares more about punishing the whole community for exploiters rather than fixing things properly, on their own time. Seriously, if people are exploiting, you have the logs, just ban their accounts or whatever. Why the need to take down the servers for it? All servers down for the sake of the AH? For the sake of exploiters? I call BS. If they were/are going to ban the exploiters, then what difference does it make if they ban them today or over the course of a week without whole-day downtime? And if their systems are so clunky that they need to take down the servers to do, then let's schedule it for sometime this week so customers' scheduled won't be hosed. And if they're worried about new exploiters, then just temporarily disable the content/mechanics that they're using. Problem solved until scheduled downtime later.
2.) show that always-online DRM for the Foundry is fail-sauce. Where's the excuse to keep the Foundry always online? The developers used a more powerful version of it offline just fine. FREE THE FOUNDRY!
Hammerfist Clan. Jump into the Night: NW-DMXWRYTAD
Everyone has a Plan until they get Punched in the Mouth. I am a Fighter.. I punch first. - Zweisocki
They should hire this guy to be the community manager.
I am sad, really let down about this game. I liked this game, but the zen costs and the exploits just are breaking this game. EVEN BEFORE THE LAUNCH.... LIKE WHAT THE HELL.....
Over 25 of us WILL be starting Elderscrolls mmo when it starts. If that game bombs i might quit all mmo's. Well until blizzard's new one comes out.