You listened to my SUGGESTION when you gave out way too many beta keys too fast, after some of us paid for the beta keys as part of advertised features of the pre-order, and aside from voicing my dissatisfaction at your project leadership and planning, I suggested that you lower the time from 30 minutes to 15 to boot a player for inactivity. You showed you know how to listen to good ideas, that at least is a good sign from a project leadership perspective.
Here's another:
Your development leadership needs to set some key measures and quality standards immediately, and start taking them seriously (as demonstrated by action and outcomes, not words).
STANDARDS:
1. Game Server (defined as the server, the launcher, the account authenticator, and any other subsystem that by being offline would prevent players from entering and playing the game successfully) will provide immediate and automatic notice to Cryptic personnel when not operating. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Automated notices sent to the Recovery Team during game server failure events. The Target for this Standard should be 100% of the time.
2. Game Server personnel will be on call 24/7 to ensure that when receiving automated notices of game server failure, the team is responding immediately to recover the gaming experience for customers. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = 2 Minute turnaround of Incident Communication to Recovery Team from time of receipt of automated game server failure notification. The Target for this responsiveness Standard should be 100% of the time.
And now the most important standard of them all:
3. Game Server outages should be reasonable in duration, given industry standards AND customer satisfaction - make it happen. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Game Server outages will be recovered and players back online within ___ (15?) minutes of server outage notification. The Target for this Duration Standard should be 95% of the time, especially with the number of outages.
Your Top Priority for the technology team (and project overall) right now should be on getting your service recovery duration standards in line. A two-three hour server recovery period after a crash or maintenance is a complete failure.
The above doesn't include a Standard for Uptime overall, that's kind of a no-brainer, surely you have that (and surely are not meeting it.) That standard probably needs to be revisited, if it is anywhere close to meeting Standard given the current frequency and duration (should incorporate both in the measure) of service interruptions.
The development team leadership needs to seriously get on that server recovery issues and get the right people on the right job. They're far from satisfactory. Thank you, and hope this helps.
Your development leadership needs to set some key measures and quality standards immediately, and start taking them seriously (as demonstrated by action and outcomes, not words).
I agree in general with your points. Server downtime and notice has not been as good as it could be and improvement would be appreciated.
An observation, however ...
Cryptic has pretty methodically had a long Closed Beta that ramped up quite a bit towards the end, followed by an Open Beta that again pushed their game architecture. Now, Head Start is yet another means of ramping things up another notch before the "official" release. It seems to me that all these steps are an effort to test their infrastructure, procedures, and so on in an ever increasing manner so that once the actual release date arrives, things will run as smoothly as possible.
No MMO I have seen has a 100% smooth launch and I'll be willing to give Cryptic a wide berth. If daily issues are still happening 2-3 weeks after the official release, however, I will start feeling a bit more cranky.
You listened to my SUGGESTION when you gave out way too many beta keys too fast, after some of us paid for the beta keys as part of advertised features of the pre-order, and aside from voicing my dissatisfaction at your project leadership and planning, I suggested that you lower the time from 30 minutes to 15 to boot a player for inactivity. You showed you know how to listen to good ideas, that at least is a good sign from a project leadership perspective.
You are a funny man, you really believe they listened to your suggestion, do you? :P Well, maybe that, or to one of the other 1 million beta tickets that said they need to lower that time. Unfortunately, they did not listen to the rest of the suggestions, cause if they had we wouldn't have the exact same AFK leecher problem we had in Beta.
If you suggested to only decrease it to 15 mins without doing anything else, you fail hard.
The rest of the post fails hard too, btw. You think they just have no idea how to run their business, hu?
The rest of the post fails hard too, btw. You think they just have no idea how to run their business, hu?
Flame-tards aside, did you have something constructive to add to the topic or its points? Or just a flame-tard?
As measured by their performance, they obviously need some help from those of us among them who know better how to set standards for performance in a technology and service environment.
All funny aside, I remember during the dark ages of SWG, the fan events where we'd see just how young and inexperienced even producers like Julio Torres were, as that guy in particular stood wetting his pants as some guy let him have it (rightfully so) at the table in a room full of people.
