Can we please cut some slack to the devs?

Pylgrim

Another instance of server failure (not that they are that frequent, which you should know if you have played other persistently online games) another cavalcade of angry, mocking and or insulting threads yelling at the developers. Businesses as normal in the MPQ forum. But it doesn't have to be like that. Let me count the ways:

1. Do you really think think that they need you to yell at them? Most of these threads seems to be borne of the assumption that the developers are a roguish band of teenagers haphazardly putting together some code and who need the stern, though love of their customers to be shaped into a disciplined team that gets their **** together. In reality, they are a studio with an organised hierarchy, with bosses and managers grilling the team all the time. In addition, they have a publisher (D3), a parent company (Sega) and a franchise owner (Marvel) who are constantly demanding results, answers and solutions, when they are not requesting hard-to-implement features, moving deadlines up, and clogging processes with corporate bureaucracy. Your angry yelling is as obnoxious as it is unnecessary.

2. Since only a tiny percentage of the player base has spent any significant amount of money in the game, it is statistically safe to presume that a good percentage of these angry complainers have ever paid only $0-$20. Yes, over a year or so of playing this game, paying literally with cents what amounts to hundreds of hours of entertainment. Maybe you have paid more, as I'm sure some will be quick to point, but if so, I ask you to divide the total amount of money you've paid by the number of hours you've played and then ask yourself "if someone was paying me this little for my one hour of my work, would I believe them to be entitled to yell to my face whenever I make a mistake?" Your angry yelling is as unwarranted as it is demotivating.

3. Are you familiar at all with the particular hardships, complications and endless amounts of variables that go into creating a code? Into trying to replicate and predict the ways it will behave when used by thousands when they only have a dozen or so playtesters? Do you understand the huge capacity for human error that inherently exists in an ever-evolving game like this? Do you know the real amount of man-hours necessary to just test whether any of the "simple fixes" offered derisively in those threads (as though the devs where dumb infants who couldn't think of them) would work? Have you ever tried an endeavour of this level? Have you even worked at all? Many of the complainers have betrayed themselves to be unemployed or school-age kids with nothing else to do with their time than playing the game and angrily complaining when the game is not working exactly the way they want. Your angry yelling is as self-entitled as it is ignorant.

4. Do you understand that the developers are human beings like you and I? With real feelings, capable of frustration, sadness, and weariness? Don't you think that they themselves feel already bad when issues arise? That self-blame flies around, that fear for their livelihoods creep in? And yet, they are unfailingly polite, tirelessly working to not only fix the problems that unavoidably will pop up, but also continuously trying to make the game better, to make it evolve, if that sometimes means changing the ways people have gotten used to play and withstanding the subsequent outrage. Have you seen the times in the middle of the night when some of the updates or fixes on their issues go up while you are comfortably sitting in home, angrily typing yet another belittling post? I dunno how much money you have spent in the game but there's no real amount of money you can spend that should make you feel comfortable being so **** to your fellow humans in a public forum while you are protected by the anonymous disguise of a nickname. Your angry yelling is as unfair as it is petty.


If you love this game enough to get angry when it doesn't behave like you wish, spare a thought for the developers before giving an outlet to your frustration. The game is not perfect but it has given you enjoyment for hours and hours, or otherwise you wouldn't even be part of its online community. For free or for a ridiculously modest amount of money when compared to the playing time. Problems will inevitably appear but they will be fixed. Changes that you might not initially like will happen but it will all be for the continued health of the game over time. If you disagree or if you truly feel wronged, do provide feedback; they have proved that they are constantly listening (if not immediately bending over backwards about every little thing as some wish they did). Just remember to do unto them as you would have them do unto you and this community may finally cease being a cesspool of vitriol, name-calling and hate. If you have ever worked, you know that a happier, healthier work environment will inevitably result in less issues and an improved output, so everybody wins.

IamTheDanger

Well, I will say that I agree with what you are saying. You have some very good points in your post. Several of them, I've said before myself. The only thing, and I mean no offense, but you did come off as a little rude or condescending. . But other than that, like I said, I completely agree.

For the devs, this their job. How they pay their bills and feed their families. So I would think that they want to make the best game they can. I really doubt that any problems with the game are intended. As you've mentioned, with a game like this, with so many players all over the world, things happen. And when they do, like you said, they do their best to fix it as soon as they can.

So basically, I agree. Especially the past 6 weeks or so, a lot of Players have been pretty harsh.

