GOA gives the big wavey finger

[Kabane]

Clustering was postponed due to DATABASE PROBLEMS UNRELATED TO THE CLUSTERING.
with regards to Evolution its seems you were left out Stupeh eather that or ya just Stupid ill let u pick

[stupeh]

We were originally told that clustering would happen late June, and it didn't. That had NOTHING to do with the recent database problems, so kindly stfu and get a clue?

Edit: Adding news snippet.

[10-06-2005] The Camelot Reporter

This week some news about the launch of version 1.75 that is getting closer and a few reminders. No background piece this week but it will be back next week…

Some news about version 1.75
Testing is now well underway in every language and we hope we will soon be able to announce a release date. This week Mythic faced some exceptional climatic conditions (extreme heat and humidity) and that lead to great disturbances in the state of Virginia as well as technical issues in Mythic offices that made their work difficult for a couple of days. Hopefully, servers are far from there in secured (and cooled) offices and no disturbance appeared in the game.
All this should not prevent the release of version 1.75 in Europe before the end of June however.
We will begin testing server clustering only after 1.75 is released, so servers will be clustered a few weeks later.

[Requiel]

First of all 500 people is not exactly a small amount. Req says there are 20,000 accounts but if you check the stats there are less than 1,500 toons logged onto Excal and Pryd at any one time. Some of these must be buff bots. Allowing for people logging in and out here and there I am not sure that 20,000 is really representative of the number of regular active players - being honest it probably is not.

3,000 peeps at any one time and 500 not restored is not the same as 20,000 accounts. The trouble is we (and I suspect nor they) really know how many people we are really talking about.

A fairly good rule of thumb (for most MMOs as it happens) is that peak numbers x6ish are the number of people who play actively (i.e. at least twice a week) and peak numbers x9ish are the number of people who have active accounts and play at least once a month. Casual players are mostly invisible to established players and so it's a common tendency to assume that the same people are making up the numbers every night.

There always seems to be a reason for the restoration not being a priority - marketing, clustering or whatever. Fact is there are still 500 reports outstanding and we are now 2 months after the problem with the server. Hard to regard that with anything other than horror, especially as GOA seem oblivious to the fact that peeps have had to pay for 2 months of play time and may not have been actually able to play (remember no pay no restoration).

Restoration is absolutely the number one priority for the English team. Everything else has been shelved, events have been cancelled, holidays have been pulled, all other server activity has been cut to the minimum to focus as much as possible on the Prydwen issue. I know it's taking a long time and honestly I can't apologise enough for that however I'll say again that really we are doing everything we can. I don't expect people to be happy about it however there really is nothing more that we can do to get it done faster. These last few weeks have been about the only time that I haven't enjoyed my job. The company as a whole has other commitments to keep - some of which are contractual, such as the patch schedule - and so the restoration has slowed down of late although it never stopped. The game show made very little difference - ultimately it meant we were without two French GMs for about 3 days. I can give you more reasons but really it's not important, you don't want to hear reasons. Unfortunately I can't give you what you want which is an instant solution.

Req professes to bewilderment and so do I. Mine is caused by the fact that anyone in GOA could not forsee the fuss that clustering before restoration would cause among the many who are yet to be sorted. All it would have taken was an official announcement to explain what was happening and that restoration would not be delayed. But instead GOA continue to refuse to comment on their main webby - making it seem like some big secret they hope will go away.

There's a number of reasons why we don't continue to post on our website about this. One is that there's actually no 'news' as such to give you. Progress is made, the pile gets smaller and all we could really do is cut and paste that every few days. The first time it would make people happy as they'd feel they were being updated, however the third or fourth time they read essentially the same thing, it will simply become another source of annoyance.

Secondly too much news is a bad thing. I know we get a lot of flack for not communicating and partly I see why, however we have these policies for good reasons. Our communication strategy (yes we do have one) is three fold. Firstly the official site is used for important news that will be of interest to the majority of subscribers. If there are a lot of (essentially pointless) posts repeating the same information then real information on the site becomes more dilute and the value of the site decreases. That's why we GMs are encouraged to post on community forums and maintain a high visibility presence in the community so that we can elaborate on 'official' news and pass on information that people want to hear that doesn't necessarily belong on the front page. The third part is RightNow where people who have specific queries can have them answered. People assume that if there's nothing on the front page then Goa has nothing to say, however I, Xalin and Zenythe have all posted countless times here, and on other forums and answered many individual queries in forum PMs, ingame and through RightNow. These are all Goa communicating with you.