I don't presume knowledge and experience on anyone's part when I address my feedback to a service provider, I speak to the performance measures, drivers, and results; the tangibles, the things that answer "what matters here".
The rest of the post fails hard too, btw. You think they just have no idea how to run their business, hu?
I'm sure they have SOME idea. It's how you WORK that idea that matters.
You can't TRIBBLE up a first impression like this. It sets the tone for personal references, first-look reviews, and basically piddles on the players who committed to the game willingly, without needing those reviews and references to say, "I'm in."
First impressions are critical. When your Headstart reliability becomes a JOKE amongst the gaming clans? That's a BAD precedent.
I think the OP's suggestions are in line with a professional business plan for a server host environment. My Site Operations crew for my web-focused ASP company works on similar principle: Servers are polled every minute. If there's no response after 3 tries, pages go to the ENTIRETY of the Site Ops crew. The on-call rep investigates, evaluates the issue, and if it's critical he'll post an update to all clients affected (we use email, but in more extreme circumstances we'll do the website itself - and those instances are RARE).
If the site is down for more than 10 minutes, the site crew is assembled to resolve immediately. Granted, our paying customers pay $10K/annual for our app. Most of us are paying $15/mo. But the approach is scalable and sensible.
I agree with the OP's suggestion. It's BUSINESS sense. STO, at its heart, is a business for Cryptic.
I'm sure they have SOME idea. It's how you WORK that idea that matters.
I agree with the OP's suggestion. It's BUSINESS sense. STO, at its heart, is a business for Cryptic.
Always good to get some reasoning folks on the forums discussions. Too often it degenerates to the lowest common denominator. Good example in your post from your firm. Thanks for contributing. I also have no doubt that Cryptic knows what we're referring to, but as you said, its how they work it. How they work it is based on their solutions and their teams' competencies... all the way to the top office.
They don't even know you exhist. To them, you are just another wannabe computer guru who thinks they know something about a rather technical and substantial server cluster, you are nothing to them. You have no idea the challenges facing them, just leave it to the professionals.
You tell them to get the server up in 15 min (lol) and you mention nothing about them determining what caused the failure, in your own words all you care about it getting it back up. You sir are a failure and i would can you from my IT team in a heartbeat. Personally, I would prefer them to review logs to determine issues and attempt resolutions, if you knew anything about the industry you would know it is not as cut and dry as you make it look.
You seem to be coming from the perspective of some college student who has taken the theory yet has no real work experience.
You listened to my SUGGESTION when you gave out way too many beta keys too fast, after some of us paid for the beta keys as part of advertised features of the pre-order, and aside from voicing my dissatisfaction at your project leadership and planning, I suggested that you lower the time from 30 minutes to 15 to boot a player for inactivity. You showed you know how to listen to good ideas, that at least is a good sign from a project leadership perspective.
Here's another:
Your development leadership needs to set some key measures and quality standards immediately, and start taking them seriously (as demonstrated by action and outcomes, not words).
STANDARDS:
1. Game Server (defined as the server, the launcher, the account authenticator, and any other subsystem that by being offline would prevent players from entering and playing the game successfully) will provide immediate and automatic notice to Cryptic personnel when not operating. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Automated notices sent to the Recovery Team during game server failure events. The Target for this Standard should be 100% of the time.
2. Game Server personnel will be on call 24/7 to ensure that when receiving automated notices of game server failure, the team is responding immediately to recover the gaming experience for customers. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = 2 Minute turnaround of Incident Communication to Recovery Team from time of receipt of automated game server failure notification. The Target for this responsiveness Standard should be 100% of the time.
And now the most important standard of them all:
3. Game Server outages should be reasonable in duration, given industry standards AND customer satisfaction - make it happen. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Game Server outages will be recovered and players back online within ___ (15?) minutes of server outage notification. The Target for this Duration Standard should be 95% of the time, especially with the number of outages.
Your Top Priority for the technology team (and project overall) right now should be on getting your service recovery duration standards in line. A two-three hour server recovery period after a crash or maintenance is a complete failure.
