Can we please cut some slack to the devs?

MarvelDestiny

GothicKratos wrote:

MarvelDestiny wrote:

HOWever, our current situation could have been avoided with a little forethought, planning, and server upgrades/expansion. The devs have already stated that they have been planning and working on this for months. I find it hard to believe that not a single member of the team mentioned a need to invest in upgrades. So that leaves two possibilities: either this disasterous AvU implementation and the associated systemwide crashes are products of gross incompetence, or d3p didn't feel the expenditure was worth it to upgrade their equipment.

Neither one of us have any ideas what they did or didn't do. You're being presumptuous in the thought that they didn't do anything to try and curtail issues. Just because there was issues, doesn't mean nothing was done to try and prevent them.

You're also being presumptuous in stating that the developers believe that upgrading equipment "wouldn't be worth it", since that's exactly what they said they did here.

Furthermore, I would posit that the ideal of D3 being bumbling oafs 'that constantly screw up' is extreme hyperbole. Here's how I look at it;

When was the last time there was server downtime? DQvMPQ. That was quite a few months ago. Before that? I seem to faintly remember some downtime at the end of a season somewhere, but I also remember that being compensated by giving users the next up Progression Reward, which was met positively. Other than that, I don't even know - I don't recall any other down times in my stint of playing.

Yeah, we had the Taco Token fiasco, but that got addressed in what, a day? Maybe two? They even came onto the forums and described how and what happened when a forumite asked them. That was recently.

What was the last technical "issue" we had? There's that save data thing that just cropped up - they've got a fixed worked up and it took a week...? That's acceptable.

There was the Shield fiasco, and that was bad, and it lasted longer than I feel comfortable admitting. That was what, a month ago though? What was before that?

Sorry if I view 99% of the complains of "constant screw ups" just condensed complaints about nerfs or mechanics changes (not directly pointed at you).

Nothing taken personally GK. (Can I call you GK?) I appreciate the feedback and differing point of view. Perhaps I am being presumptuous. I agree, I was not there and do not know the particulars of their design process. I am willing to step back and analyze my comments when presented with new information should d3 opt to provide it. In the meantime, my opinion is based on experience as a team lead, QI, root cause analysis, ect. So I have a pretty good idea how an engineering/programming team works. Bigtaf's post summed up everything well.

I wouldn't go so far as to say everyone at d3 are bumbling oafs. I'm sure there are plenty of good people on their staff and I never meant to infer otherwise. Crashfest 2015 needs to be addressed outside of "we're working on it" though; D3 communication to its end users needs to improve overall; and bugs in the code should be shored up to stabilize current gameplay -- all of which is lacking.

I understand your view of the 99%, if I were in your position as admin I would probably feel the same (nor do I feel it was personal). I posted my opinion and tried to add to the conversation. Perhaps it was a bit more expression than exposition, but there you have it.

Buret0

The problem with the system going down in this game versus some of the other games out there is because the devs put you into a dependence cycle in order to succeed in the game.

You need QS to get SW. You need SW to get IMHB. Every time they release a new character, they make the previous character a "required" character for the next mission.

If you are a true casual player, you won't care that you don't have the required character. You aren't trying to get the top spots or top progression rewards.

Here, it is even worse because you aren't just letting yourself down, you are letting your alliance down. When you do what you can to try and get the progression for your team and the eight different event issues/bugs/bad information relating to this event happen to screw things up, you can understand the justifiable frustration that the players feel.

So when communication with the users breaks down, we get frustrated.

When we don't know the timeline for reparations from the problems, we get frustrated.

Especially since we know that someone is looking at this problem, not with their customer relations face on, but with their greed face on.

What does it cost to give everyone the SW covers that they missed out on in time for Ultron R2? Nothing but the opportunity cost of people not buying packs to acquire the SW covers that they are missing.

That's why they haven't given us the covers yet. They are waiting to hope that people spend the money on the 10 packs first. That's what sucks about this whole thing. That's why the userbase has legitimate cause to be angry and frustrated and vent.

Edit:

And it isn't the devs who come into this forum who are ultimately going to be able to make that decision, so it is unfair to be mad at them for that part. It is going to be somebody completely disconnected from the forum and the userbase. Someone looking at a spreadsheet of opportunity costs.

GothicKratos

jobob wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Neither one of us have any ideas what they did or didn't do. You're being presumptuous in the thought that they didn't do anything to try and curtail issues. Just because there was issues, doesn't mean nothing was done to try and prevent them

Well, to be fair, one thing that we do not have to speculate about is their response thus far. A technical problem caused a sognificant amount of players to miss out on rewards through no fault of their own. That HAS to be addressed. And while I have no problem with them taking their time putting together a full response, the fact of the matter is that every minute they wait, they are keeping many players locked out of the SW nodes, artificially increasing the difficulty of getting IMHB.