We were originally told that clustering would happen late June, and it didn't. That had NOTHING to do with the recent database problems, so kindly stfu and get a clue?

Kabane is also correct. Clustering was originally delayed due to problems with Mythic getting the files to us for various reasons. We were finally ready to cluster in mid August and two days before the set date Prydwen started exhibiting problems. We rebooted the server on the 23nd and took it down on the 24th when it became apparent that there was a good chance of serious corruption occurring. Unfortunately we weren't told until afterwards how certain critical systems worked and so shutting the server down didn't stop the problem from becoming worse. Clustering of the French servers occurred on the 25th and obviously we weren't able to cluster the English servers at the same time as we'd originally planned to. Prydwen came back up on the 5th September and we announced that we would be holding off on the cluster until we were sure that there were no additional database or stability problems lurking.

[Belisar]

Clustering was postponed due to DATABASE PROBLEMS UNRELATED TO THE CLUSTERING.
with regards to Evolution its seems you were left out Stupeh eather that or ya just Stupid ill let u pick

We were originally told that clustering would happen late June, and it didn't. That had NOTHING to do with the recent database problems, so kindly stfu and get a clue?

Is it me or are you two actually agreeing but still being a tad abusive ?

Either way happy to hold my hands up and say I was wrong.

Oh and btw being condescending is neither necessary or helpful.

[Belisar]

There's a number of reasons why we don't continue to post on our website about this. One is that there's actually no 'news' as such to give you.

Secondly too much news is a bad thing. I know we get a lot of flack for not communicating and partly I see why, however we have these policies for good reasons. Our communication strategy (yes we do have one) is three fold. Firstly the official site is used for important news that will be of interest to the majority of subscribers. If there are a lot of (essentially pointless) posts repeating the same information then real information on the site becomes more dilute and the value of the site decreases.

Another late night Req - thanks for the response though.

My only addition is that whilst I agree with the points above and making a number of posts which say the same thing (i.e. we are making progress) serves little purpose much of this could have been prevented by actually making a comment somewhere.

A post was made telling us that clustering would happen. Why could there not have been a simple line in that saying, oh and by the way we know not everyone has had their items restored but clustering will not delay that process ?

A simple line of acknowledgement would have gone such a long way and could have been done without a separate news update or issue being made. I know you and other GM's visit and post on sites (here and FH) but also seem to remember seeing a comment somewhere which was along the lines of such posts are unofficial.

If you actually read the official posts you would think that all was "hunky dory" and the world was at peace - except when mids/albs/hibs meet up ofc. For 500 people (less now hopefully as another day has gone by) this is not quite the case.

[clearbrook]

shutting the server down didn't stop the problem from becoming worse.

Never buy servers from cyberdyne systems

[Satyn]

I have 3 ppl in this thread i could give a warning but i wont. So pls dont flame and counter flame each other or I will.

[Scabs]

My rating is dropping faster than Monica Lewinsky, haha

Anyway nana, there is absolutely no reason for you to believe that clustering wont take the focus off character restoration, except for maybe the possibility that GoA has gotten it into their heads that they really really REALLY shouldn't c*ck this one up. That's probably the only reason you could take comfort in, that GoA, besides pissing off the minority that hasn't had their items restored yet, doesn't want to piss off people by c*cking up clustering

Don't worry mate mind did the same when posting strong personal opinions.

[Scabs]

There isn't a final date as such but if youleave it too long there will be no accessable logs and so we'll only be able to restore quest items and artifacts. Everything else will be compensated with cash (the RoG merchants wll disappear too).

With regard to the whole issue of us 'breaking our promise', there is a big difference between what we said - which was that we planned to cluster after the restoration was complete - and a promise to complete restoration before clustering. I've already given the reasons why we can't - and shouldn't - hold off on clustering. While I do understand that it's frustrating for people who are still waiting for items, there is no duplicity here, we aren't trying to slide anything past you and neither have we broken any firm vow. We made an estimate and had to revise our plans based on the developing situation. It's not intended, and shouldn't be taken as, a kick in the teeth for the people who are still waiting.

It is a big kick in the teeth for the people who were looking forward to the cluster, and getting a character ready for the cluster.

So upon cluster my NS will not be ready, and when i finally get my stuff back I will still need to get new leather crafted, luckly I have a sc'er. I will also have to get a new set of pvp equipment.

[Scabs]

I have 3 ppl in this thread i could give a warning but i wont. So pls dont flame and counter flame each other or I will.

Why not?