The above doesn't include a Standard for Uptime overall, that's kind of a no-brainer, surely you have that (and surely are not meeting it.) That standard probably needs to be revisited, if it is anywhere close to meeting Standard given the current frequency and duration (should incorporate both in the measure) of service interruptions.
The development team leadership needs to seriously get on that server recovery issues and get the right people on the right job. They're far from satisfactory. Thank you, and hope this helps.
I have to agree with the OP. I get that cryptic needs to get everything tuned for the release, and that many people are playing the headstart. But it would be better to take the server offline for 6 hours and announce it and get it right, then have 3 server downs on one day.
Your standards seem rather obvious, to the point that they're probably already there. Setting a standard does not equate to meeting a standard though.
1 and 2 are probably implemented. Unless you're referring to the time to communicate downtime to players - in which case it can be just as automatic (though still somewhat meaningless - the only players noticing unexpected downtime are the ones not able to play, the difference between 2 and 20 minutes means little in such a case).
3 is all well and good as an idea, but not really feasible as you put it. The reasons a system fails can vary too widely to expect consistent recovery within such a short time span. Things often fail for a reason, and it makes more sense in the long run to isolate and fix that reason rather than just going for the reset button on everything and hoping it all magically keeps working this time. Longer outages now for less outages later.
People need to understand that this is a brand new product. It's not like rolling out a server with the latest stable Apache release. They don't have years of experience working with this system to just go "oh look, the _ is down again, do _" with a nice pretty flowchart of problems and solutions. Most of the problems experienced at this point in something's release are more along the lines of "what the #($! just happened?"
In short, stop making wild guesses about what is or is not going on behind the scenes. I'm not saying they are doing things right, but It's a bit early to make such calls.
Always good to get some reasoning folks on the forums discussions. Too often it degenerates to the lowest common denominator. Good example in your post from your firm. Thanks for contributing. I also have no doubt that Cryptic knows what we're referring to, but as you said, its how they work it. How they work it is based on their solutions and their teams' competencies... all the way to the top office.
Well if you say they suck then why do you buy software from them?
Those guys you think you are talking to -on a game forum- are not reading this forum, nor will anyone tell them what you have written here. If you think that their operations will change because someone wrote something in their forum you are delusional.
We all know that servers should be stable. They know it, we know it, everyone knows it. We all know that servers should be up as soon as possible.
So what in your post was new? They have standards for everything, they just can't meet them. Now if you tell them they have to meet them it makes it all better?
Err.. no.
BTW.... on the technical side, you dont seem to have any clue how such a server works. It's not a database server or a webserver. You can't just bring it back up when it crashes like nothing happened and it all will be good.
This is a server that actually may need programming, it's not just hardware. You can get corrupted data you need to fix, and you cant just type /fix on the console like you can with a database server and it will auto-fix...
OP. Good post. Cryptic does need to attended this.
I do wish they would have a little more detailed and timley communcation. That would solve a lot of the issues for most gameplayers.
I wonder if they ever got that new equipment they ordered installed?
I also bet that cryptic did not expect the turnout they received. Star Trek hits a much larger spectrum of people than your typical "game". Thusly this game will draw from larger and more diverse groups than most games do.
Your standards seem rather obvious, to the point that they're probably already there. Setting a standard does not equate to meeting a standard though.
1 and 2 are probably implemented.
Now who's making assumptions. Based on educated observations, I believe you are incorrect.
I don't care to the reasons, I care to the results. The standards and the targets, and the actual results. How we get there is for them to solve, there's no right way or wrong way, as we know from business. What does matter is that we achieve the targets.
Again, in my educated opinion and observation, we do not have such standards in place, or I wouldn't have mentioned them.
Unless other standards are very low, we would not have launched retail (would have seen later dates, or delays in retail launch - another sign of the quality of the planning process itself) with uptime or duration of outage standards off by 600 to 1200% to target.
If you didn't understand the original work and its relevance, this response is a waste of time, because you won't get the latter, either. No worries, if you're lucky and learn through your career opportunities, you will understand someday. But then again, you're not stopping to learn from others more experienced and knowledgable today (simply ridicule and hate the good for being good)...