That's not speculation. And ultimately it's the biggest problem I have with D3 on this issue, and... No, we should absolutely not cut them any slack. Stop continuing to punish players for your mistakes and issues, D3.

They are addressing it.

Feel free to watch here for information about compensation and other changes involving the first run of Ultron.

This thread addressing the server outages. Then the previous one.

How about here, where they addressed the problem with some people not being able to start round four.

What about this one talking about Scarlett Witch not propagating for Essential Nodes.

Unrelated to the event issues, but there's also this one here letting everyone know that the save file corruption issue has an available fix and why it happened to begin with.

You were saying....?

[EDIT]: Yeah, GK is fine (this is actually where things like my GamerTag come from "geekay" LOL). Thanks for keeping things constructive and friendly, by the way. I just wanted to kind of not-so-subtly say that maybe we're thinking too much with our sleeves. I'm guilty of this too, I just tend not to vent on the forums.

Pylgrim

Arondite wrote:

For the record, I agree with most of what you said. The one thing I take issue with is the whole "do you know how hard it is to code?" Argument.

That's a non argument.

Sure, code isn't necessarily easy, but it's what programmers do. It's their whole job to be good at it, despite its difficulty. My job is hard too, but if I mess it up I lose said job. Difficulty doesn't matter when that's what you're trained for and its the path you've chosen, and usually your pay is adjusted to compensate the difficulty of the work depending on your field, so...

Again. Coding is hard is a non issue.

I agree. Perhaps I didn't word it correctly. It's not that coding is inherently hard and as such devs deserve praise for attempting such difficult endeavour. Rather that the people who criticize and mock most of the time don't have any idea of what they are talking about. They say things like "God! It's just a matter of doing this and this instead of that, how stupid can you be not to see it?" without an inkling of what actually entails to do it. That whole point was not about the difficulty of coding but about the relative ignorance of haters.

jobob

GothicKratos wrote:

jobob wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Neither one of us have any ideas what they did or didn't do. You're being presumptuous in the thought that they didn't do anything to try and curtail issues. Just because there was issues, doesn't mean nothing was done to try and prevent them

Well, to be fair, one thing that we do not have to speculate about is their response thus far. A technical problem caused a sognificant amount of players to miss out on rewards through no fault of their own. That HAS to be addressed. And while I have no problem with them taking their time putting together a full response, the fact of the matter is that every minute they wait, they are keeping many players locked out of the SW nodes, artificially increasing the difficulty of getting IMHB.

That's not speculation. And ultimately it's the biggest problem I have with D3 on this issue, and... No, we should absolutely not cut them any slack. Stop continuing to punish players for your mistakes and issues, D3.

They are addressing it.

You were saying....?

Maybe I didn't explain my point well enough... they are addressing the technical issue, and that's great. I've said multiple times that those things happen, and that's just the way it goes. Definitely cut the devs some slack there.

What I'm referring to- and what they haven't addressed in anything but the most vague ("we're looking into ways to make it up to players") language- is the fact that their technical issues caused players and alliances to miss out on rewards... rewards that are then a requirement for playing the next round (obviously I'm talking specifically about Scarlet Witch).

Take my alliance for example... casual moms and dads who have more to do than just game. But we did pretty well, especially with only about 1/3 of us having Quicksilver... with 6 hours to go, Ultron was at ~100k health in the first round to reward SW. Then the login issues started... even so, one player managed to finally kill him off... only to be unable to login to play the node to get the SW cover. None of us were able to log in to play it.

Now, about 5 or 6 of us did get SW through the tokens... but ALL of us (or almost all) should've been able to get her, if not for D3's technical issues. So now, instead of having all alliance members be able to tackle the SW nodes, only 5 or 6 do... meaning we are **** for getting the Hulkbuster.

The thing to do would've been to give everyone at least 1 SW cover immediately, so that no one was locked out of those essential nodes. Then they don't have to give out Hulkbuster covers as well. But now we're 12 hours into the event and still no SW cover for alliances that got screwed out of them through no fault of their own. No slack is deserved until they come out and tell us how they intend to make it right- a few extra tokens is absolute **** in lieu of a guaranteed cover that was denied due to their technical issues.