As for me, I would like to thank the devs for doing as much and working as hard as they have. Also like to thank them for the Ultron event. Things may be getting off to rocky start, but I personally enjoyed it very much. I also think this would be a great way introduce new characters. Or at least 4*s. Instead of just the top 5/10/50 getting them, the alliances can work together and more players wouldn't lose out. Maybe not doing re-runs of this exact event over and over, but more events like it. The concept of alliance co-op Boss Battles is great. With so many Marvel villains still missing from the game, there are endless possibilities.

jobob

Yes and no.

Technical issues happen. But those technical issues locked a significant number of players out of the Scarlet Witch cover, which in turn severely limits their chance at Hulkbuster. Every minute that goes by without addressing that is a Customer Relations sin.

I work in sales and consulting. Mistakes happen. But you HAVE to make them right or your customers won't be customers very long. I have never- and will never- treat my customers like this, so, no, I can't cut them slack on this front.

As for the money issue... A lot of my customers play this game, so as an entertainment expense I've been buying them $300 - $500 worth of HP a month for the last 7 or 8 months. All but one told me today that they are quitting, so that's a decent chunk of change that D3 has lost.

Unknown

Ha ha. Bet you wished you had waited half an hour before posting this.

Waited until it crashed again becasue the devs put Ultron 2 up before addressing any of the problems brought by Ultron 1. Greed much?

Bainee

Servers are down again!

Funny their code to collect our money seems flawless.

Pylgrim

Twombley wrote:

Ha ha. Bet you wished you had waited half an hour before posting this.

Waited until it crashed again becasue the devs put Ultron 2 up before addressing any of the problems brought by Ultron 1. Greed much?

This second run of the event was scheduled for this time since long ago. And before you say that they could just have moved it away, you must understand the amount of red tape that each little decision must cut through going all the way up to Marvel, who are very much interested in having as much cross-promotion as they can right now, so I doubt they would have been very willing to listen to proposes of event delays.

I don't regret making this thread. As I said, problems will come. That shouldn't affect our capacity to be humane.

cyineedsn

Everyone is being harsh. But guess what? It's the job. I program for my full time job too, and guess what happens when I mess up? I'm held accountable and have to fix/support/communicate asap.

If the nature of the back to back events didn't make having an SW cover important, then maybe I would cut them some slack. But, she is necessary for the essential nodes, and so some people are going to have a harder time getting hulkbuster now (how much harder is debatable). Nonetheless, I'm sure some people got screwed out of getting their first SW last night during the outages, and are now playing with a handicap today. (I'm thankful I managed to get a cover earlier)

So yeah, everyone is being harsh. They should do their job and communicate/give reparations/something asap. Because again, this is their job.

Unknown

The whole 'software is hard' seems to complete miss the point of legitmate disaster recovery. At where I work, our department has a disaster recovery policy. Suppose a giant earthquake or an alien invasion took out our data center which renders all our program inoperable, we have a plan to deal with that. As soon as it happened there's a guy that's supposed to call everyone to all the programmers in the middle of the night to let everyone know that aliens just took over data center, and we'd quickly send out email to our users letting them know that aliens have our data center. At the latest we'd definitely have notified everyone that our server is gone the next day though it's likely sooner. Now the plan says it'll take approximately 2000 hours to recover this stuff so it's obviously not a very speedy process, but the users absolutely do expect some kind of notification within at most one day and generally much earlier than that, and this part is not unreasonable. By the way, it'd be considerably easy to predict that the end of the Ultron event is likely to produce some kind of catastrophe on the server, versus remembering to check your servers when a giant earthquake wiped out everything as opposed to looking for survivors (that's the kind of stuff we're supposed to be prepared for), but we're still expected to inform our users and I find nothing unreasonable about that.

fmftint

Yeah, I'm gonna stay with no on this.

Roswulf

Phantron wrote:

The whole 'software is hard' seems to complete miss the point of legitmate disaster recovery. At where I work, our department has a disaster recovery policy. Suppose a giant earthquake or an alien invasion took out our data center which renders all our program inoperable, we have a plan to deal with that. As soon as it happened there's a guy that's supposed to call everyone to all the programmers in the middle of the night to let let everyone know that aliens just took over data center, and we'd quickly send out email to our users letting them know that aliens have our data center. At the latest we'd definitely have notified everyone that our server is gone. Now the plan says it'll take approximately 2000 hours to recover this stuff so it's obviously not a very speedy process, but the users absolutely do expect some kind of notification within at most one day and generally much earlier than that, and this part is not unreasonable. By the way, it'd be considerably easy to predict that the end of the Ultron event is likely to produce some kind of catastrophe on the server, versus remembering to check your servers when a giant earthquake wiped out everything as opposed to looking for survivors (that's the kind of stuff we're supposed to be prepared for), but we're still expected to inform our users and I find nothing unreasonable about that.

