Server Outage (07/08/15) *Updated

Linkster79

CrookedKnight wrote:

Did compensation only go out to people who were in an active bracket during the outage? My entire alliance lost out on the chance at top 50 because people couldn't play, but anyone in an early PvP bracket seems to have been left out in the cold.

I obviously wasn't affected enough either as am yet to see anything on my screen. Being in the UK and being a night shift worker I was going to log in and snipe some rewards in the events before I went to bed, I could not log in and start those events.

TheOncomingStorm

wuweird wrote:

The truth is too many players were affected in too many ways.

I'm not asking for them to go down to individual level rewards. I'm wanting recognition that some players were screwed over worse than others and at least providing some nominal compensation that displayed that. It's the "all players were affected equally" rhetoric that ends up alienating people because it is demonstrably not true.

A simple and far better solution would be to extend active events by the amount of time the server was down.

I personally would be happy for them to take a break from new characters & features if it meant they could either lessen the chance of this happening again or improve the outcome when it does.

Your solution is another example of what initially looks like it would be good, but it just causes more of the same problems. This would adversely affect ppl that thought they had shielded until the end of the event costing them extra hp if they have any shields not on cool down or players' shields would expire because they were done playing and they'd lose points.

It would also still affect players that could only play that day on the window it was down. Remember, players choose end times for a reason.

That's not counting how it would affect optimal play in pve. I'm sure there would be more things affected as well.

Lastly, you wanting recognition or special compensation is understandable, it's human nature. Unfortunately, you're upset right now and not being rational or you would see they have already done what you are asking. The compensation is so great precisely because they realize some players lost out on more than just simple playing time. However, stating all players were affected equally is not just rhetoric on this circumstance. Because you're discussing hypotheticals in this case, they can't just look at what players had done to the point of the outage because players who fell outside of the boundary that you feel deserve the same compensation as you can argue that they were getting ready to play the event and would have done just as well or better than you. Therefore, mpq gave out compensation to more players than you felt deserved it although they were making the same argument as you.

TL; DR: you're solution creates its own set of problems. You can't judge that some players were screwed over less than you because they didn't get a chance to play during the outage either.

puppychow

I wasn't too negatively affected by the server outage. And although I know some ppl who got screwed in their bracket due to the outage, they were satisfied with the compensation package of hp/iso. I think overall, the package was quite generous and more than made up for the losses incurred by most players.

Unknown

I still have not recieved my compensation. Should I send in a ticket, wait, or assume I'm not "everyone" who was "affected the same"?

Unknown

I recieved compensation on my account, but my wife still have not recieved compensation on her account. What she should do in this situation?

Unknown

Not wishing to be rude, but I'm a bit sick of the band of D3 apologists, who hail every message or gesture from D3 admins like manna from heaven. A number of facts from this latest episode.

1. This is the latest in a long series of server availability issues.
2. Although the server crash was out of their hands, the failure of the restore/fail-safe routines was their fault - as seen by David Moore's initial message.
3. Communication from D3 was awful. There was not a single communication in the 5 hours the servers were down. In fact, I think the first proper communication was 7 hours after the servers came up. Not nearly good enough.
4. Directly or indirectly, these guys wages are paid for by MPQ players.

So down to the individual impact on players. Players were impacted by shields expiring during the crash (which happened to me), events expiring during the crash, or hitting the time that they were available to play. This hit individuals and alliances.

To be honest, if you think 250 HP and 2000 ISO is sufficient compensation, then
a. you weren't significantly affected by the issue,
b. you don't understand the impact this had on a large number of players, and
c. you've been numbed by the miserly compensation for previous issues offered by D3.

250 HP is 10% of the cost of a 4* cover and 20% of the cost of a 3* cover. 2000 ISO is pretty much half of what is offered in DDQ.

I'm annoyed with D3 for the following reasons.