Well if you say they suck then why do you buy software from them?
More hate of the good for being good. This is a perfect example of what young flame-tards do. When they can't argue the facts, and can't engage in a reasonable discussion, they deflect the subject and seek to undermine with vaporous rhetoric and ridicule.
Star Trek hits a much larger spectrum of people than your typical "game". Thusly this game will draw from larger and more diverse groups than most games do.
Yes, they get alot more refined feedback as a result. All the major IP's tend to see a more mature (older, experienced) audience in their playerbase, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTRO...
They get folks like me, executives with long track records of successful leadership, playerbase who include CEO's, CFO's, EVP's, CIO's, and an impressive array of technical leadership who likely dwarf their own career and limited experience by comparison. Quite an opportunity, and quite a challenge, to keep up with the wealth of knowledge embedded in their community base.
I've been a business leader longer than these couple of flame-tards puppies have been out of the sac - 28 years...
... and I'm still learning... always try to, and always try to share and mentor along the way. Especially when the success of my present MMO and avatar enjoyment is on the line.
I've been a business leader for 28 years, and I'm still learning... always try to, and always try to share and mentor along the way. Especially when the success of my present MMO and avatar enjoyment is on the line.
Wow, you are really full of yourself.
No one here is interested in your sharing and mentoring, because you obviously have no clue what you are talking about.
Well, other than that the servers should be more stable, which even my newborn son knows, and he can't even talk.
To tell someone else what his standards should be is just friggin hilarious. You don't know the situation, you don't know the environment, you have no clue how they are doing business and what their problems are.
Wow, yeah they really need the advice of someone without a clue.
amen brother!
As a quality control inspector i fully agree, and while there is a big difference between weld inspection and QC on a software product, all quality issues are effectively the same and boil down to one thing.........MAKE THE CUSTOMER HAPPY
You listened to my SUGGESTION when you gave out way too many beta keys too fast, after some of us paid for the beta keys as part of advertised features of the pre-order, and aside from voicing my dissatisfaction at your project leadership and planning, I suggested that you lower the time from 30 minutes to 15 to boot a player for inactivity. You showed you know how to listen to good ideas, that at least is a good sign from a project leadership perspective.
Here's another:
Your development leadership needs to set some key measures and quality standards immediately, and start taking them seriously (as demonstrated by action and outcomes, not words).
STANDARDS:
1. Game Server (defined as the server, the launcher, the account authenticator, and any other subsystem that by being offline would prevent players from entering and playing the game successfully) will provide immediate and automatic notice to Cryptic personnel when not operating. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Automated notices sent to the Recovery Team during game server failure events. The Target for this Standard should be 100% of the time.
2. Game Server personnel will be on call 24/7 to ensure that when receiving automated notices of game server failure, the team is responding immediately to recover the gaming experience for customers. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = 2 Minute turnaround of Incident Communication to Recovery Team from time of receipt of automated game server failure notification. The Target for this responsiveness Standard should be 100% of the time.
And now the most important standard of them all:
3. Game Server outages should be reasonable in duration, given industry standards AND customer satisfaction - make it happen. Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Game Server outages will be recovered and players back online within ___ (15?) minutes of server outage notification. The Target for this Duration Standard should be 95% of the time, especially with the number of outages.
Your Top Priority for the technology team (and project overall) right now should be on getting your service recovery duration standards in line. A two-three hour server recovery period after a crash or maintenance is a complete failure.
The above doesn't include a Standard for Uptime overall, that's kind of a no-brainer, surely you have that (and surely are not meeting it.) That standard probably needs to be revisited, if it is anywhere close to meeting Standard given the current frequency and duration (should incorporate both in the measure) of service interruptions.
The development team leadership needs to seriously get on that server recovery issues and get the right people on the right job. They're far from satisfactory. Thank you, and hope this helps.