As I see it, not having a plan in place to address breakdowns at the start of Ultron 2 is substantially worse. The server crunch is now a known quantity. Without knowledge I don't have I can't say what D3 should have done (most critically, is postponement an option, and for how long?). But D3 seems to have done nothing to address, mitigate, or even prepare the player base for the inevitable, easily anticipated problems annoying people as I write.

I'm not angry, but I am bemused. And I am less likely to spend money on MPQ going forward, because I am less confident in the ability of the MPQ staff to deliver fun. If the Ultron experience was one of my earliest contacts with MPQ,I would be gone. Communication and responsiveness mater.

Unknown

As a leader of a software development team I would like to weigh in a little.

Heres where I cut D3 some slack

1) Yes bugs do happen, its a given in software development. I don't care how large or small the development team is, it will happen to the best of us.
2) It was a new event so certainly the margin for error was a lot higher then normal. They tried something new thats a good thing.
3) Server load is difficult to predict, when you've provisioned for 100,000 users and see a peak of 1M users there exists a high probability issues will occur. This is something that can be planned for and implemented (relatively easily) early on in development, trying to patch this in later on can be difficult. So it could be they never expected their app to reach this level of popularity.

Heres where I think D3 needs to improve

1) Learn from there mistakes. After Event 1 went so poorly there should have been either a delay or additional resources allocated to prevent a repeat of issues. Honestly if the reason for no delay is Marvel pushing for a quick release for promotion sake, then D3 has to have a difficult (re pride swallowing) conversation and own up to not being quite ready. It would be better to release a quality product a week later then a questionable product immediately.
2) Communication lacking at best. When these type of issues occur (and as I mentioned it happens to the best of us) its important to get infront of the issue and be proactive not reactive. Customers in my experience do understand issues occur and as long as they think your working your **** off for them they will be a lot more lenient. Generally my approach is outline how the issue affects them, outline a path to rectify the issue with as accurate a time frame as possible, assure the customer there will compensation ( if appropriate). D3 reps should be all over the forum when major issues occur, reassuring customers and maintaining that customer confidence (See below)
3) It's very important to prevent a repeat of similar issues. This causes customers to lose confidence. The most important thing is ensuring customers have confidence in your ability to recover from the issues.

Unknown

I've never bought the 'unanticipated load' argument in any game since every game that ever got crushed due to insane popularity had no problem with upgrading their capacity in a matter of days. I've been in plenty of sales pitch talk before which all goes like, "If we add this feature we can make millions of dollars". How much does extra hardware cost? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Did I miss the part that Moore's Law is no longer valid and that computers are supposed to be super expensive? It's not like MPQ server is doing anything computational expensive here. It's obviously not that expensive if they can immediately go out and upgrade this stuff overnight in most cases. Shouldn't it occur to someone that if they didn't have the servers running then they can easily lose millions? And even if you spent hundreds of thousands on servers for just one event and never needed to use them again, is that even that much of an expense? How many manhours were spent on developing TUs? There are plenty of features that turned out to be useless or worse yet, detrimental, that took a lot of time to develop and hence a lot of money. At least with extra servers that you never use again you can maybe donate them to SETI@home or whatever, or just keep them around in a storage somewhere. I think the biggest cost to computers is actually cooling them but I doubt the MPQ server will reach a supercomputer status where the heat generated by your computer becomes a significant problem.

Megdar

As a coder for a game publisher myself... it's exactly as you said. But most of the time, we juste "discard" angry useless complain and threat to quit. Constructive stuff are always looked at. But right now, nothing constructive can be said. We must let them do there job. They know we are not happy...

Malcrof

Megdar wrote:

As a coder for a game publisher myself... it's exactly as you said. But most of the time, we juste "discard" angry useless complain and threat to quit. Constructive stuff are always looked at. But right now, nothing constructive can be said. We must let them do there job. They know we are not happy...

Working for a software company, with a majority of our product cloud related, when there are issues.. you have 3 types.. threaten to kill you, understanding, and the ones who do not know enough to say anything.

But with any type of major outage, especially with a new release or product line, we have to provide timelines, updates, and many times, compensation to our customers. I understand they are in panic mode, i also understand it is most likely their lunchtime as well

That said.. i am still aloud to be a little miffed that my playtime is gone, and i lost out on things because of server issues last night and today.

