Maybe we should send a message to GOA?

[Adalyn]

you write to much Xest :<

Wyst gonna get jelous (spelling?)

[Cryn]

I would like to know why Requiel thinks anyone would be "anti-GOA" for no reason? What could cause someone to dislike GOA? The only thing I can think of is the level of service they've received.

Things that have lowered my opinion of GOA over the years, and contribute to my view of them being a poor service provider:

1) Not marketing the product to the UK adequately, resulting in a reduced UK player base.

2) Not giving us a third English server, reducing the choices of English players.

3) Not giving us a cooperative server for role players

4) When patch 1.42 (or whatever, the first big rolled up one) turned into a horrible mess, a lot of people complained on GOA's forum. GOA's response was to close the forum, sending a pretty clear message about how much they value customer feedback. It struck me at the time as the CRM equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "LALALALALA - I CAN'T HEAR YOU"

5) RightNow responses are slow, terse and often unhelpful.

6) The subscription page is very poorly developed. Over the last year, players have time and again been locked out from resubscription, drawing the process out to days sometimes. Not only is it poorly developed, but GOA have made no attempt to fix it.

7) The XML has been broken for months, and GOA have not given us any kind of support on it. For most of that time they failed to acknowledge the problem, and even now they have obliquely acknowledged it by taking down the Roll of Honour, they won't give us any reasonable indication of what's going on or when we can expect the situation to improve.

8) Every single issue that arises with GOA they use this sneaky tactic of using GMs to communicate on forums, rather than announce stuff. This means they can cover themselves and later claim that information "was not official" if it turns out they got it wrong, but also they can claim we were "given updates" as Requiel did in his recent post.

I like Requiel as a GM. In game he's always been very responsive and helpful. But GOA represent the worst kind of self-absorbed corporate entity to me. They care about 2 things - money and saving face.

If my perception of them is wrong, and they do care about the quality of service they offer, then they have the worst customer relationship management people in the world.

[Ovi]

Hoho, not exactly the most honest assessment of the situation. The truth is you've avoided discussing the issues at hand in favour of making sniping little quips. My replies to you are asking you to stop doing that. And yes, every time you do it, I ask you to stop.

quip (kwp)
n.
1. A clever, witty remark often prompted by the occasion ..."

Won't argue with the use of Quip, as that is really exactly what they are intended to be.

They were not intended to be sniping.

[Lothandar]

I remember when goa cancelled their forums. They couldn't take the flames.

[Satyn]

Xest dont shoot the messanger pls

[Belisar]

I am disappointed that a fix has taken so long.
I am disappointed that we do not know what happened or why or how likely it is to happen again.
I am disappointed that I will have to check my toons, vaults etc for missing items which, if missing, I may not get back.

So disappointed but to an extent apathetic about the whole thing.

Some people seem to have got a little worked up over this, which as daoc is community based and takes up a lot of time for some, is understandable.

Oddly for me having tried excal and not really had the enthusiasm for it I have found other things to do. So having broken the daoc habit there are a few things I am not sure about when the server comes back on.

How much time will I spend back in game having been forced out into other things?
How enthusiastic will I be about renewing subs if I am not in game much ?

This is not a matter of free time or other compensation just simply I have got out of the daoc habit and found other things to do.

I am sure there are others like me and thus GOA are sure to lose some income over this. In a way that could be message Peat wants to send to GOA without anyone else deliberately holding back subs. Enough people will drift away anyway.

[Bourkey]

I havnt read all the posts only the first few, if something goes wrong it goes wrong, perhaps goa did keep us in the dark a little to much, but aprt from that im sure they are/where working as hard as they could to get the server back up on time. So as a paying customer im disappointed at the server being down but tbh daoc isnt everything and is nothing you can do.

[Requiel]

Which exactly? The level 100 troll? It was GOA themselves that stated this was database corruption, are you now going back on this? If so what did cause the level 100 troll. I've also seen GOA state on many occasions, albeit rarely that character corruption does happen. As for this latest incident, how can you contradict yourself so blatantly? Only a few minutes later you posted this:

So just run this by me again, if some of the issues I mentioned weren't the fault of corruption why did GOA lie and say they were? Don't accuse me of being misinformed when I'm going off information provided by GOA themselves, if I'm misinformed about GOA issues then it's GOA who's doing the misinforming.

I'm not going to waste my time on arguing every point with you but some of the things you are saying are simply too wrong to be allowed to stand.
The level 100 troll was before my time I don't remember what that was about, however the issue with characters appearing to be other characters wasn't caused by any kind of corruption (which is what I was saying in my last post). If you really must know what caused it, the game issues every character a unique session id when they log in so it can track them. The routine that determined these session ids would in rare instances issue the same id to two characters at once and hence the character would appear to be an amalgam of both the database entries. The database itself was intact and unaffected and relogging (thereby forcing a new session id) resolved it.
This problem on Prydwen was caused by database corruption as I have said personally and as the official statements on the website confirm. It certainly isn't the oft-repeated problem that you represent it as however.