Posts like this tickle the #$^# out of me :rolleyes:
Standard = Level of Performance Expected = Game Server outages will be recovered and players back online within ___ (15?) minutes of server outage notification. The Target for this Duration Standard should be 95% of the time, especially with the number of outages.[/COLOR]
Yes, they get alot more refined feedback as a result. All the major IP's tend to see a more mature (older, experienced) audience in their playerbase, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTRO...
They get folks like me, executives with long track records of successful leadership, playerbase who include CEO's, CFO's, EVP's, CIO's, and an impressive array of technical leadership who likely dwarf their own career and limited experience by comparison. Quite an opportunity, and quite a challenge, to keep up with the wealth of knowledge embedded in their community base.
I've been a business leader longer than these couple of flame-tards puppies have been out of the sac - 28 years...
... and I'm still learning... always try to, and always try to share and mentor along the way. Especially when the success of my present MMO and avatar enjoyment is on the line.
"Shard will be coming down for emergency maintenance."
Three times its booted me and taken ages to register characters and get back in, one of which was a crash... not to mention yesterday... or the last two weeks before that...
I've been trying to get online since Friday mid-day, and only a mid-level lieutenant as a result thus far. Cryptic, very disappointing show of project leadership in my experience thus far.
lol, all I see in you is a college student who has some theory yet no real work experience.
Well, he didn't really mean 28 years, he meant 28 days as the leading executive of a new internet company. It obviously went bankrupt after 28 days cause it couldn't meet his standards.
10 years in senior leadership in a real estate industry (development, construction, and property management), and 18 years in executive leadership in the banking industry. As EVP, COO, or CFO, led most divisions of an organization over the years, many of which were I.T., and Planning. MBA, and other exclusive executive programs such as CCL.
But in the end, thank you to the couple foosballs who don't have nor demonstrate critical thinking in their posts, who like to demonstrate their hate for their fellow man, and thank you, too, for addiing value to this post in one way...
... bumping a constructive thread. Please continue to add that value, and continue to demonstrate your character.
10 years in senior leadership in a real estate industry (development, construction, and property management), and 18 years in executive leadership in the banking industry. As EVP, COO, or CFO, led most divisions of an organization over the years, many of which were I.T., and Planning. MBA, and other exclusive executive programs such as CCL.
But in the end, thank you to the couple foosballs who don't have nor demonstrate critical thinking in their posts, who like to demonstrate their hate for their fellow man, and thank you, too, for addiing value to this post in one way...
... bumping a constructive thread. Please continue to add that value, and continue to demonstrate your character.
Since you've just stated you have no relative experience in this industry, every point you have tried to make in this thread is void. And mind you, thats flaming back at those that you also call a "flame-tard". Its like the pot calling the kettle black. For shame, sir... for shame.
Seems to be a misunderstanding about how these things work, too, on the part of the OP.
Server goes down or develops any of a series of pre-determined non-operational behavior, the systems are programmed to send a tweet or text message to about a dozen different phones.
Whoever hasn't been awake for 72 hours straight (and that number diminishes by the day) rushes to a computer somewhere, logs on, and tries to clean up the mess. In the meantime, they're poring over the logs to figure out exactly why it's happening -- and why it keeps happening every few hours or so. THAT is the problem that really needs fixing, not just rebooting the server... They also have to perform database integrity checks to ensure the player data wasn't corrupted before or during the crash.
On bringing it all back up, they need to be sure it's coming back up in a sane state. And then monitor for a while to be certain it isn't going to crash again within seconds because several tens of thousands of people are all trying to log on again simultaneously.
Once done, they go back to their offices and try to catch another catnap, or go home and take a shower and say hello to their neglected spouses and kids... and hope to have just a few hours before the next crisis.
amen brother!
As a quality control inspector i fully agree, and while there is a big difference between weld inspection and QC on a software product, all quality issues are effectively the same and boil down to one thing.........MAKE THE CUSTOMER HAPPY
Our number one goal at our financial institution. All performance factors lead to the One, and result from the One.
Seems to be a misunderstanding about how these things work, too, on the part of the OP.
Ah, would be interested in hearing more about what makes you think this.
