GOA and support

[Trez]

I was just looking at the WAR website and saw that GOA was looking for ppl to work as game masters, so looked at the site and found out it was the irish part that was looking.

When did GOA make local offices in other countries?

And you think this will improve their support?

Link to the jobsite http://www.manpower.ie/goa_jobs/default.asp

[Sharkith]

was always gonna be an irish support thing and I bet they will do as well as they can. Its the leadership that makes me cringe.

[Gahn]

Goa and Support don't walk hand in hand

[Xest]

It's not game masters are the problem as Sharkith said, it's management and their clearly incompetent IT staff that couldn't run stable and secure servers or maintain a proper backup regime

[Trez]

Well, hopefully they learned their lesson, because I don't think that EA will accept it if GOA runs a crap service and the entire EU customer base complains.

Or at least I hope they wont go for it.

[Xest]

I'd say Mythic is the best bet, they always were pretty damn good when it came to customer service to be fair.

EA and GOA have always been poor when it comes to customer service so I truly don't think there's any hope there in terms of getting an improved service. EA is the same company that will release a game that just doesn't work on thousands of customers PCs and doesn't bother to even release a patch until 6months later if at all. GOA is just GOA so I really wouldn't count on either of those two resolving the problems we've seen with GOA in the past.

[Ethedad]

tbh, i never had any problems with GOA. Maybe u find that lame, but its true. Had my account restarted after 2 years and no probs eather. So what kind of probs u all talking about?

[Gahn]

tbh, i never had any problems with GOA. Maybe u find that lame, but its true. Had my account restarted after 2 years and no probs eather. So what kind of probs u all talking about?

Let's talk about the Prydwen Database crash, the OT neverending problems, the dispoutable in game "rules" enforcements against soloers ... shall i add more?

[Belisar]

Not meaning to drag the whole thing up again but I was never quite sure what the story was with the database crash.

Was it that GOA's backup system was flawed or did they not spot the corruption and for some considerable amount of time ?

I seem to remember GOA saying that Mythic had told them to just delete and start again - is that right ?

The rules thing was a sad state of affairs and was a really shortsighted thing to do, especially as US and European interpretations seemed different.

[Xest]

Not meaning to drag the whole thing up again but I was never quite sure what the story was with the database crash.

Was it that GOA's backup system was flawed or did they not spot the corruption and for some considerable amount of time ?

I seem to remember GOA saying that Mythic had told them to just delete and start again - is that right ?

The rules thing was a sad state of affairs and was a really shortsighted thing to do, especially as US and European interpretations seemed different.

They said the corruption started occurring due to an overheating CPU and that old backups also hence suffered this corruption. The real question for me here is what kind of cheap crap hardware are they using where there is no overheating warning and no error checking? Even the most basic desktops will warn you if the CPU gets too hot, in a server you should be able to configure alerts dropped directly into your mail box, to a pager or anything like that.

Mythic did indeed tell them to delete and start again, presumably because there was always the risk of not knowing how far back in the backups corruption went.

The biggest problem I always noticed with the rules was that on GOAs servers it was down to the GM's personal interpretation at the time so they could change as and when the GM saw fit. I always remember when Alb relic raided when the server was having problems stopping people connecting and Kemor allowed it, then the same happened with Hib doing the raid a couple of weeks later but when Hib did it the relic was returned, if that wasn't an example of double standards due to a poorly defined ruleset I don't know what is, the scenarios were identical. On Mythics servers the rules may seem a little annoying at some times but they're applied equally throughout and are consistent which makes them acceptable. They also had procedures for things GOA just didn't for some reason, GOA always insisted it was impossible to recover accidentally destroyed/sold items and that this was Mythics policy too but that simply wasn't true, Mythic had a proper process for recovering items you accidentally destroyed/deleted where you just logged an /appeal and the standard CSRs just took notes of when/what was deleted then they'd pass it up to the chain to senior CSRs who had permissions to recover the objects, it was usually pretty quick apart from the most busy times (i.e. Expansion releases), if you'd sold the item they'd just trade the item back to you for the price you sold it for to the NPCs.

My biggest problem with GOA was the whole billing thing, charging people for up to a year after they'd quite blatantly cancelled specifically so that seeing they were still being build requested cancellation again and still didn't get it - there were too many affected for it to be a fault of the users. Messing up the game is one thing but to me messing up billing was simply unacceptable, I was fortunate enough to not be affected by it but knowing 3 people who were it was the last straw, I'm simply not willing to keep my card details in the hands of a company that were not honouring cancellation of service and had shown time and time again they weren't a company you could trust with personal details (i.e. server hack).