Incompetence unsurpassed?

Unknown

Maybe I'm getting this the wrong way, but did D3P really just push a patch into the final hour of an event? One that prevented those people from playing that were timing their refreshes to get the best results out of their participation, essentially ruining all effort spent over a week? How will this get resolved, events cancelled, full first place payout for all participants as compensation plus additional rewards based on placement at point of disservice? Anything less would feel like extremely poor disaster recovery handling. Not already seeing some very apologetic announcement in the news section is making me wonder if this company is caring about customer relations at all.

Unknown

Seconded.

I'm also a little miffed about the 200 Hero Points I spent on Health Packs for the final push that I didn't get to make.

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

Maybe I'm getting this the wrong way, but did D3P really just push a patch into the final hour of an event? One that prevented those people from playing that were timing their refreshes to get the best results out of their participation, essentially ruining all effort spent over a week? How will this get resolved, events cancelled, full first place payout for all participants as compensation plus additional rewards based on placement at point of disservice? Anything less would feel like extremely poor disaster recovery handling. Not already seeing some very apologetic announcement in the news section is making me wonder if this company is caring about customer relations at all.

The exact same thing has happened before, so the more appropriate title might be "Incompetence, we meet again"

A no prize to the first person to guess what compensation was handed out last time

Unknown

This is just basic Business 101 kind of stuff. I'm not terribly surprised to see such mistakes, given other things I've seen here, but this sort of thing just shouldn't happen.

I lost a good shot at a green GSBW cover, which is annoying, but it's the overall air of "we don't think things through, and we certainly don't put players first" that bothers me most.

JamieMadrox

Patches should be pushed out in the MIDDLE of an event when it's less likely to hurt anyone.

Unknown

I took an early lunch to try and finish out events, and ended up spending the entire time (until five past, when it was too late) trying to get the game working. If this cost me a cover in the PVP I'm going to be really annoyed.

Unknown

charlesjbarry wrote:

Patches should be pushed out in the MIDDLE of an event when it's less likely to hurt anyone.

or just do it after the event ends. it's still going to be in the middle of another event but don't do it when there is 30 minutes left to finish a PvP for ****'s sake.

Unknown

I can almost see why they needed to patch the seasons in because hollowpoint was starting but even an hour earlier would have been much smoother transition

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

I can almost see why they needed to patch the seasons in because hollowpoint was starting but even an hour earlier would have been much smoother transition

The sensible time would have been between the two sets of events. They could even announce it ahead of time, like they did that one time. Doing it in the last hour of two events is just poor planning.

Unknown

Just speculating but if they wanted the season to start at noon, then yes they needed to patch before noon, but I agree wholeheartedly the last hour of two events was too late and they should have had the presence of mind to do it either an hour earlier or after the event ended. 2 hours before the end of the event and I am not certain anyone would have even noticed...

CNash

Would it have been so terrible to have an hour where *no* events were running, specifically so that patches or updates could be pushed out with as little collateral damage as possible? It would also serve as "breathing space"; at the moment, D3P are running event after event after event, and it's exhausting.

JamieMadrox

IceX said in another forum that the server issue and the patch were unrelated so the downtime would have happened even without the patch being pushed out. The fact that they happened at the same time is just an unfortunate coincidence.

Unknown

charlesjbarry wrote:

IceX said in another forum that the server issue and the patch were unrelated so the downtime would have happened even without the patch being pushed out. The fact that they happened at the same time is just an unfortunate coincidence.

...and something completely predictable and easily avoided by a dev team that is halfway competent and considerate.

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

Maybe I'm getting this the wrong way, but did D3P really just push a patch into the final hour of an event? One that prevented those people from playing that were timing their refreshes to get the best results out of their participation, essentially ruining all effort spent over a week? How will this get resolved, events cancelled, full first place payout for all participants as compensation plus additional rewards based on placement at point of disservice? Anything less would feel like extremely poor disaster recovery handling. Not already seeing some very apologetic announcement in the news section is making me wonder if this company is caring about customer relations at all.

'Season 1' was shortly visible on a PVP event in the recent past -- that was patched away in minutes. Implying the season stuff was due like a week ago.

It was pushed ahead to yesterday for the GSBW tournament is already in. Meaning a patch was needed before its start time -- what is traditionally set at the end time of the previous tournament.

