#50 - June 9, 2010, 9:47 p.m.
Q u o t e:
Consider a cinema analogy.
Oh, I'd really rather not. Such analogies tend not to be very analogous at all.
The only value of an analogy is when it accurately reflects the true nature of the situation, which this fails to do. How many films do you typically have 24 hour access to, day and night, except for prescribed maintenance periods. How many cinemas require extensive technical attention (generally on a weekly basis) just so that critical parts of your films don't go missing? How many cinemas require drastic alterations to accept and run next week's new film with no issues? How many cinemas service thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers simultaneously, as well as tracking millions of items, actions and exchanges?
Cinemas exist by relatively precise schedules - the success of that model rather completely depends upon it. By contrast, World of Warcraft is an entertainment which is generally available, but is interrupted by occasional necessary maintenance - which in turn is provided for in the agreement between provider and customer. They simply aren't analogous.
Q u o t e:
For the complete lack of communication and lack of respect shown to your customers who were affected by the maintenance last night.
Speaking from an Oceanic realm point of view, we were originally told that our servers would be down for 24 hours, finishing at 12:01AM PDT... no worries, cool. Then we received the message saying that there would be authentication maintenance finishing at 2AM PDT, bit of a bummer but ok, no worries.
2AM rolls along and we are still unable to log on. Or we can log on, but there are no oceanic realms available to log on to.
Time keeps ticking by, hundreds of frustrated customers are creating threads in this forum asking for some advice as to what is happening. It is at this point where a couple of minutes time spent by one of your employees to pop on to the forums and make a post saying "Hey guys, really sorry your realms aren't up yet, we're having some problems" would have been really appreciated. But instead we are left in the dark, with no clue what is happening, until shortly before 4AM when our servers started slowly coming back up.
I'm pretty sure most of us are sensible enough to understand that when doing major maintenance or prep work like you did last night, things could go wrong. And if the servers needed to be down for even longer to get it right then most of us would understand that as well. What frustrates the absolute heck out of us though is the lack of communication.
Would it really have been so hard for one of you to make a quick post for us shortly after 2AM? If you look through all of the threads that were created at the time, you'll see most of the frustration was not with the servers being down, but with you telling us nothing.
Cheers
I am more than willing to provide an apology actually. There was certainly no intent to leave anyone in the dark or to cause any distress. While I wasn't present at the time, I can only assume that it was necessary to confirm that there was an issue, then to gather and verify information before a response could be provided, though I am genuinely sorry if this caused any frustration or confusion for you.
Please note that down times in these situations--indeed, with every maintenance--are always approximate, and there is no guarantee that the realms will ever be available by the posted times. We provide those estimates so as to give our customers an idea of what to expect. In the preponderance of maintenance periods the realms are available at or before the posted time. Occasionally, it is necessary to extend maintenance beyond the indicated time frame due to unforeseen issues.
In this case, I believe it was indicated to our staff that the realms were indeed available by the second provided estimate. Later we became aware that some players were simply unable to view those realms. It would seem that it took time for us to become aware of that issue and to determine what the causes might be, and I am sorry if you found yourself unable to locate further information on the topic until our on-duty forum representative was able to provide it.