Some of the others seem to have an understandable lack of experience and maturity that goes with their age, and don't understand that executives have clear line of sight to a venture's success factors, whether H.R., I.T., Marketing, Operations, etc.
To dumb it down... LOTRO as an example, brought their servers up within 5 minutes, had them in lock down for internal testing, and back open for business in minutes. About 10-15 minutes top.
At the end of the day, its about performance and standards, not understanding. That's what matters to leaders. For the teams we empower and support, we expect solutions and performance that achieve the goals. The details of the knitting don't matter to the executives or the customers, so long as the performance is there.
But when the performance isn't there, then comes the "leaning in." Thankfully, well-run shops have such standards to provide clarity for all ranks and the organization, for what matters, what we will achieve, and where our focus is. The standards and measures not only provide focus, but provide line of sight to accountability. Without these things, ventures are suboptimized often to the point of failure.
As the other chap said, the primary success factor is... Happy Customers.
Comments
I agree in general with your points. Server downtime and notice has not been as good as it could be and improvement would be appreciated.
An observation, however ...
Cryptic has pretty methodically had a long Closed Beta that ramped up quite a bit towards the end, followed by an Open Beta that again pushed their game architecture. Now, Head Start is yet another means of ramping things up another notch before the "official" release. It seems to me that all these steps are an effort to test their infrastructure, procedures, and so on in an ever increasing manner so that once the actual release date arrives, things will run as smoothly as possible.
No MMO I have seen has a 100% smooth launch and I'll be willing to give Cryptic a wide berth. If daily issues are still happening 2-3 weeks after the official release, however, I will start feeling a bit more cranky.
You are a funny man, you really believe they listened to your suggestion, do you? :P Well, maybe that, or to one of the other 1 million beta tickets that said they need to lower that time. Unfortunately, they did not listen to the rest of the suggestions, cause if they had we wouldn't have the exact same AFK leecher problem we had in Beta.
If you suggested to only decrease it to 15 mins without doing anything else, you fail hard.
The rest of the post fails hard too, btw. You think they just have no idea how to run their business, hu?
Flame-tards aside, did you have something constructive to add to the topic or its points? Or just a flame-tard?
As measured by their performance, they obviously need some help from those of us among them who know better how to set standards for performance in a technology and service environment.
All funny aside, I remember during the dark ages of SWG, the fan events where we'd see just how young and inexperienced even producers like Julio Torres were, as that guy in particular stood wetting his pants as some guy let him have it (rightfully so) at the table in a room full of people.
I don't presume knowledge and experience on anyone's part when I address my feedback to a service provider, I speak to the performance measures, drivers, and results; the tangibles, the things that answer "what matters here".
I'm sure they have SOME idea. It's how you WORK that idea that matters.
You can't TRIBBLE up a first impression like this. It sets the tone for personal references, first-look reviews, and basically piddles on the players who committed to the game willingly, without needing those reviews and references to say, "I'm in."
First impressions are critical. When your Headstart reliability becomes a JOKE amongst the gaming clans? That's a BAD precedent.
I think the OP's suggestions are in line with a professional business plan for a server host environment. My Site Operations crew for my web-focused ASP company works on similar principle: Servers are polled every minute. If there's no response after 3 tries, pages go to the ENTIRETY of the Site Ops crew. The on-call rep investigates, evaluates the issue, and if it's critical he'll post an update to all clients affected (we use email, but in more extreme circumstances we'll do the website itself - and those instances are RARE).
If the site is down for more than 10 minutes, the site crew is assembled to resolve immediately. Granted, our paying customers pay $10K/annual for our app. Most of us are paying $15/mo. But the approach is scalable and sensible.
I agree with the OP's suggestion. It's BUSINESS sense. STO, at its heart, is a business for Cryptic.
Always good to get some reasoning folks on the forums discussions. Too often it degenerates to the lowest common denominator. Good example in your post from your firm. Thanks for contributing. I also have no doubt that Cryptic knows what we're referring to, but as you said, its how they work it. How they work it is based on their solutions and their teams' competencies... all the way to the top office.