Ah yes, the blame Mythic cause, this'll be exactly why the problem has never arisen on the US, Italian or Japanese servers then. Oh wait no I forgot, GOA has a special version of DAoC and instead of using perfectly working code and sharing it across versions from US to EU Mythic wrote the EU version of DAoC from scratch inserting lots of added bugs and flaws. They even added in some code that lets a player hack into GOAs servers and also a bit of code that makes people working on Right now take days/weeks to respond as well as an extra little hack that makes GOA's 3rd party billing company charge cancelled accounts, yes that must be it.

Who's blaming Mythic? All I said was that they had to be involved in the fix as they are the developers. If you run (for example) an Oracle database and some weirdness develops that eats your data, do you write your own patch for the Oracle software or do you turn it over to Oracle's developers? Especially if your agreement with Oracle prohibits you from altering the code.
Every version of DAoC is entirely different from the others. The Japanese version is different to the European version which is different to the US version. Each is developed, tested and patched separately as I have explained repeatedly.
No player ever 'hacked' the server fyi either, a lapse of judgement from a former staff member allowed a GM account to become compromised, at no point was the server actually hacked.
Seeing as you're so interested in the way the service runs here are some stats for you, 95% of all RightNow queries are answered with 25 hours, 60% are answered within 1 hour. As you don't play on Euro servers anymore I can understand why you wouldn't know that although I have to confess to being more than a little mystified as to why you care so much about it.

Again, I work on information you provide, if you provide contradictory or flawed information then it's a problem of your own making, not mine. Perhaps you should stop spreading misinformation, of course, that's if it IS misinformation and you're not just trying to change your mind as the situation suits.

No I'll say something and you'll twist it. You'll dig up old fallacies that I've demolished previously and present them anew as facts. I am accustomed to the fact that there are a small minority of people who seem to take vicarious pleasure in misrepresenting everything I say. It doesn't mean however that I am prepared to let them lie about the people I work with.

Doesn't matter how you put it - 10 days is far, far too long for a fix, for any company. If for example, an internet hosting firm had their servers go down for 10 days they'd be out of business.

Yes ten days was far too long but that's how long it took. If it could have been done faster it would have been. It's not in anybody's interest to keep the server down longer than it needs to be. For the record I've spent around 14 hours today in the office testing the server and dealing with RightNow reports. The server didn't stay down due to a lack of effort in fixing it.

[Xest]

Yes ten days was far too long but that's how long it took. If it could have been done faster it would have been. It's not in anybody's interest to keep the server down longer than it needs to be. For the record I've spent around 14 hours today in the office testing the server and dealing with RightNow reports. The server didn't stay down due to a lack of effort in fixing it.

But that's just it, this isn't a one off screw up is it? It's one of many constant screw ups.

Satyn, don't blame me for shooting the messenger, when I present facts about GOA's lack of professionality Requiel is the one who seems to take it personally, he then decides to go off and try and attack me which basically just proves more my point about how unprofessional GOA actually are.

Tell me Requiel, why is it only my comments that you seem to take so much to heart? Do I keep striking some kind of nerve? Instead of coming here making excuses, twisting some comments, ignoring others why don't you relay back this feedback to your managers and point out how bad GOAs reputation actually is so that they can go about fixing it rather than just continuing to prove that GOA are the biggest bunch of blame-shifting, problem ignoring, unprofessional people on the planet? Requiel can argue with me all he wants about whether something I says is true or not, but again as I said already it doesn't do anything to change the fact GOA are doing a whole lot of things wrong and offering and outright terrible service.

[Satyn]

Satyn, don't blame me for shooting the messenger, when I present facts about GOA's lack of professionality Requiel is the one who seems to take it personally, he then decides to go off and try and attack me which basically just proves more my point about how unprofessional GOA actually are.

Sorry but the way I see things he has every right to take things personal. The way you are attacking Goa (wich he's obviously a big part of) isnt fair. He has always come to these boards to give us the information we needed, in game he has always helped out straight away.
If i had to right now something (wich I did a lot in the past) I got response very fast, i never had to wait more than a day.

And I also dont think its fair you're being so damm harsh on them when you play US server. Yes you have the right to your opinion I wont deny (sp) that but sometimes i really think you should get a grip and word things diffrently cos you seem to attack ppl whenever you feel like it. You see a chance to lash out to ppl and you take it, sometimes i really think you're one frustrated boy.
You present things that happened in the past, Req explains once again how they happened. You say its this, Req says its that and tbh I think i know who to believe. I dont see why this all have anything to do with the server being down for so long.

Every company has its problems so does Goa. If they could have fixed the problem sooner they would have.


(hides for xest)