A letter to GOA?

[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.

[Sharkith]

Ovi - expectations do vary but an agreement or some form of written guidance is as always a way to regulate those expectations.

SLA's are used throughout many industries to regulate expectations and are not solely used to guard against loss. Or in this instance a profound dissappointment of expectations and I can show hundreds of these in some of the institutes I have worked with. So that narrow view of an SLA does not reflect how they can be demonstrated to vary.

Finally, in all of this I have not once criticised the service provided I am restricting my comments to the problems that resulted in the dissappointment of not having access to the pattern of data that some call characters and which they obviously pay for. I have nothing but respect for Requiel and the others trying to sort the mess out and actually I think things here are not so different as in the other MMPORG's I do now play.

What I am keen to explore is if this sort of thing could have been avoided it has implications beyond DAoC ofc.

Sharkith

[Bugzy]

The core of a buisness is never defined as losely as the 'customers.'

It's keeping the customers being customers.

[Sharkith]

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.

I agree once more but didn't they have to give free days anyway? Not only that but they had to do other things that has ramifications beyond the normal state of play in the game - the giving of plat for RoGs is one case in point.

Surely some form of regulated agreement would have helped them guard against this loss? Otherwise they have just ended up making it up as they go along - all of that bodes well especially when you are trying to gain confidence that the backup system they say they are now implementing is actually better than what was previously being maintained.

[Sharkith]

The core of a buisness is never defined as losely as the 'customers.'

It's keeping the customers being customers.

logically inconsistent.

[Ovi]

I agree once more but didn't they have to give free days anyway? Not only that but they had to do other things that has ramifications beyond the normal state of play in the game - the giving of plat for RoGs is one case in point.

Surely some form of regulated agreement would have helped them guard against this loss? Otherwise they have just ended up making it up as they go along - all of that bodes well especially when you are trying to gain confidence that the backup system they say they are now implementing is actually better than what was previously being maintained.

No they didn't have to give the free days, the service was never down. A mute point I know, but none the less we always had access to the service.

How would a regulated agreement have helped? I am fairly certain that, given the situation that occured, GOA and Mythic did their best to resolve the situation as well as they could.

Any agreement made before hand would amount to less for the customers, since they would have to honour it is anything went wrong it would be carefully worded to reduce the risk as much as possible, and would possibly have resulted in a different outcome.

The agreement would include something for complete loss of characters, what if this cost was less than the costs involved in taking a week or 2 to fix the characters? You would say goodbye to the characters, and imo be in a worse position.

They would also have had little flexibility in their reparations, since they would need to stick to the agreement, they wouldn't be able to add RoG merchants for example, the agreement would also be unliekly to include the underpopulation bonuses being used either (Since they weren't around when the agreement would have been drafted...).

I have yet to see a situation where an SLA wasn't used to guard against loss. They are a two way agreement, the other direction of the agreement is obviously to regulate expectations. They work, and are useful, because they benefit both sides. In this instance they wouldn't actually benefit either side.

[Sharkith]

I have yet to see a situation where an SLA wasn't used to guard against loss. They are a two way agreement, the other direction of the agreement is obviously to regulate expectations. They work, and are useful, because they benefit both sides. In this instance they wouldn't actually benefit either side.

try most University service department and their relations to other departments or the regulation of cleaning contracts for bus stops and the reasonable expectation of councils and frequency of bus services - there are thousands of such agreements and they are not there to regulate loss. If you want examples I can provide links to them. Their primary function is to regulate dissappointed expectations.

I think an SLA in this instance would have meant a more predictable response. At a time when you lose trust in the service as a customer a point of reference to procedures that are being carried out would have helped. Having a series of actions made up on the hop looked and felt unprofessional - that is more damaging than any financial consequnce of free time because that results in lost customers. By this I am referring to the people who might have signed up as a result of recommendation from existing customers who no longer feel they can recommend the existing system.

Not only this but part of the agreement could also include explanation and reassurance. Whatever the case - you could even remove the notion of SLA and replace it with a statement of expectations. In this case players still have no way of knowing when they will be able to play again. That I am afraid is not good enough - despite all the best intentions in the world.

Sharkith

edit: syaing they didn't have to do this is not a good way to make people feel happier either - all it is likely to do is piss them off.

[Rejecta]

It will get fowarded to the special GOA complaints tray

[Sharkith]

lol most likely

[Lieva]

tbh

theyve tried this before on the us servers like about 2yr ago except that was more organised and stuff.

nothing happened then and that was to mythic...

and y'all know what happened in star wars galaxies