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Lack of communication is unprofessional


Demorgoth

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Overall Bioware has shown more customer feedback and communication than ANY MMO dev company sans, CCCP.

 

Doesn't make up for the fact that the game itself is terrible.

 

 

Say WHA?

 

If by more feedback you mean darn near totally silent then yeah, otherwise I say that you are completely full of crap.

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Because people were getting disconnected hourly and in some extreme cases within minutes. Just because the bug doesn't affect you doesn't mean there is not a problem. They needed to put the fix out asap. Bioware did a great job with this. The community should be excited by the amount of patches bioware is doing..not bickering.

 

Jeeze, way to overreact to my post.

 

I never said it wasnt a vital fix, only that I said I have never seen anyone posting about it.

 

IVe seen LOTS of threads about ability lag, and error 9000 and people saying that the AA doesnt work or that people are farming nodes on illum.

 

But ive never seen one thread about this, hence me asking how long its been an issue for and why it was a vital fix. It seemed to have no presence on the forum at all.

 

Also, it still doesnt invalidate the fact that they didnt put out a single bit of info about it before they patched - if they had there might be a tiny bit less stress about the patch.

 

Keep people informed, regularly, and the problems will lessen immediately.

 

Tell people absolutely nothing, and they will get angry and stressed.

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IVe seen LOTS of threads about ability lag, and error 9000 and people saying that the AA doesnt work or that people are farming nodes on illum.

 

But ive never seen one thread about this, hence me asking how long its been an issue for and why it was a vital fix. It seemed to have no presence on the forum at all.

 

Also, it still doesnt invalidate the fact that they didnt put out a single bit of info about it before they patched - if they had there might be a tiny bit less stress about the patch.

 

Keep people informed, regularly, and the problems will lessen immediately.

 

Tell people absolutely nothing, and they will get angry and stressed.

 

 

Exactly!

 

*IF* this was an emergency fix they wanted to push out the second it was finished, then do it. It obviously wasn't important enough to push out when they first announced it (early evening the day before according to what some people reported from twitter). Then you get into the realms of:

 

'we can piss off 30% of people with downtime that effects them to help the 2% who are experiencing problems a 3 days early, but we can't possibly piss off 45% of people to help those 2% an extra half a day early...' (or whatever the figures happen to be) Then it's all a question of degree, rather than necessity.

 

It STILL doesn't excuse the fact that there should be regular updates about what the downtime is for, how it's progressing, and any potential delays or divergeance from the published itinerary the moment they come to light.

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It STILL doesn't excuse the fact that there should be regular updates about what the downtime is for, how it's progressing, and any potential delays or divergeance from the published itinerary the moment they come to light.

 

This completely.

 

There should be a thread on each page of the forums saying exactly what the DT was for (unless its an exploit they dont want to advertise, then they could simply saying 'gamebreaking exploit being fixed') exactly how the DT is going, where its going. Heck, what they are eatiing for lunch!

 

Anything just to let us know that they give a flying poop.

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I usually read all the forums and everything and love this game but was very uspet with this update. OP is totally right when he talks about the notice being hard too see, this was the only one I was taken off guard by. I feel like i read the forums carefully but the original post about the maintenance + update is just soo misleading.

 

I live on the west coast and last night got a good hour of star wars in after work before the servers closed. I know it sucks for European players worse but I usually play from around 9pm-3am PST as i think a lot of people on the west coast play so i always get screwed up by these patches.

 

I actually tried to pull any all nighter, the message about the patch not taking any longer then 4 hours and all the people on the forums saying these things are usually implemented qukcker then what is posted, got my hopes up. Lol total fail stayed up to 4:00 am too see the maintanence has been delayed another hour and so i sadly went to bed.

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There should be a thread on each page of the forums saying exactly what the DT was for (unless its an exploit they dont want to advertise, then they could simply saying 'gamebreaking exploit being fixed') exactly how the DT is going, where its going. Heck, what they are eatiing for lunch!

 

Anything just to let us know that they give a flying poop.

 

So you want a thread constantly updated during maintanence that basically says

 

"Alright, we finished patching x. we're gonna take a 10 minute bathroom break than start on issue y."

 

 

Yea, cuz all the other MMO companies totally do that already....

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So you want a thread constantly updated during maintanence that basically says

 

"Alright, we finished patching x. we're gonna take a 10 minute bathroom break than start on issue y."

 

 

Yea, cuz all the other MMO companies totally do that already....

 

Riiight cuz that is what people are asking for.

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Riiight cuz that is what people are asking for.

 

Apparently you didnt read what I quoted. Cuz that was exactly what he said.

 

 

I was responding to one individual with expectations far above what's reasonable. I did NOT say that everybody in the thread has no reason to complain.

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Yesterday I got disconnected a few times and it was annoying so I do understand the reason for it.

 

But....I completely agree that the communication to us was incredibly poor.

 

First of all, the message was completely ambiguous. From the title it looked like it was all happening Tuesday while the patch was today.

 

Also, they did add a message 15 mins before it was supposed to end and then nothing till it was finally done.

 

Beforehand there was no information why the patch was needed. They could've said in the sticky what the reason was for the patch.

