How on earth is MA / FPC running release Projects... ???

[ZippO]

It has been this way for the 6+ years or so I've been around. You might as well accept this is how they do business.

Exactly.. This is the same old song and dance.

 

[SamNinja]

Hanne, you're gonna ruin your good standing with the community if you keep throwing smoke screens out like Marco and the rest. IMO someone else should be speaking to us on this issue.

And YES the fault is exactly THERE. This update was NOT properly tested PERIOD. It may have been tested on MA's "supercomputers" in an on-site test server.... BUT, it was NOT tested in an environment typical of YOUR end users.

I've seen you state in another thread that the release was tested and the fault is not that of QA. If QA tested it in the proper environment they would have caught it. AND QA MUST know by now that programming is NOT one of MA's strong points. (Then again, neither is customer service). You keep popping in on these threads and stating this blatant B.S. you'll do nothing but harm your own relationship with the community. I fear you are already becoming one of "them".

Menace

Hey Menace,

Is it possible that you can avoid being a troll for a minimum of 1 day?

 

[mastermesh]

Folks, this is a GAME: can't we deal with 1 day downtime of our GAME? Yes, we can. Many other games have such downtimes, and nobody yells at the moon.

Yes, it's a game... and 1 day of downtime would not be bad IF IT WAS LIKE ONE DAY EVERY 6 MONTHS...

 

[Menace]

Hey Menace,

Is it possible that you can avoid being a troll for a minimum of 1 day?

^^ Epic Troll right there.

There's a difference between stating an opinion on a situation and saying something just to cause a shit storm.

Menace

 

[JJO]

We'll i just got home from work, and I can't download or login same as yesterday.

OK, time to vent.

First off to Hanne, I'm afraid your usual apologist replies.. "Its NOT FPC's fault" which i see plastered all over the forum is really not gonna cut it here.

In case you haven't noticed, most of the people posting these IT/TECH/DEVELOPMENT/CODING threads/polls are INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS! We know what we are talking about cause we earn our living from sweating it out in companies that need to provide WORKING products to thousands of clients with just as much overhead and even greater demand for quality and functionality, not to mentiona stability and precision. I work especially intensly with many different people from many different disciplines since im in networking which ties the whole conglomerate of systems together, trust me, they would laugh if they knew how MA runs stuff here - in the rest of the world people get fired for this sort of work.

Also note, the "BEHIND THE SCENES" work is nothing blurry to us. Unless MA decided to turn the entire architecture of IT upside down, most of us IT folks here would know everything thats going on behind the scenes, save for the individual names of the people involved.

Trying to tell educated clients they dont have the facts is a low blow, and really is not gonna make a RIGHTFULLY impatient/upset lot calm down. I might play this GAME, but trust me I and MANY other here are very highly trained and experienced professionals, when we start complaining about how your bosses are running the show, you might want to start calling them to come watch the screen, rather then tell us who is not to blame.

MA and their spawn off company FPC are starting to look like an inept 3rd world Internet Service Provider...

 

[burnsey]

I'm really very disappointed by the indifference MindArk has with their customers.

This, and how unprofessional they are as a company where they say one thing and do another. There's a word for that...

hypocrites

 

[the-unknown]

MA and FPC are two different companies right?

So this is MA's fault and not FPC's right?

Can I assume as professional organisations, you both have SLA / LD agreements right?

So, I expect MA to be paying you some big $$$$ for the issues.

Will that be used by FPC to get more QA people to catch problems before they hit the end users? Or is this going to be just "FPC tells off MA" and no further action is taken? and MA goes on doing what it has always been doing?

On another note, it would have been nice to have had at least one official person from FPC or MA in the PCF Chat with people trying to figure out things and help each other out. Even if an official was idling there, at least it would have given a sense of you guys trying to help, instead of posts here every once a while.

And finally, I wonder how many of the recent newbies are going to think that you guys are a 2 bit company cos the first thing they encounter is a badly botched update.

