What's Going on With Maintenance?

[Purr]

1. I have been playing this game since right after it came out. Lots of money spent on it. I try to have a positive attitude and gratitude towards the people who make it possible for me to play.

2. When I hire a guy to come do maintenance on my car or AC or whatever, I expect that if I asked "What are you doing?" he could give me a list of what was being done.

3. I feel like I get essentially no explanation from DDO on what they're actually doing for 2 to 12 hours every Wednesday (or Thursday) or whatever. Are they just rebooting a server? Defragging hard drives? Changing out cables? Installing security updates?

4. If the tire place says "it'll take 2 hours" and then it takes 6, I expect them to say "oh, we found a problem in one of the rims and had to remove it, get a dent out of it, and then put it back in so it wouldn't cause problems later on.

5. I feel like I get essentially none of that from the current dev team, and that makes me sad.

 

[Dandonk]

What is going? It's just going on... and on.... and on...

 

[Discount Gandalf]

yup

 

[DDO Gaming]

// What's Going on With Maintenance? //

if they don't maintain the maintenance, how do you think the game will retain its maintainability and maintain its strong gaming audience?

 

[Ungermax]

Duno but it sure as hell aint maintenance

 

[Xaerxiessia]

in some restaurant , you'd better not know what's happening in the kitchen.

 

[Blunt Hackett]

This is an apples and oranges comparison. Not defending SSG at all saying that. It's their hardware and software they're maintaining. It isn't yours unlike the car in your analogy. It is pretty common for there to be maintenance in other online games and for them to only tell you what is customer-facing (patch notes, maintenance extensions, and such).

That said, what is also common in the industry is to give something out to thank the players for waiting even for planned downtime finished in a timely fashion. I don't think I'm entitled to that or that anyone is, but given how players feel about all the downtime we're having, it would be smart of SSG to do something of the kind. And even smarter, if it is because the servers are old, they need to be replacing them or at least the parts that cause the worst bottlenecks.

 

[paddymaxson]

DDO could stand to generate some goodwill with this lately, but I don't think having a person running server maintenance giving technical updates every 15 minutes when they're working on it would generate that goodwill and frankly when people ask me for updates every 15 minutes so I have to down tools for 5 minutes to present that update fucks me off so I'd not ask someone else to do it.

The car thing's a bit of a false equivalence in that to get your tyres sorted you may have to make arrangements to get from the tyre place, to home, then back there later only to be told it's not done on time then have to go away and come back again. Bit different from "my videogame isn't up yet :("

Much as I think SSG are misstepping with this stuff and something substantial needs to be done to either improve the problem or ameliorate the bad vibes caused by the problem, I don't think more feedback during the problem is the issue and I don't think it's equivalent to your mechanic being slow.

 

[Spook]

This is an apples and oranges comparison. Not defending SSG at all saying that. It's their hardware and software they're maintaining. It isn't yours unlike the car in your analogy. It is pretty common for there to be maintenance in other online games and for them to only tell you what is customer-facing (patch notes, maintenance extensions, and such).

That said, what is also common in the industry is to give something out to thank the players for waiting even for planned downtime finished in a timely fashion. I don't think I'm entitled to that or that anyone is, but given how players feel about all the downtime we're having, it would be smart of SSG to do something of the kind. And even smarter, if it is because the servers are old, they need to be replacing them or at least the parts that cause the worst bottlenecks.

If only SSG hired someone to communicate to or dare I say "Manage" The DDO community.

 

[DDO Gaming]

That said, what is also common in the industry is to give something out to thank the players for waiting even for planned downtime finished in a timely fashion. I don't think I'm entitled to that or that anyone is, but given how players feel about all the downtime we're having, it would be smart of SSG to do something of the kind. And even smarter, if it is because the servers are old, they need to be replacing them or at least the parts that cause the worst bottlenecks.

If only SSG hired someone to communicate to or dare I say "Manage" The DDO community.

Sure SSG could hire a "maintain relations with gamers" guy and deliver goodwill freebies (maybe a new "maintain the elixir of discovery" potion that adds 1 hour to maintain the runningtime of an existing elixir of discovery) thereby maintaining excellent relations with the gaming community which inturn funds the maintainability of the game and gaming audience

 

[Arkat]

Sure SSG could hire a "maintain relations with gamers" guy and deliver goodwill freebies (maybe a new "maintain the elixir of discovery" potion that adds 1 hour to maintain the runningtime of an existing elixir of discovery) thereby maintaining excellent relations with the gaming community which inturn funds the maintainability of the game and gaming audience

 

[magnus2882]

[ Inserts SSG Fanboi defending reply here to be compliant with my fellow posters ]