1. This was another totally avoidable situation. Test your game! Test your infrastructure! It isn't that tricky.
2. When something happens, they need to communicate. 12 hour response time is totally unacceptable.
3. The dismissive way that compensation is offered. Effectively, "This is what it is. We won't listen to any complaints. Deal with it!"
4. The lazy way that compensation is dealt with. MPQ is all about statistics and databases. Finding out who is likely to have been hit isn't so difficult. I've seen a number of ideas and I put across an idea on another thread (which Ice then locked without any acknowledgement that he'd read any of the ideas at all). I admit that no compensation algorithm would be perfect, but if you make a proper attempt in a transparent way, then the community will have much more respect for your efforts.

I've actually been impressed with the way MPQ has progressed in the last few months, but situations like this kill all that goodwill very quickly. It just reinforces the view than many people had built up over the previous 12 months that D3 don't understand their player community and actually don't really care.

mohio

I've calmed down a bit over this, but figured I'd give my 2 cents as well in case anyone cared or it helped explain more people's frustrations.

Where to start...okay, so it's midnight Tuesday night/Wed morning, my HB is sitting at 2/4/4 so I really wanted that red hulkbuster. On normal night ending events my m.o. is to start slice 5 with about 2-2.5 hours left in a slice, hit 1k in about 1:40 or so and shield out. Since this was the mid-week one, I didn't really want to do this midday Wednesday so I see that slice 3 is ending in about 6 hours so I decide I'll do my huge climb and shield thing a bit early so I can give myself time to hop once in case I don't make it in one go like usual (also wanted to give myself a bit more time since Falcon tends to slow things down). Had a few things to do so I start around 12:40 AM, do my usual thing, get to 780 and servers go kaboom right around 2 AM. While there's certainly no *guarantee* I would have hit 1k, I haven't missed an in-season 1k since they changed the scoring system except I think once where I started with just 1:20 left and only got to 950-ish. I'm fairly certain I could have found 220 points in the 4 hours left in my event. Unfortunately I wasn't given that opportunity cause obviously no one could play during that time. As you can see from my 2/4/4 HB (now 2/5/4 from hitting 1300 in Fly-Fight-Win), I'm pretty pissed about missing out on the red HB. That's practically another month I'll have to wait for the next set of HB rewards to cycle through and offer up the red cover again before I can max him out.

I can understand that the server outage was a universal effect for everyone, but as others have pointed out, it didn't effect everyone equally. The top guys in my bracket were sitting shielded around 1200. They at least got their HB cover, but no doubt with 4 hours left they were planning on at least one more hop to hit 1300. Those guys were effected too. I had an alliance mate, also in slice 3, shielded at 900+ waiting for hours so he could hop to hit 1k and shield out, but he never got the chance. I know there are a lot of possible problems, and awarding people with what they "usually" get is a bit problematic (I could have just started and been at 300 and had the same complaints as I do now being at 780), but just shrugging off people's discontent doesn't seem like a good way to engender yourself to your customers. Plenty of people join brackets with lots of time left but don't really do a big climb until the last 3 hours to save on HP. To them 250 HP and 2000 iso is a pretty big slap in the face, especially telling them they have no recourse to get anything more, they're just SOL. Now I'm just getting more upset about it so I'll stop here.

tl;dr - I was pretty severely negatively effected by the outage and am seriously disappointed with their handling of compensation. I don't even blame them for the outage, but their response is pretty laughable.

Unknown

I ended up opening a ticket about not receiving compensation, to which I of course have not received a response. I am duly pissed off because there is no way I wasn't affected, considering that I had literally just completed a match and got disconnected while the reward screen was loading. So I was very clearly right in the middle of participating in the event when this server outage occurred. Obviously whatever algorithm they're using to determine who was and was not affected by their screw ups is not accurate. The only way to avoid this in the future (besides getting their s*** together) is to just give blanket compensation to EVERYONE. No trying (and failing) to determine who was affected. Just give the compensation to everyone and be done. Because now not only were some of us screwed from the outage, we're now being screwed by their failure to compensate us fairly.

