A letter to GOA?

[Cromcruaich]

Shark,
But as said earlier the intent of the writers is good. The execution is worthless

Support the intention then, i think we can all take it for granted that we will not get an SLA, and even if we were (which incidently can be a blanket one, as is the typical case when providing SLA's in a professional software service provision environment, with exceptions drafted for those who it) then it would still effectively be worthless.

The enforceability of any SLA is directly related to the amount of money you have paid your solicters to be involved in drafting it!

The value of sending something formal is that it brings to the attention of those higher in the GoA food chain that there is a genuine and united feeling of dissatisfaction. While salving the wounds of those customers (ie us!) who were involved in the letter itself.

[Quinlan]

Personally it is not the uptime either that is the problem - because that is not what was broken. What was broken was their ability to deliver on an expectation that we would not have characters currupted as a result of what appears to be a fairly routine operation - updating of the system.

And this is where it gets very tricky since we dont own the characters and data related to it

[Quinlan]

The value of sending something formal is that it brings to the attention of those higher in the GoA food chain that there is a genuine and united feeling of dissatisfaction. While salving the wounds of those customers (ie us!) who were involved in the letter itself.

I think in the recent meetings that where held at GOA they very well realised they will have alot of complaints. I am pretty sure GOA senior management is more then aware of the situation essp since alot of people where put on the problems of prydwen and away from there normal jobs (so the GM's posted).

Ofcourse these are assumptions and my thoughts. The letter will not add or decrease that imo.

1 comment in general: Alot of people are claiming that GOA are the worst ever. The funny thing is that every single online game has forums where you can find the same comments about that specific company. You'll also find numerous petitions etc everywhere which after a while will be forgotten. Same with this (altho it might take a while with this one )

[Lairiodd]

Shark,

what would you expect to be in the SLA. let's keep it simple and the SLA will guarantee an uptime of 92% (I actually think GOA is higher then that atm) for a random number.

So if the 92% isnt made we get in to the penalty clauses where we might get free days. This does mean if the make 93% uptime due to being 1 week down they dont have to give you freedays since they lived up to the SLA. And would this SLA also include a reward clause which is not uncommon in this time.

But as said earlier the intent of the writers is good. The execution is worthless

It could just be a list of targets and performance metrics.

overall uptime per month

This is percentage of time the service is up in a given month.
Target maybe 95%

maximum duration of a single outage

A single outage has 1 day before and 1 day after of uptime. (This prevents them bringing up the server every 10 mins and claiming that their outage is only 10 mins long).

Targets
< 6 hours normally
Exception
Up to 2 days once per year

Rollbacks/Backup frequency

Max rollback of 2 days

Character reliability

Definations:
Major items: Items that the char normally has equipped and/or uses during combat
Minor items: Items that are stored
corrupted char: Char that cannot be logged in due to corruption or who has lost levels/realm ranks except due to rollback

Corrupted chars will be restored in 2 days

Major items wil be restored in 2 days

Minor items will be restored within 1 month (this should be automated to ensure all items are restored)

Compensation

Active char: Any char who has been logged in in the last month (maybe require that some exp or rps or crafting skill be accumulated)

Server down: Anyone with level 50's on that server and no "active" level 50's on another server at the start of the problems receive one free day for every day of downtime

All servers down: one free day for each day of lost time for all accounts

Character corruption: One free day for every two days of downtime, unless all active chars on the account are corrupted and then its one free day for every day of corruption

Item corruption: One free day for every two days of major item and one free day for every 4 days of a minor item

[Quinlan]

Lair,

You cant make an SLA with a customer about something the customer does not pay for. Characters and related data are not ours neither do we rent/lease etc them in anyway. We pay for the service to be able to play daoc on some server somewhere and that is all.

Ofcourse i assume GOA does anything within their abilities to make sure we have our chars and they are all fine all the time. But making a formal agreement on it is impossible.