Unknown

Seems the devs have ebbed and flowed on the communication. Sometimes they are out in force answering questions and interacting with the community. Sometimes they are mostly absent for weeks at a time. I think this post is 100% relevant because it seems very much like the devs can be civil and communicate and interact, and people will argue, complain and yell. Or they can say nothing and people will argue, complain, and yell. If our behavior is on average so vitriolic, why should they take the time to interact with us for our benefit? Why do we deserve that?

They are trying to continue to make the game innovative and accessible to as many as possible. I hate that phrase that gets thrown around so often "the customer is always right" no, everyone always has the capacity to be in the wrong even if you have spent money somewhere. A monetary exchange does not make your views suddenly infallible or excuse terrible behavior to people simply doing their jobs. Because news flash if we ask for heads to roll and everyone to get fired for every mistake then what happens if we give you what you want? One of two things, they hire new inexperienced people to replace them who will make even more mistakes or suddenly there is no one to develop or run the game and everything shuts down and every penny spent here becomes de facto worthless. Both of those choices sound pretty terrible. If we want better higher quality content, that cannot be demanded. It can only be nurtured through the continued success of the game. So what you can you personally do to ensure the future success of the game? Maybe not much, but for one we could try to ~not~ spam the forums with pages and pages of reasons we hate the game and the company and all the changes they make. All that anger will only drive people away, newbs and vets alike.

Malcrof

Something tells me they are too busy trying to get it working to run to the forums right now...

Unknown

No we can't. They're incompetent and proved it over and over and over again. Players have every right to be angry. Especially whales, because there's no excuse why they didn't design their servers to cater for the paying customers first. More so given this is a PVE event...
But hey, they're human and humans make errors, right? Too bad Demiurge's producers, designers and coders (I do hope the plural is warranted) seem to make a lot of errors... and quite often.

Pylgrim

cyineedsn wrote:

Everyone is being harsh. But guess what? It's the job. I program for my full time job too, and guess what happens when I mess up? I'm held accountable and have to fix/support/communicate asap.

If the nature of the back to back events didn't make having an SW cover important, then maybe I would cut them some slack. But, she is necessary for the essential nodes, and so some people are going to have a harder time getting hulkbuster now (how much harder is debatable). Nonetheless, I'm sure some people got screwed out of getting their first SW last night during the outages, and are now playing with a handicap today. (I'm thankful I managed to get a cover earlier)

So yeah, everyone is being harsh. They should do their job and communicate/give reparations/something asap. Because again, this is their job.

The thing is that I'm not talking about accountability. Accountability is still paramount. Mistakes are made? They must be fixed. Users were affected? They must be apologised to (done) and compensated (happening soon). Improvement is necessary? Feedback is not only warranted but actually much desired. The whole point of the thread is about the tone of communication. Case in point, the current server errors: No later than 5 minutes after the issue presented itself, no less than 7 threads were created, most of them filled to the brim with sarcasm, vitriol, mockery and ridiculous entitlement. This is not helpful to anybody. This is just the haters having a holiday.

Unknown

Unreasonable demands and angry demands are not the same. You can make a reasonable demand that is angry. Sometimes I think devs in any game are too caught up in 'constructive criticism'. Let's say a dev just deleted your account and wiped out everything you have and you got a note saying 'haha I don't like your name you lose'. According to the posters you're probably supposed to make a post like: "Hello dear dev, I lost everything in my account and it seems like it's because a dev thought my name was dumb. I'm sure this is totally a misunderstanding so I'd like to politely request my account to be restored." Of course, in reality you're probably going to get something like "WHAT THE @!#%* DEVS I DEMAND MY MONEY BACK OR I'LL SUE YOU!" And the second response is just as valid as the first one.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

.... an alien invasion took out our data center which renders all our program inoperable, we have a plan to deal with that

Wow - that is SO cool !

Megdar

Phantron wrote:

I've never bought the 'unanticipated load' argument in any game since every game that ever got crushed due to insane popularity had no problem with upgrading their capacity in a matter of days.

It's funny because it took 8 years for Blizzard, one of the biggest MMO provider, to figure out how to have smooth launch. Every time something major was coming, there was server lag, login crash, instance lock, weird bug etc...

The first release without problem was Cataclysm. If the biggest online game can't be stable with the money they make, I'm able to give some slack to a small game from a small provider...

No you can't go out and buy server, sometime it's not even the servers that are the problem. Sometime, you just discover your code is not meant to handle it, and you can't just change server code in 3-4 days...

Maybe they should have delayed it... the movie is still not even out in the US for another week anyway.