 

[Kitten]

With the type and size of the change I am not surprised if some people had problems, Myself I had to uninstall and do full reinstall after manually delete the directories on my desktop and work laptop. Oh well a day I cant play its annoying but WOW the system resources used by entropia is way lower, it looks better on low graphics on my laptop at work and its faster! I think its a great update. Buggy installer good program is how I see it.

 

[Menace]

Unfortunately, even if it WAS solely MA's fault, the fingers always get pointed towards the company we're a customer of..... which is FPC. Maybe FPC needs to look elsewhere to do their business? In the end FPC, YOUR customers are unhappy.... whether it's MA's fault or not.

I would HOPE that FPC is going to the company they're paying for a service and tear them a new one seeings FPC is NOT part of MindArk.


Menace

 

[SamNinja]

^^ Epic Troll right there.

There's a difference between stating an opinion on a situation and saying something just to cause a shit storm.

Menace

AND QA MUST know by now that programming is NOT one of MA's strong points.

Of course I was expecting a retaliatory comment, but maybe one a little more original. Do you have any idea how many lines of code EU is and that MMORPG game development is so complex that someone who makes comments as such (who states that programming by MA is weak) would have not a clue about any of this?

Have you ever thought about things before you posted stupid comments?

 

[$ilicondollar]

FPC does not code.
How FPC runs our release projects is therefore not relevant to this discussion.

But to the question of test environments; Of course both FPC and MindArk does have test-environments and QA. The fault is not always there.

And where is it then?
Dear Hanne i have told you before and i guess i will tell you that lots of times in the future...
"Silence is gold..."

Sil$

 

[NQFEAR]

FPC does not code.
How FPC runs our release projects is therefore not relevant to this discussion.

But to the question of test environments; Of course both FPC and MindArk does have test-environments and QA. The fault is not always there.

We as players don't care who runs the code, we just want a good STABLE!! game to play.

Now the question is, will the loots get worse to pay for this mess??

 

[billairboy]

One problem with software and code testing is to "guess" what can go wrong and to test it on diffrent computer specifikations. I mean, how many possible diffrent combinations of configrations do we have? many,many. So i can understands problemes like this can happend. And to the community is shouting for faster updates and quicker bugg fixing, not longer delivering times for more tesing of the updates.

My update worked well yesterday and today, but is saw some ingame issues when i was online for a short time yesterday. Maybe some of us got download/internet issues when downloading the update and that broke the update process, because the update speed was much slower yesterday compared to the normal download speed for the updates.

 

[JJO]

And where is it then?
Dear Hanne i have told you before and i guess i will tell you that lots of times in the future...
"Silence is gold..."

Sil$

I won't say she has to keep quiet, just the usual "it is NOT FPC's fault" comment is starting to sound a bit monotonous, like an old joke. Generally I find her replies to be either little cute/funny shoutouts to her fans on the forum (yay i'm so popular), or some apologist generic explanation telling us why FPC's not to blame......... for almost anything........... almost all of the time with no technical understanding or intelligent reasoning behind the posts, just slap dash, I/WE DONT KNOW, but just don't blame FPC, they are your friends.

Do people study to do this in sweden, is this a career path people aspire to? I'm just asking cause this seems just too easy a job to think of the person behind the replies as a trained professional? I just can't believe people in sweden get payed MONEY to post a few generic replies for us everytime we legitemately want answers, hell i could script an autobot in 20 minutes (whilst inebriated), which would do it for free and add some variation to keep it fresh......... OUCH (yes i have poison glands too MA / FPC and Community Advisor Hanne and I score high on counter-insults, so don't insult my intelligence with your watered down BS replies).

Where are the people that KNOW something or who can post something concrete, why are they so fucking hard to find?

Now tell us again......... who's FAULT is it NOT?!

 

[Razormat]

LOL, I think it is ridiculous how some people get all pumped up about this.
Is it because you lost 10.000 $ (or more) to this game or what ?
EU had a day of downtime, so what ?
MA said that they did some massive changes, what do you expect ?
Also these are changes that a lot of people asked for,
so in the future they do not have to download every single update for every planet.
There where various statements from FPC and MA that this release did not go as smoothly as anticipated so...???

