Maybe we should send a message to GOA?

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Briannon
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Post by Briannon »

Sharkith wrote:Hi folks,

<big snip>

Passing the buck to Mythic is unacceptible because you can explain this without getting too specific I am sure. Whether or not you do will speak volumes about your attitude to the good people who have remained faithful in your ability to deliver this excellent game.

kind regards

Sharkith

I think any buck-pasing to Mythic is unfair because my experience of the US servers is that they are, firslty, much less laggy than the european servers, secondly, patched and hot-fixed regularly with relatively few problems, and thirdly, clustered without any harmful side effects.

People are too keen to say that if something goes wrong it must be Mythic's fault - my experience of Mythic as a service provider is a very positive one.
Briannon
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Briannon
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Post by Briannon »

Xest wrote:Exactly, essentially it could be as simple as whoever was making the database changes making a slip and changing the wrong field or something similar. Again though it seems to come down to good practice, why were such devestating changes made to a live server? When Mythic were testing clustering they brought up a new test server - Hector to cluster it with Pendragon, the new server was an exact copy of one of the live servers, I beleive it was Palomides or Percival.

It would surely make sense to make a copy of one of the servers to emulate clustering with Gorre or another copied server and then if it works copy the fully tested and working version over instead of breaking the live server from the off. Did GOA do this? Emulate the changes internally on a copy of a live server? If so at least we can rule out lack of a proper system of testing - something which has plagued GOA heavily in the past.

Really just don't see how Mythic can be blamed when their servers run so flawlessly in comparison.

Completely agree with everything Xest says.
Briannon
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Sharkith
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Post by Sharkith »

Requiel wrote:I don't think it's possible to guarantee 100% that you will never suffer any kind of catastrophic failure, software errors and hardware failures can always happen no matter how stringent your systems are, however there will never be a situation where we are having to talk people out of a complete database wipe again.
Of course no-one would reasonably expect a cast iron guarantee Requiel but when your trust is shaddered to this extent you would like to have some concrete reassurances - in non-technical and oepn terms. Your responses are helping but an offical response would serve us all much better.
Requiel wrote: If any of you happen to play on the French servers, you'll know that the clustering of Orcanie and Carnac was very smooth indeed, certainly there was nothing to indicate problems with our implementation.
This makes what happened all the more mysterious. Anyway good news so far of the many affected I know of one person who is totally and completely satisfied with your compensation. I hope the trend continues - at least something is going right now. :)

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Sharkith
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Post by Sharkith »

Briannon wrote:I think any buck-pasing to Mythic is unfair because my experience of the US servers is that they are, firslty, much less laggy than the european servers, secondly, patched and hot-fixed regularly with relatively few problems, and thirdly, clustered without any harmful side effects.

People are too keen to say that if something goes wrong it must be Mythic's fault - my experience of Mythic as a service provider is a very positive one.
Well until this happened I was delighted with the service lag has almost vanished (with the exception of the Alb zerg of course) and I did get to see the dodgy service on that WoW server - even Eve Online can have its issues - so GOA are not as bad as some have pointed out. I am not however going to be very happy until they do apologise officially on their website, provide a decent explanation and some reassurance for the future.

If they don't do it through the offical channel it might well smack of a cover up - since most other European players will have no clue just what happened here in the UK.

At least the compensation is going well and I can start to chill out a bit more about it all.

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Post by Requiel »

Briannon wrote:I think any buck-pasing to Mythic is unfair because my experience of the US servers is that they are, firslty, much less laggy than the european servers, secondly, patched and hot-fixed regularly with relatively few problems, and thirdly, clustered without any harmful side effects.

People are too keen to say that if something goes wrong it must be Mythic's fault - my experience of Mythic as a service provider is a very positive one.
Less laggy that European servers: That would be because the internet infrastructure in the US is generally more homogenous than in Europe. You have one big hop across the Atlantic then a couple of smaller hops to the specific part of the States, whereas here in Europpe you can be routed through several different countries' internet backbones for a relatively short connection distance.
Patched and hot fixed regularly with relatively few problems: True on the European servers too.
Clustered without harmful side-efects: True on the European servers too.

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Post by Briannon »

Oy Xest!! Just read your signature - I'm one of those "retards" from Gawaine and boy oh boy oh boy am I gonna kick your ass the next time I meet you in the frontiers.

Dear oh dear oh dear.

;-)
Briannon
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Briannon
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Post by Briannon »

Requiel wrote:Less laggy that European servers: That would be because the internet infrastructure in the US is generally more homogenous than in Europe. You have one big hop across the Atlantic then a couple of smaller hops to the specific part of the States, whereas here in Europpe you can be routed through several different countries' internet backbones for a relatively short connection distance.

I can accept this.
requiel wrote: Patched and hot fixed regularly with relatively few problems: True on the European servers too.

Ok, won't argue with this either.
requiel wrote: Clustered without harmful side-efects: True on the European servers too.

Let's wait and see shall we?