They don't even know you exhist. To them, you are just another wannabe computer guru who thinks they know something about a rather technical and substantial server cluster, you are nothing to them. You have no idea the challenges facing them, just leave it to the professionals.
You tell them to get the server up in 15 min (lol) and you mention nothing about them determining what caused the failure, in your own words all you care about it getting it back up. You sir are a failure and i would can you from my IT team in a heartbeat. Personally, I would prefer them to review logs to determine issues and attempt resolutions, if you knew anything about the industry you would know it is not as cut and dry as you make it look.
You seem to be coming from the perspective of some college student who has taken the theory yet has no real work experience.
How can they tell us ahead of time that the server is gonna be down when it crashes and even THEY dont know its going down till it starts?
Just my 2 cents
1 and 2 are probably implemented. Unless you're referring to the time to communicate downtime to players - in which case it can be just as automatic (though still somewhat meaningless - the only players noticing unexpected downtime are the ones not able to play, the difference between 2 and 20 minutes means little in such a case).
3 is all well and good as an idea, but not really feasible as you put it. The reasons a system fails can vary too widely to expect consistent recovery within such a short time span. Things often fail for a reason, and it makes more sense in the long run to isolate and fix that reason rather than just going for the reset button on everything and hoping it all magically keeps working this time. Longer outages now for less outages later.
People need to understand that this is a brand new product. It's not like rolling out a server with the latest stable Apache release. They don't have years of experience working with this system to just go "oh look, the _ is down again, do _" with a nice pretty flowchart of problems and solutions. Most of the problems experienced at this point in something's release are more along the lines of "what the #($! just happened?"
In short, stop making wild guesses about what is or is not going on behind the scenes. I'm not saying they are doing things right, but It's a bit early to make such calls.
Well if you say they suck then why do you buy software from them?
Those guys you think you are talking to -on a game forum- are not reading this forum, nor will anyone tell them what you have written here. If you think that their operations will change because someone wrote something in their forum you are delusional.
We all know that servers should be stable. They know it, we know it, everyone knows it. We all know that servers should be up as soon as possible.
So what in your post was new? They have standards for everything, they just can't meet them. Now if you tell them they have to meet them it makes it all better?
Err.. no.
BTW.... on the technical side, you dont seem to have any clue how such a server works. It's not a database server or a webserver. You can't just bring it back up when it crashes like nothing happened and it all will be good.
This is a server that actually may need programming, it's not just hardware. You can get corrupted data you need to fix, and you cant just type /fix on the console like you can with a database server and it will auto-fix...
I do wish they would have a little more detailed and timley communcation. That would solve a lot of the issues for most gameplayers.
I wonder if they ever got that new equipment they ordered installed?
I also bet that cryptic did not expect the turnout they received. Star Trek hits a much larger spectrum of people than your typical "game". Thusly this game will draw from larger and more diverse groups than most games do.
Now who's making assumptions. Based on educated observations, I believe you are incorrect.
I don't care to the reasons, I care to the results. The standards and the targets, and the actual results. How we get there is for them to solve, there's no right way or wrong way, as we know from business. What does matter is that we achieve the targets.
Again, in my educated opinion and observation, we do not have such standards in place, or I wouldn't have mentioned them.
Unless other standards are very low, we would not have launched retail (would have seen later dates, or delays in retail launch - another sign of the quality of the planning process itself) with uptime or duration of outage standards off by 600 to 1200% to target.
If you didn't understand the original work and its relevance, this response is a waste of time, because you won't get the latter, either. No worries, if you're lucky and learn through your career opportunities, you will understand someday. But then again, you're not stopping to learn from others more experienced and knowledgable today (simply ridicule and hate the good for being good)...
More hate of the good for being good. This is a perfect example of what young flame-tards do. When they can't argue the facts, and can't engage in a reasonable discussion, they deflect the subject and seek to undermine with vaporous rhetoric and ridicule.
Weak. Try to stay on topic and raise the bar.
And now... back to the game in progress.
Yes, they get alot more refined feedback as a result. All the major IP's tend to see a more mature (older, experienced) audience in their playerbase, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTRO...
