Mindark DOESN'T have 24/7 server watch...

Hi

I was just now up hunting at CP and saw that there were virtually no spawns in dome 1, and tons of ppl strugling for the spawn in dome 2...

So I decided, wtf - give MA a call and tell them about this issue as its proberbly costing them a lot of money.

Spoke with an very polite female that told me that there were noone but her at work, and that they couldn't reboot the servers because there were no server specialists at work.

Thats very very unproffesional in my book, even my work has an 24/7 server admin on watch, so wtf is this? Multi Million company with no techs on work?

Thats pretty lame (my opinions)

Just thought U should all know they R'nt @ work hehe.

Btw, that nice support gal - hung up at me after I tried convising her they lost money...

Well imo EU isnt realy a critical application. If the server is down for a hour its not realy a big deal. I think its a simple risk calculation, and the result was that it doesnt pay off to have a specialist standby 24/7. My guess is, in case of emergency, someone will be called that is on duty that night.

IMO peds can be spend better then on a database specialist drinking coffee all night .

~ thebuzz ~ said:

Hi

I was just now up hunting at CP and saw that there were virtually no spawns in dome 1, and tons of ppl strugling for the spawn in dome 2...

So I decided, wtf - give MA a call and tell them about this issue as its proberbly costing them a lot of money.

Spoke with an very polite female that told me that there were noone but her at work, and that they couldn't reboot the servers because there were no server specialists at work.

Thats very very unproffesional in my book, even my work has an 24/7 server admin on watch, so wtf is this? Multi Million company with no techs on work?

Thats pretty lame (my opinions)

Just thought U should all know they R'nt @ work hehe.

Btw, that nice support gal - hung up at me after I tried convising her they lost money...

Click to expand...

Lame isn't the exact word for this regarding a claimed 500.000 customers playerbase.

But it actually doesn't surprise me at all. Are there many companies out there with an outsourced forum with such a playerbase? Its actually the most obvious thing imo how this company works. Least costs in every respect.

So again, totally not surprised about this. Maybe expected even just an answering machine to be active...

Maybe you caught the cleaning woman?

Cani Ostro said:

Maybe you caught the cleaning woman?

Click to expand...

Well she really presented herself as an support crew... But it might be.

Possibly they have an support tech that runs there if a server crashes, but this is running - half anyway. So it might not be too important to them.

Cani Ostro said:

Are there many companies out there with an outsourced forum with such a playerbase?

Click to expand...

I remember correctly they had one once.. "Didnt work out" was the reason for closing it I believe.

And I agree with Buzz. We dont have tech's all night for our servers @ work, but atleast when something happens, we have the batphone, *big red phone* to call for help at any time of the day. They will be called outta bed if needed. All kinda of monitoring systems that will automatically call them outta bed when something happens. It doesnt cost much extra either.

The hamster was napping on the job! Pay cut! Only medium grade cheese today!

Witte said:

Well imo EU isnt realy a critical application.

Click to expand...

It is to Mindark PE AB.

Lets just imagine the vitrial here if the servers went down at 9pm Friday and didnt come back until 10am Monday? you dont need some guy on site 24/7, just some monitoring and alert an engineer by phone. Why bother having someone to answer the phone if it cant be escalated? thats a waste of money.

Being an IT Manager and a player, I can see both sides of this. On the one side, you need to have your equipment monitored 24/7, and in the case of an online game you need to have support people available as well (notice I did not say ON SITE). On the other side, as a player you expect a certain level of quality from the game you play. I suspect they see it like this:

The in question server is running and the load is not critical. Any spawns or loots are controlled by an algorithm that is running on a server, and that server is running fine.

There are very rarely monitors for minimum conditions. You just don't worry about how little something is happening (unless you are trying to increase business). You worry about when things get to a critical stage, because then you need to jump through hoops to fix them regardless of the hour.

I can't call this incident a "foul" specifically, but I can say that at least the support person should have taken down some information about the condiditon and sent it on up the chain.

it sucks...but you and many others will still play EU...thats why MA dont care about this and many other things

Its been this way for years , in fact years ago the game would crash for hours and we would spend hours complaining about it on "merc"-we would have to wait for staffers to show up in the morning to reboot it , and sometimes someone would have Marcos cell number and he would do it from home . Its been a 9-5 operation at MA headquarters (sweden time) for a long time and i dont think they see any reason to change it.

~ thebuzz ~ said:

I was just now up hunting at CP and saw that there were virtually no spawns in dome 1, and tons of ppl strugling for the spawn in dome 2...

Click to expand...

I told you folks herds have been too thin lately, and some people didn't believe me.

Rant over! We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

Personally, I'm not surprised. 24/7 support would be too expensive for MA IMO.