 

[MindStar9]

Do you have any idea how many lines of code EU is and that MMORPG game development is so complex that someone who makes comments as such (who states that programming by MA is weak) would have not a clue about any of this?

With all due respect ... regardless of how much code is involved, I've played several MMORPG games that "get it" ... and who not only have appropriate staff in place to handle whatever needs to be done, and done efficiently, but also communicate quite openly with their player base to keep them informed. Time after time, releases are delivered with all functionality in tact, yet year after year (even before CE2), this is not the case for EU.

As far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with code, and everything to do with competence. I too get tired of hearing excuses, and people pointing fingers ... obviously something isn't working right, and something needs to be done about it. Whether you're the platform developer or a planet partner, it doesn't matter ... bottom line is ... it's not working properly, and there is a community who dedicates time, effort, and investment into this rarely fully-functioning game, and that's just a damn shame.

 

[Droops]

One problem with software and code testing is to "guess" what can go wrong and to test it on diffrent computer specifikations.

"Error Guessing" thats one way to test

I do hope they use other test techniques

Recently seen a cv btw from a former employee with more then enough qualifications so one should expect they have "some" knowledge how to manage these releases.

 

[SpikeBlack]

It has been this way for the 6+ years or so I've been around. You might as well accept this is how they do business.

if they still owned Calypso and it were the only planet thats exactly what we'd have to do but now they're the sole platform provider with multiple companies totally reliant on MA to produce a stable platform for them to operate their business, it just shouldn't work that way.

 

[NotVF]

<removed...>

 

[Rapido]

I belive that both MA/FPC doing there best to make us happy, but sometimes there can be some hard coding error hiting us when the realease is dropped. I dont think its fair that we "the player base" at once trowing our dirty feelings out at the forum and put the blaim directly towards MA/FPC.
As we know, atleast the older players, that every realease have some problems that they will fix as soon its possibly with some patches...

My tip is log in and find the error, make a supportcase about it an wait some hour/days (I know its frustreted) but still Ofc we can start a whiningtread on the forum, discuss the errors and so on....

But dont throw shit on the people working so hard making this game working, my 2 pecs

Rapido

 

[Stave]

I belive that both MA doing there best to make us happy

And thats just the problem isnt it, thier best is way below the industry standard, and its not good enough, especially in a game whare players invest hundreds of thousands of dollars.


This cockup with the timing it had, right in the middle of a newbie influx, no doubt lost us 100's of ex potential depositors.

Its not good enough, and ma's silent treatment isnt helping.


If this was a one off, it woudlnt matter so much to us, but this happens time and time and time and time again, for the last 8+ years. You get to the point, whare it crosses the line and the community has had enough.

This is not a whining thread, its a thread full of constructive criticism, quite rightly voicing our oppionon on something.

Credit is due when its due, this isnt one of those times.

 

[JJO]

I belive that both MA/FPC doing there best to make us happy, but sometimes there can be some hard coding error hiting us when the realease is dropped. I dont think its fair that we "the player base" at once trowing our dirty feelings out at the forum and put the blaim directly towards MA/FPC.
As we know, atleast the older players, that every realease have some problems that they will fix as soon its possibly with some patches...

My tip is log in and find the error, make a supportcase about it an wait some hour/days (I know its frustreted) but still Ofc we can start a whiningtread on the forum, discuss the errors and so on....

But dont throw shit on the people working so hard making this game working, my 2 pecs

Rapido

I have to disagree.

I know your post is sincere and this is usually how most people feel when something goes wrong, but seriously, this broken development has been the norm for ages here. You come back form a year break you took because of a crappy/buggy upgrade to the CE engine and then 1 month after you're back, having just dumped in a chunkload of your hard earned cash (again), you find the same NAFI attitude thrown in your face, trust me, you are about done with being calm and supportive or a client for that matter. If i screw up in my duties at work, most people would be ok with it if I humbly appologise and rectify it and refrain from repeats, but the second time it happens I'd start getting reprimanded, 3rd time i might be asked to politely, and rapidly, clear my desk.