They get folks like me, executives with long track records of successful leadership, playerbase who include CEO's, CFO's, EVP's, CIO's, and an impressive array of technical leadership who likely dwarf their own career and limited experience by comparison. Quite an opportunity, and quite a challenge, to keep up with the wealth of knowledge embedded in their community base.
I've been a business leader longer than these couple of flame-tards puppies have been out of the sac - 28 years...
... and I'm still learning... always try to, and always try to share and mentor along the way. Especially when the success of my present MMO and avatar enjoyment is on the line.
Wow, you are really full of yourself.
No one here is interested in your sharing and mentoring, because you obviously have no clue what you are talking about.
Well, other than that the servers should be more stable, which even my newborn son knows, and he can't even talk.
To tell someone else what his standards should be is just friggin hilarious. You don't know the situation, you don't know the environment, you have no clue how they are doing business and what their problems are.
Wow, yeah they really need the advice of someone without a clue.
As a quality control inspector i fully agree, and while there is a big difference between weld inspection and QC on a software product, all quality issues are effectively the same and boil down to one thing.........MAKE THE CUSTOMER HAPPY
Posts like this tickle the #$^# out of me :rolleyes:
15mins? hahahaha
Three times its booted me and taken ages to register characters and get back in, one of which was a crash... not to mention yesterday... or the last two weeks before that...
I've been trying to get online since Friday mid-day, and only a mid-level lieutenant as a result thus far. Cryptic, very disappointing show of project leadership in my experience thus far.
Well, he didn't really mean 28 years, he meant 28 days as the leading executive of a new internet company. It obviously went bankrupt after 28 days cause it couldn't meet his standards.
But in the end, thank you to the couple foosballs who don't have nor demonstrate critical thinking in their posts, who like to demonstrate their hate for their fellow man, and thank you, too, for addiing value to this post in one way...
... bumping a constructive thread. Please continue to add that value, and continue to demonstrate your character.
Since you've just stated you have no relative experience in this industry, every point you have tried to make in this thread is void. And mind you, thats flaming back at those that you also call a "flame-tard". Its like the pot calling the kettle black. For shame, sir... for shame.
Server goes down or develops any of a series of pre-determined non-operational behavior, the systems are programmed to send a tweet or text message to about a dozen different phones.
Whoever hasn't been awake for 72 hours straight (and that number diminishes by the day) rushes to a computer somewhere, logs on, and tries to clean up the mess. In the meantime, they're poring over the logs to figure out exactly why it's happening -- and why it keeps happening every few hours or so. THAT is the problem that really needs fixing, not just rebooting the server... They also have to perform database integrity checks to ensure the player data wasn't corrupted before or during the crash.
On bringing it all back up, they need to be sure it's coming back up in a sane state. And then monitor for a while to be certain it isn't going to crash again within seconds because several tens of thousands of people are all trying to log on again simultaneously.
Once done, they go back to their offices and try to catch another catnap, or go home and take a shower and say hello to their neglected spouses and kids... and hope to have just a few hours before the next crisis.
Our number one goal at our financial institution. All performance factors lead to the One, and result from the One.
Ah, would be interested in hearing more about what makes you think this.
Some of the others seem to have an understandable lack of experience and maturity that goes with their age, and don't understand that executives have clear line of sight to a venture's success factors, whether H.R., I.T., Marketing, Operations, etc.
To dumb it down... LOTRO as an example, brought their servers up within 5 minutes, had them in lock down for internal testing, and back open for business in minutes. About 10-15 minutes top.
At the end of the day, its about performance and standards, not understanding. That's what matters to leaders. For the teams we empower and support, we expect solutions and performance that achieve the goals. The details of the knitting don't matter to the executives or the customers, so long as the performance is there.
But when the performance isn't there, then comes the "leaning in." Thankfully, well-run shops have such standards to provide clarity for all ranks and the organization, for what matters, what we will achieve, and where our focus is. The standards and measures not only provide focus, but provide line of sight to accountability. Without these things, ventures are suboptimized often to the point of failure.
As the other chap said, the primary success factor is... Happy Customers.