 

And then to add insult to injury, they shut down the forums so people wouldn't have a chance to blast em away. I can understand that to a degree, but in combination with the lack of explanation of why the patch was needed, it really made me wonder what on earth they were playing at.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love the game, but I expect better communication from Bioware than this.

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Hey everyone; I appreciate everyone's views on this topic and I can understand the feelings being expressed here.

 

Our Live team took the decision to roll out today's 1.1.0c patch during Friday night/Saturday morning with the knowledge that it would affect a higher than usual number of players. Unfortunately, we had to make changes that required server downtime. The Live team felt those changes were urgently required and that was why the maintenance was scheduled. Generally speaking, we try and ensure all required maintenance happens during our weekly maintenance period, but this was one situation where we had to move forward quickly; to not do so could have led to severe performance issues across the service as a whole.

 

I want to address a couple of other points from the OP:

 

1: You post a warning less than two hours before the servers are brought down. Ok, if this is an emergency, tell us it's an emergency. Don't call it 'maintenance' when you decide to pull down all the servers on a Friday night with less than 2 hours notice.

This is a little inaccurate. I'm not sure where your timing comes from, but our original post regarding the downtime was posted at 5:10PM CST (Austin time). At that point, we were unsure of the start time for the maintenance so posted without it. The post was updated with the exact timing of the maintenance at 8:54PM CST, which would give just over five hours notice of the exact timing.

 

Five hours is not a generous window of notice, and for that we apologize. In this instance, we updated with the precise timing as soon as we could, but we'll strive to improve.

 

2: The post is highly ambiguous. If you're pulling the servers down on a Friday, put Friday in the title. If you're pulling the servers down today, in 2 hours, put that in the title to get the word out. The title gives the overwealing impression that the Patch + Maintenance are on Jan 31st.

Overall, this is a fair point. Generally speaking, every Friday we post details of our upcoming maintenance period to give plenty of advance notice. Because of the timing of this patch, we thought it might be easier to roll both notices into one. We didn't feel the ambiguity was too extreme, as the upcoming patch was detailed up front, but I can see how it might have confused some. We'll improve.

 

As stated, the patch was deemed necessary and urgent enough to be rolled out on a Friday night/Saturday morning (Austin time). We didn't take this lightly, and don't expect or wish it to be a regular occurrence.

 

To those of you in Europe, I want you to know that we'll be discussing maintenance windows and how we can improve their timing this coming week. We may not have an update immediately (and not before the scheduled maintenance on January 31st) but we have been paying attention to your opinions.

 

Thanks again for the feedback - it helps us know where to improve.

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What ever happened to be able to make changes on the Hero Engine while people were still on it? They used to brag about it but it seems they lost that ability.

 

I was wondering this too. I remember reading that the engine was capable of writing new content to the servers and streaming it to the client without ever interrupting service, or causing any issues...

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so what DID the patch last night fix?

 

Well for one thing, people were crashing out or unable to log in from the login screen with all kinds of crazy disconnects. They fixed that before people started frothing at the mouth and screaming "Y U NO FIX" ... at the cost of irritating our brothers and sisters in the EU.

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Hey everyone; I appreciate everyone's views on this topic and I can understand the feelings being expressed here.

 

Our Live team took the decision to roll out today's 1.1.0c patch during Friday night/Saturday morning with the knowledge that it would affect a higher than usual number of players. Unfortunately, we had to make changes that required server downtime. The Live team felt those changes were urgently required and that was why the maintenance was scheduled. Generally speaking, we try and ensure all required maintenance happens during our weekly maintenance period, but this was one situation where we had to move forward quickly; to not do so could have led to severe performance issues across the service as a whole.

 

I want to address a couple of other points from the OP:

 

 

This is a little inaccurate. I'm not sure where your timing comes from, but our original post regarding the downtime was posted at 5:10PM CST (Austin time). At that point, we were unsure of the start time for the maintenance so posted without it. The post was updated with the exact timing of the maintenance at 8:54PM CST, which would give just over five hours notice of the exact timing.

 

Five hours is not a generous window of notice, and for that we apologize. In this instance, we updated with the precise timing as soon as we could, but we'll strive to improve.

 

 

Overall, this is a fair point. Generally speaking, every Friday we post details of our upcoming maintenance period to give plenty of advance notice. Because of the timing of this patch, we thought it might be easier to roll both notices into one. We didn't feel the ambiguity was too extreme, as the upcoming patch was detailed up front, but I can see how it might have confused some. We'll improve.

 

As stated, the patch was deemed necessary and urgent enough to be rolled out on a Friday night/Saturday morning (Austin time). We didn't take this lightly, and don't expect or wish it to be a regular occurrence.

 

To those of you in Europe, I want you to know that we'll be discussing maintenance windows and how we can improve their timing this coming week. We may not have an update immediately (and not before the scheduled maintenance on January 31st) but we have been paying attention to your opinions.

 

Thanks again for the feedback - it helps us know where to improve.

 

 

 

 

And thank you in kind for the feedback! Things like this go a long way in helping us not only be informed, but also feel informed on what's cookin' behind all the curtains!

 

Cheers!

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