Is this kind of ineptitude acceptable anywhere else?

jimpaek02

For anyone out there who has a job, if this many problems happened at your job and you didn't even feel the need to apologize, would that be OK with your boss?

Unknown

Mistakes happen all the time in life and in work, probably 30% of my day is writing and the rest is fixing mine and other peoples mistakes. We don't know if they're not going to apologise yet, the problem is only a few hours old.

Unknown

O the humanatee

Unknown

Yes and yes.

At work, we're often called to have something done by a certain time regardless of the actual amount of time it takes to do it. So we tell them, this is what we could do, what we couldn't fit in, and here are some of the risks of having the product in this state.

Most of the time only the minor risks end up happening, but there are times when big things happen like server crashes.

Hey, you want better results, have the resources and be willing to spend the time. We told you up front what the risks are.

Regarding Demiurge/D3, of course they're going to apologize. That's what customer relations are for.

GothicKratos

I always love these threads. Yes, my boss looks over mistakes everyone makes every day, sometimes even multiple times a day.

Unknown

Yes.
If you were a weather forecaster, and were this bad at your job, it would be acceptable.
If you worked for the Obama administration, and were this bad at your job, it would be acceptable.
If your last name was Clinton, and were this bad at your job, it would be acceptable.
You could also burn the servers to hide any incriminating evidence that you knew what was going to happen, and did nothing to prevent it...

TLCstormz

I don't understand. Yes, people make mistakes. Even when they are get paid. But said people are only getting paid by their EMPLOYER. And of course, that's okay. That IS human.

But........with this game......they are making mistakes WITH PEOPLE'S MONEY. lol. That is what I see as oh so very different than "well, I mess up at my job all the time, stocking the shelves of CVS" or what have you.

Where are the actual bankers at? Personal shoppers? Financial Investors? Entertainment and Athletic Managers? The people who, if they mess up, are messing with people's money. What happens when THEY mess up. lol. That one dude in the other thread said he spent over $175 this week alone on the game, getting ready for Ultron. And now everything is offline. Again.

I love the game too, and I thank the people that made it possible, but the excuses and reasonings are oftentimes so left field. You can support something and yet NOT excuse it, when unnecessary or undeserving.

:+p

Pylgrim

OP has to be unemployed or still a student to make a thread like this. Human and/or chance error are a expected part of any endeavour and no amount of planning can completely remove it, only reduce it or prepare contingencies. The real one difference I can see with this game is that when we screw up, worst thing that happens is that we get reprimanded by an angry boss or manager, as opposed to insulted, mocked or threatened by hundreds of outraged, entitled players.

Unknown

There's this myth of software is inherently hard and therefore catastrophic failure at some point is inevitable. Well, software is hard, but there are steps you can do to mitigate the issue. The first step would be to have someone that's actively monitoring the biggest event you ever ran that's already crushed the server once on opening day. If there was a post like, "A dragon ate our servers and currently we're sending IceIX in to try to distract it, we're working on a solution to reward players if this didn't work" we'd at least know why the server suddenly died. I'm not particularly bothered by the time it took to fix the issue (though it seemed like it was only fixed because people stopped playing after the event ended) because accidents do happen, but the lack of any status update is something that is entirely D3's fault.

Eddiemon

Sure, when most of your 'customers' aren't paying and never intend to pay, then you get a lot of leeway.

As I am using a free service, I don't really hold them to the standards of a subscription service

Unknown

Problems and mistakes are inevitable. Of course this event's tragic end hit a lot of Alliances deep.

I can't speak to D3 / Demiurge's internal culture, but it's not unusual to have someone up the chain stifle fast and clear communication for some "grand plan" and to "control the message." In general, developers and designers care. They just don't always have the freedom to express that.

SnagglePuss

If you've ever worked in IT you'll know that this type of **** happens more frequently than you realise. Some of it beyond the scope of planning / control. The typical, it was more than we expected, happens due to costs vs risk.

Not just small projects / developers but large multi-nationals multi year projects. That's if the project ever gets to the Go Live stage.

Unknown

I do find it a bit odd that we all knew this event would be a horror show downtime wise. You would think if we all knew, then something would be done by the devs to y'know, stop it happening? But on the flipside yeah, I make mistakes and the boss tends to overlook them.

If I made the same mistake though, repeatedly, over the course of more than a year, he would probably question my intelligence. Not saying that the problems each time are the same, just that the end result (servers offline) are.

Unknown

We don't know the inner workings of Demiurge and D3 though. Maybe someone said "We'll need 20 concurrent servers to handle this load with 99.99% no crashes" and then after a pass through management and accounting they told the guy "Do it with 5."

They really aren't doing any favors with their future. People who come back or newly join the game will think that this is just a hugely buggy game with unreliable servers, even if it only happens with these big events. Why spend money on a game that isn't guaranteed to be up?