Ofcourse this is nit picking but has to be said

[Qbic]

Customer is king but not a Dictator and that is what the writers of this seem to want to be. I never said they customer is not important. Only thing i said is that they are not as important as they think.

And ofcourse they try to do their best to not let it happen again. Not like they installed their servers and do nothing (eventho alot of people post they do)

Mate if you provide a service to customers then the customers are the core of the business. You don't have to be Einstein to figure that one out.

[Quinlan]

Mate if you provide a service to customers then the customers are the core of the business. You don't have to be Einstein to figure that one out.

Sure mate

[Sharkith]

And this is where it gets very tricky since we dont own the characters and data related to it

yes this is true. The data is not ours. Neither is the character. What is ours however is clearly a set of expectations that we will be able to use the service - as expected (nice tautology). In other words the expectation of the service is closely related to the pattern of data that through months of playing people have developed access to. So clearly the data and the expectations of the service are not as easily seperated as Mythic, GOA and others might wish. This is backed up by the fact that during this incident everything everyone has said, and this applies to Requiel's own statements, is that these characters are 'theirs'.

Now I know that the ownership of the character and data relating to the character is a crucial issue for all MMPORG's as far as I can see. Wasn't there a press release about one of the MMPORG's that had moved to set up it's own internal auction site for the sale of characters? Something that Mythic strongly opposes as far as I remember?

I can see the problems - but denying that a person can expect to use a service through the configuration of data that they had become accustomed to is a denial of the relationship between the service and the customer in its most elementary form. How that basic part of the relationship with the customer can be ignored is frankly stunning.

So the technical legal issue of ownership as always says nothing about the actual relationship. It is a mistake to state this as the answer (edit) or non answer which is where we are at with our discussion of course .

Sharkith

[Quinlan]

So the technical legal issue of ownership as always says nothing about the actual relationship. It is a mistake to state this as the answer (edit) or non answer which is where we are at with our discussion of course .

Well i have to disagree there. A customer can ofcourse have his expectations when using the service. Ofcourse you want your years of using to service secured. You dont want to start over every time you log in.

But to try to put this expectation in a binding agreement like an SLA is impossible. The things is GOA can now easily set up an SLA with all customers in general (and i kinda expect them to already have an SLA with Mythic). The problem is that once they dont obide by the SLA they go to the penalty clauses and should give us free days. But they can easily get out of that due to their ownage of the actual data and the fact we press accept twice every time they login where we basically agree they can do whatever they want with the data.

Hence i said it could get very trixxy

Edit: and yes customer relation is very important. And any normal company will try to keep that relation as good as possible. But this discussion is about extreme situations.

[Ovi]

Customer expectations are all different.

Maybe I have low expectations, but somethings I expect ...

I expect to get an ongoing service that is econimical enough to continue running for an extended period.

I expect at some point the service to be terminated due to these financial constraints.

I do not expect a 100% up time service (I would prefer to pay much less for 99%).


In my opinion an SLA would be a complete waste of time & effort (Which means my money too!).

Goa are a Company, therefore they are running the servers to make money. The service they provide is to end users, if the service is down they lose money.

SLAs work in situations where if the service is down the customer loses money, and therefore needs to be sure of a service, and if they don't get the service level they require to continue in their business they need to be compensated for the fact that they are losing money. There is no way anyone can justify needing an SLA due to losing money, unless they are breaking the EULA by selling in game items.

We have to take on trust that GOA are doing their best for us, taking into account the economics and available resources. They do not want to upset customers, and I am sure they are well aware of the feelings in the community wihtout clogging up their inboxes with meaningless messages.

People are very free to say give free days, I wonder if they would be so free if it was their money, or if it meant closing the servers because of financial difficultires resulting.

If you don't like the service you have I simple choice, don't use it and don't pay for it. With DAoC there is one big advantage over other MMORPGs, you get a choice of companies hosting the service, if you don't like GOA go and play on Mythics servers.