And I wasn't really trying to compare Mythic and GOA in that post (honest), I was just trying to point out that my experience of Mythic was a positive one and some of the reasons for it. Other reasons that I didn't mention were in-game /appeal system with CSRs on-line 24/7 handling live appeals; a customer services phone line that has been quite good at handling phone enquiries. Oh, and I didn't mention a particularly comprehensive web-site that is regularly updated, has working roll of honour, character and guild searching abilities.

I do think the RightNow! system is generally quite good.

But overall, I do think Mythic are a good service provider and are too often unfairly criticised in these forums.

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Post by Ovi »

Briannon wrote:I think any buck-pasing to Mythic is unfair because my experience of the US servers is that they are, firslty, much less laggy than the european servers, secondly, patched and hot-fixed regularly with relatively few problems, and thirdly, clustered without any harmful side effects.

People are too keen to say that if something goes wrong it must be Mythic's fault - my experience of Mythic as a service provider is a very positive one.
Given the level of involvement Mythic needed to have with this issue it is obvious that GoA did not have the access to some of the areas that went wrong. That would imply that there was an issue in an area that is Mythic's responsibilty.

I agree it is not Mythics fault, at the end of the day we give our cash to GOA, and it therefore becomes GOAs responsibilty to ensure that Mythic are providing them with the service they require. However saying it is nothing to do with Mythic is also a little naive.

It is quite likely that the issues on Prydwen were a one off, and could also have been just as likely to occur on the US servers, we could have just been unlucky.

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Post by Xest »

Given the level of involvement Mythic needed to have with this issue it is obvious that GoA did not have the access to some of the areas that went wrong. That would imply that there was an issue in an area that is Mythic's responsibilty.
Wrong - the issue was with the database, DAoC runs on a MySQL database which is an open source product, SQL is also a standard therefore to fix the database someone with SQL skills is required so if anything it more likely implies that GOA don't have someone competent with SQL databases and most certainly does not in any way suggest that GOA don't have access to what was required for the fix.
However saying it is nothing to do with Mythic is also a little naive.
Saying it IS something to do with Mythic is actually the naive standpoint. Just because GOA called Mythic to fix the problem doesn't in any way whatsoever mean Mythic caused the problem. If you drop your laptop is it the manufacturers fault you broke it just because it's them you call to fix it? Hardly.
It is quite likely that the issues on Prydwen were a one off, and could also have been just as likely to occur on the US servers, we could have just been unlucky.
Again, this only shows you have absolutely no knowledge of the issues that have plagued the european service since day 1, and how the US service compares. Mythic probably have suffered equally bad problems, after all they implement new stuff well before GOA, the difference is, Mythic are onto the problem and fix it without anyone noticing how bad the issue could potentially have been - they just have better procedures in place to solve problems than GOA do. GOA has a whole catalog of serious problems and an entire encyclopedia Britannica sized archive of minor problems, since playing US, which has been about 2 years now I can't recall seeing a single major problem (and by major I mean the hacking, the crashing of excal on a Friday and not being rebooted until Monday, the latest Prydwen downtime, the billing of closed accounts, the level 100 troll player on Camlann etc.) and I've seen far less minor problems.

Mythic aren't saints (certainly not when it comes to class balance :p), they have their fair share of issues and such but on a customer service level they're just so much more professional than GOA, they have the systems, the skills and the resources to ensure problems are eliminated as soon as they crop up and the difference is so noticeable at the end of the day. Perhaps this is just due to different countries expectations? Anyone who's been to the US will know that customer service there is vastly superior to that in most of Europe - you only have to walk into a shop in the US to be descended upon by hoardes of happy smiling workers offering to help you, asking if there's anything in particular you're looking for. A massive contrast to the dreary teenagers in europe with the most depressed looks on their faces that do their outright best to avoid having to come into contact with a customer incase it means having to do some work. Customer service is just taken much more seriously in the US with most retail firms employing people to pretend to be customers to check that staff are maintaining top notch service.

Why do you think Mythic wanted to open a European office for Imperator and still want to for Warhammer Online? It's been clear for a while Mythic themselves aren't happy with the running of the euro servers either - after the hacking of GOA's servers Sanya in forums and a post on the Herald with regards to a petition setup by euro players to try and get Mythic to take over the English euro servers made it pretty clear what Mythic's feelings regarding GOA are.
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Tare
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Post by Tare »

Xest wrote: Again, this only shows you have absolutely no knowledge of the issues that have plagued the european service since day 1, and how the US service compares. Mythic probably have suffered equally bad problems, after all they implement new stuff well before GOA, the difference is, Mythic are onto the problem and fix it without anyone noticing how bad the issue could potentially have been - they just have better procedures in place to solve problems than GOA do.
The key problem here, is that GoA has to rely on Mythic to fix the bugged code, they are not allowed to touch it. Of course Mythic can fix bad problems because they don't have to wait for the yanks to wake up and do their work.

edit: oh and xest, the servers were never hacked.
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