Unknown

We've passed the point of no return in terms of compensation, as in even if everyone gets a SW cover now there isn't enough time left to get IMHB for any 'on the fence' alliances so unless they're going to hand out an IMHB cover to everyone too (or extend the event by at least 2 days, because if it's one day people will just say they already gave up and it'd still not be enough). Today is really the last day where you can resolve the fallout from Ultron Part 1 without going to the extraordinary measure of 'give everyone an IMHB cover', which would be unbelievably generous but is now the likely expectations due to the delay. Up until today, people could tell themselves that if only they have that SW cover they totally could've beaten round 6 (and likely fail, given the increased point total required), and now that today has passed without a resolution, what is merely a hope is now going to be the reality when you ask those guys the same question. Everyone is going to tell you they definitely would've beaten round 6 had all the alliance members had SW covers, and even if they're all lying you can't prove it, not to mention some of those guys would still be telling the truth!

Unknown

My theory is that they were "allowed" to do this event by Marvel to tie in to the movie... just like the mob "allows" you to pay protection money.

They knew they weren't ready, but had to get the event out anyways.

All compensation will happen after the current (2nd run) is over. This is because if they compensated people now, there would be 50 more things that deserve compensation, that will transpire before the 2nd run is over.

What Phantron says would even be obvious to the team involved with the game. The more you wait the madder people get. There is a cost to benefit ratio at play here somewhere, and I think my theory is the best explanation for their inaction on compensation.

As has been mentioned before carious places... this game has what is commonly referred to as "snowball effect mechanics". Each thing builds on the last. Anytime you break the chain you cause massive disruption to the whole "ecosystem" if you will. If anyone doubts this, look back at all the rage about the MMR "fixing" that went on during nonstop events that built on each other. That's how I got stuck with a KK with only 2 colors of covers...

El Satanno

I'd like to riff on something which hasn't been addressed in too much depth and is likely a big reason why we're not getting what it is we want here. For reference, I work in middle management in a fairly big company (~5k employees) and most of what I'm going to go into below is a direct reflection of the parallel **** I have to deal with on a daily basis.

We like to heap scorn and scathing commentary upon the dev team whenever things don't go the way we like. But we are, for various reasons, operating without full understanding of the situation. It is possible, if not highly likely, that forces well beyond the control of the dev team are working against our best interests. Let's just take the latest fiasco as an example of how these things often work in a business environment:

Let's say you're on the dev team. Your team requests more server power to handle the deluge of new and returning players for your exciting new Ultron event, in addition to the current playerbase. Management team weighs the cost vs. potential fallout and responds with "you can have half." Executive team trumps with "you can have a quarter." Who shoulders the blame? Not the devs...oh wait, yes you do. Your fault? Nope. Substitute "delay of event to prevent madness" for "server power" and you can have an identical conversation. That's assuming an external force, like Marvel, isn't out-and-out forcing your hand thanks to licensing agreements.

Maybe you're someone like Hi-Fi or IceIX whose job entails community management. In your head, you're screaming "It was those d-bags in the suits!" But you can't say that. You know full well that if you had had your way, things would have at the very least been far less damaging, if not altogether avoided. Still, you're not allowed to actually tell the players that a Decision From On High was responsible. In fact, you may even have your hands tied as to how clearly you can respond. You want to say "it'll take this long," or "we plan to give you this as compensation," or even "yeah, it sucks, and we're busting our **** to figure it out." But you can't. Gotta keep up that professional front. Or maybe someone else in a dark suit has decided that "We're working on it" will suffice.

At the end of the day, it is possible if not likely that a major reason why we're getting the cold shoulder sits higher up the food chain. From the Ultron crash issues, to the token packs, to the character releases, to come whatever may, there is at least an even chance that we're pointing our anger at the wrong people. This in addition to the very well-written OP by Pylgrim.

Or maybe we simply could stop being cowardly sniveling pricks hiding behind the veil of anonymity and not post things we wouldn't dare say to someone's face.

Unknown

Can't and if we could still definitely shouldn't.

Why do you think permanent incompetence and ignorance worth kudos?

You're right on a single point: pointing out the obvious is pretty redundant. And if we didn't see any trace of corrective, let alone preventive measures, we hardly shall expect them in the future.

But is that enough ground for your call to just shut up and FO? How about you giving common sense a break?

Unknown

Arondite wrote:

For the record, I agree with most of what you said. The one thing I take issue with is the whole "do you know how hard it is to code?" Argument.

That's a non argument.

Yeah. Then again if we accepted that way of approach it still would not fly. I know a plenty of people who could solve all the cited problems in no time. I could solve most of them myself actually. We have solutions for so much bigger problems than MPQ has or even imagines.