TheOncomingStorm

ephyzephy wrote:

Not wishing to be rude, but I'm a bit sick of the band of D3 apologists, who hail every message or gesture from D3 admins like manna from heaven. A number of facts from this latest episode.

1. This is the latest in a long series of server availability issues.
2. Although the server crash was out of their hands, the failure of the restore/fail-safe routines was their fault - as seen by David Moore's initial message.
3. Communication from D3 was awful. There was not a single communication in the 5 hours the servers were down. In fact, I think the first proper communication was 7 hours after the servers came up. Not nearly good enough.
4. Directly or indirectly, these guys wages are paid for by MPQ players.

So down to the individual impact on players. Players were impacted by shields expiring during the crash (which happened to me), events expiring during the crash, or hitting the time that they were available to play. This hit individuals and alliances.

To be honest, if you think 250 HP and 2000 ISO is sufficient compensation, then
a. you weren't significantly affected by the issue,
b. you don't understand the impact this had on a large number of players, and
c. you've been numbed by the miserly compensation for previous issues offered by D3.

250 HP is 10% of the cost of a 4* cover and 20% of the cost of a 3* cover. 2000 ISO is pretty much half of what is offered in DDQ.

I'm annoyed with D3 for the following reasons.

1. This was another totally avoidable situation. Test your game! Test your infrastructure! It isn't that tricky.
2. When something happens, they need to communicate. 12 hour response time is totally unacceptable.
3. The dismissive way that compensation is offered. Effectively, "This is what it is. We won't listen to any complaints. Deal with it!"
4. The lazy way that compensation is dealt with. MPQ is all about statistics and databases. Finding out who is likely to have been hit isn't so difficult. I've seen a number of ideas and I put across an idea on another thread (which Ice then locked without any acknowledgement that he'd read any of the ideas at all). I admit that no compensation algorithm would be perfect, but if you make a proper attempt in a transparent way, then the community will have much more respect for your efforts.

I've actually been impressed with the way MPQ has progressed in the last few months, but situations like this kill all that goodwill very quickly. It just reinforces the view than many people had built up over the previous 12 months that D3 don't understand their player community and actually don't really care.

You got me, I'm a mpq apologists. Just disregard my epic rants, I'm sure those were typos.

Of course, I could just be trying to be rational and have perspective on this situation, but I like the title of mpq apologist much better. If you don't mind, I'm going to steal it from you and make it my forum signature later.

Unknown

It wasn't aimed directly at you, but at a number of posts here and on other threads. However I do take issue with comments like "The compensation is so great" which D3 will cherry-pick and convince themselves they are doing right by the community (if indeed they read any of this at all), when the amount of thought or consideration they put into it, was less than the effort a standard player puts into a node of DDQ.

Getting accurate compensation would be difficult, but they never try, and probably never will when we get a bunch of people calling this generous. If this was free-to-play just organised by a bunch of fans and volunteers, then I'd totally sympathise with them - but that isn't the case at all. This latest pathetic attempt to appease the community is lazy in thought and lazy in execution.

Unknown

hector83 wrote:

I recieved compensation on my account, but my wife still have not recieved compensation on her account. What she should do in this situation?

support ticket

Kyuun wrote:

I still have not recieved my compensation. Should I send in a ticket, wait, or assume I'm not "everyone" who was "affected the same"?

probably the ticket

Linkster79

You missed a group of pkayers. Those who start late near a time shard end and go for top rankings for low points. Due to server outages I couldnt even start PvP like I wanted to so I get neither ranking rewards or compensation as I wasnt active in a PvP event.

Unknown

It happened again.
game crushed and now I am getting this error again.

///////// Save Game Error ////////////
The save file is corrupted

PLEASE HELP
Its been several days without playing MPQ

Unknown

My username on puzzle quest is mitch1991 and ive been logged out for nearly a week because my save file is corrupt so i have missed out on loads of rewards and d3 are not responding this has happend roughly 4 times now please help

Dayv

Locking this necro thread.