NAFI btw is an acronym for NO AMBITION, FUCKALL INTEREST.

I don't deposit to get ath's, hofs or make profit. I just want to be entertained, do you think I am ENTERTAINED? Unlike the hoard of noobs crying about loot and old features, I just want a solid, stable experience and to do something fun with my cash.

The problem with us as a community, and this is compared to others I am part of in other ventures/interest i have, our BALLS have fallen off. We resort to polite discussion and cutting people slack when we should be cutting throats. Why do you think MA gives us the finger and refuses to engage with us? Because they treat us like the idiots we are, we whine and then go hunt mine and maybe whine a bit more before we go to bed. Our bark is infinitely worse than our bite.

If someone with an FPC tag just posts then we are all like WOAH, they are engaging with us. This is not even close to that, when did we ever get hard answers, or a proper explination of what went wrong and what will be done and when? We don't we get treated like a bunch of kids... which not all of us are btw.

If i ever engaged with our companies clients they way FPC and co do with us, i'd be lucky if someone in the same city would employ me again.

 

[mastermesh]

NAFI

Guess the new generation got tired of using FUBAR?

 

[Hanne|SDS]

Nice personal attack there, btw.

 

[Mary Jane]

With all due respect ... regardless of how much code is involved, I've played several MMORPG games that "get it" ... and who not only have appropriate staff in place to handle whatever needs to be done, and done efficiently, but also communicate quite openly with their player base to keep them informed. Time after time, releases are delivered with all functionality in tact, yet year after year (even before CE2), this is not the case for EU.

As far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with code, and everything to do with competence. I too get tired of hearing excuses, and people pointing fingers ... obviously something isn't working right, and something needs to be done about it. Whether you're the platform developer or a planet partner, it doesn't matter ... bottom line is ... it's not working properly, and there is a community who dedicates time, effort, and investment into this rarely fully-functioning game, and that's just a damn shame.

Agree100% thats true

 

[SpikeBlack]

Nice personal attack there, btw.

hmmm, if MA continue to hide behind planet owners and refuse to engage with the players I don't see it getting better for you

 

[archman]

Am I the only one that had the update go smoothly?

I didn't download the update for 12 hours after it was available.
I give them credit for fixing many of the problems so fast, and I hope others problems get fixed soon.

 

[Terminator]

Yes it is stable now.
They messed it but they fixed it.



Lets just hope MA learnt during this week and that such incident wont appear again.
Now its time to complete these damned 5K or 10K missions.........

 

[Joat]

Imo, the RCE is the thing that attracts people to join EU, but it is also the thing
that screw the game up, in several ways.
The code get too complex due to another level of security needed around the RCE.
Funny thou', that we do lose skills occassionly, where is the security around that?

Imo another problem with MA is that they are creating a system that we might
have access to use, but they don't create a system around users.
It feels like we are allowed to access the system, but just barely.
Like being invited to a party "just because they are nice atm".

I guess we should stop blaming people down to a personal level since we don't
know who they are, but we can blame MA in "general".
Maybe it's time for some fresh thinking. Maybe it's time to put the participants
in center, and communicate better, give continously info of what's going on
(and not just drop a VU with zero "warning" before), use a system to see what
users want and so on.
Sure, MA want to look professional and so, and that's fine, but does that
do anything good for them?
Imo, it's better to have a developer that creates a feeling like
"A Universe for Users, by Users" than "...hm... well, ok, go in, but watch it!" .

 

[Menace]

Of course I was expecting a retaliatory comment, but maybe one a little more original. Do you have any idea how many lines of code EU is and that MMORPG game development is so complex that someone who makes comments as such (who states that programming by MA is weak) would have not a clue about any of this?

Have you ever thought about things before you posted stupid comments?

We'll keep this thread clean. Taking it to PM.

Menace