Unknown

TLCstormz wrote:

I don't understand. Yes, people make mistakes. Even when they are get paid. But said people are only getting paid by their EMPLOYER. And of course, that's okay. That IS human.

But........with this game......they are making mistakes WITH PEOPLE'S MONEY. lol. That is what I see as oh so very different than "well, I mess up at my job all the time, stocking the shelves of CVS" or what have you.

Where are the actual bankers at? Personal shoppers? Financial Investors? Entertainment and Athletic Managers? The people who, if they mess up, are messing with people's money. What happens when THEY mess up. lol. That one dude in the other thread said he spent over $175 this week alone on the game, getting ready for Ultron. And now everything is offline. Again.

I love the game too, and I thank the people that made it possible, but the excuses and reasonings are oftentimes so left field. You can support something and yet NOT excuse it, when unnecessary or undeserving.

:+p

When bankers mess up they cause global economic meltdown. When this happens they don't apologise and they wont be punished. And what happens to these bankers? They get bailed out by the tax payer to fund massive bonuses while the country is saddled with massive debt.

Unknown

I am picturing a bakery. They make cupcakes and on a normal day sell like 200-300. They think hey wouldn't it be cool if we got Thor, Captain America and Iron Man to personally endorse our bakery, that would be awesome. We should prepare for 10x the normal amount of business for this and have the capacity to make 3000 cupcakes a day the weekend this promotion goes live.

What happens when 6000 people show up wanting cupcakes? Its simple you try as hard as you can to accommodate everyone work crazy hard end up making 4000 cupcakes instead of the 3000 you planned on, and some leave happy with a cupcake, but at some point the demand overwhelms production and some people walk away unhappy after waiting several hours and not getting a cupcake. As soon as you can get more help you make 6000 for the next wave of people and only 2000 show up because of how badly the first event went over and 4000 cupcakes get wasted. In the end 5000 cupcakes got sold in a weekend 4000 more were thrown away, and the bakery eventually settles back down to selling 250-350 cupcakes a day and that is what we call an unequivocal success, even though many people got really mad because they came all that way and didn't get their cupcake. Would it be more of a success if they had planned for 6000 that first day and everyone walked away happy? Absolutely yes, but how do you accurately guess that number ahead of time? Hindsight is always 20/20.

famousfoxking

TLCstormz wrote:

Yes, people make mistakes. Even when they are get paid. But said people are only getting paid by their EMPLOYER. And of course, that's okay. That IS human.

But........with this game......they are making mistakes WITH PEOPLE'S MONEY.

Are you serious? The other people, the one's who make mistakes with their Employer's money that you're okay with, where the tinykitty do you think the employers are getting the money from? From customers. This is no freaking different. How... why... I don't even... do you really not understand that? When someone makes a mistake stocking the shelves, the items on the shelves were purchased with the revenue made FROM THE CUSTOMERS WHO BOUGHT THE STUFF THAT USED TO BE ON THOSE SHELVES!

Good tinykitty, this is so tinykitty tinykitty that I tinykitty my tinykitty. TINYKITTY!

Unknown

Most servers are scalable, unfortunately quite a lot of software isn't and this sometimes doesn't become apparent until its too late. Everyone keeps saying that its the fault of the makers because they didn't turn their server up to 11, scalable distributed software is hard to judge sometimes and it might be a server capacity issue, but its more likely a software issue.

user311

jimpaek02 wrote:

For anyone out there who has a job, if this many problems happened at your job and you didn't even feel the need to apologize, would that be OK with your boss?

Actually yes. In fact my job for the past 11 years has been pretty much fixing other peoples mistakes. The only times I have ever seen a person get let go have either been for offensive behavior or flat out insubordination.

I have a poster in my cubicle. "The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failures".... in other words, it's Marvel's fault.

pizzaburger

I'm so depressed that the game crashed and I couldn't get my black panther from DDQ! I'm crying!!!

Everything is terrible *tears drip into coffee*

GuntherBlobel

famousfoxking wrote:

Good tinykitty, this is so tinykitty tinykitty that I tinykitty my tinykitty. TINYKITTY!

Thank you so much for the laugh. I couldn't bring myself to respond to that post...

The way I see it, a certain group of people at Demiurge actually deserve a bonus for bringing in so many players that they broke the servers for the first time in a long time. Yes, they broke the servers, which is annoying... and CS is definitely going to have their hands full until en masse compensation is awarded. But MPQ did a good thing with this Event and player participation proves it. Even the usual suspects are still here and playing the game despite their never-ending disappointment.

This thread also made me realize that MPQ has been pretty darn stable in recent months. I think I can count more times that I've turned off Hearthstone because of server issues than MPQ and I play that game 1/10th as much as MPQ.

If I wrote a letter the Blizzard every time I lost a Heathstone match because of connection issues...