It's a safe bet a plenty of folks around there wanted the patch deployed ahead of time, but got voted down by others who wanted to add this or that -- or QA pointing out more and more issues after every fix. So it was rolled to the latest minute allowed to actually go live as intended.

Looking at the hodgepodge development with changing stuff after mere few days out it's clear they completely lack a logistics guy there who would have made the simple calculations on the effect. It's actually simple, you know the bytes needed for the patch, multiply by the people logged in at the time, then match with the server bandwidth. With the usual deployment the downloads are spread out ad people log in and out through the day.

Obviously when multiple events end way more people are around at the same time and each starting to get the patch will bring the server down -- even a big one -- unless there are proper measures to schedule DL for later and allow going on in the meantime. Those are not seem present.

So yeah, it was kinda bound to happen -- and rest assured it will happen again for the next feature forced out before it's mature. As this is not the first time we had the connection issues, we can conclude they don't learn from past mistakes, not have a process that would prevent them in the future -- or they knew well it's coming and didn't care to either compensate by playing with event times, or even to drop an announcement to expect the sht hitting the fan.

OTOH we have a bunch of people in these forums who think calling this (or other more severe issues) incompetence is way too harsh... ignorance is a bliss.

JamieMadrox

TishToshTesh wrote:

charlesjbarry wrote:

IceX said in another forum that the server issue and the patch were unrelated so the downtime would have happened even without the patch being pushed out. The fact that they happened at the same time is just an unfortunate coincidence.

...and something completely predictable and easily avoided by a dev team that is halfway competent and considerate.

How can they predict a server downtime that was completely out of the blue and unrelated to the patch that they were pushing out? That's like saying you should be able to prevent a car accident by not eating breakfast.

Unknown

charlesjbarry wrote:

TishToshTesh wrote:

charlesjbarry wrote:

IceX said in another forum that the server issue and the patch were unrelated so the downtime would have happened even without the patch being pushed out. The fact that they happened at the same time is just an unfortunate coincidence.

...and something completely predictable and easily avoided by a dev team that is halfway competent and considerate.

How can they predict a server downtime that was completely out of the blue and unrelated to the patch that they were pushing out? That's like saying you should be able to prevent a car accident by not eating breakfast.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me

Unknown

charlesjbarry wrote:

How can they predict a server downtime that was completely out of the blue and unrelated to the patch that they were pushing out? That's like saying you should be able to prevent a car accident by not eating breakfast.

You seriously think server down was unrelated to patch deployment? And AGAIN?

JamieMadrox

pasa_ wrote:

charlesjbarry wrote:

How can they predict a server downtime that was completely out of the blue and unrelated to the patch that they were pushing out? That's like saying you should be able to prevent a car accident by not eating breakfast.

You seriously think server down was unrelated to patch deployment? And AGAIN?

I trust IceX to not outright lie to us. He seems to be a pretty honest and OK guy who goes out of his way to make sure we have a good experience on the boards and in the game. I'll take him at his word until someone can prove otherwise.

Unknown

charlesjbarry wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

You seriously think server down was unrelated to patch deployment? And AGAIN?

I trust IceX to not outright lie to us. He seems to be a pretty honest and OK guy who goes out of his way to make sure we have a good experience on the boards and in the game. I'll take him at his word until someone can prove otherwise.

Err, did we see him at all since the recent **** events? I definitely didn't see any post of his offering explanation or apology or just showing a finger. Where's that word to believe?

NighteyesGrisu

TishToshTesh wrote:

charlesjbarry wrote:

IceX said in another forum that the server issue and the patch were unrelated so the downtime would have happened even without the patch being pushed out. The fact that they happened at the same time is just an unfortunate coincidence.

...and something completely predictable and easily avoided by a dev team that is halfway competent and considerate.

because apparently unexpected server downtimes don't happen in halfway competent teams.....yeah, right

Unknown

I question the "unexpected" part. A contested PvP event is happening and ending soon. History of such events has likely shown that traffic increases in the final hours, partially because of the design of the game. Maybe we're talking about an unlucky lightning strike that killed the servers, but if it was a traffic spike, then yes, that should not have been unexpected. Similarly, you do not plan on rolling out a patch when you know people are going to be playing in larger than normal numbers, and potentially changing the game during an event.

You may not be able to anticipate life's randomness, but you certainly can prepare for them, and you can most definitely think through ramifications of your own decisions.