For many players, "fair" means "what ever I can manage to extract from the other party". Whereas "fair" would be adding 2 days onto the subscription because that was the only thing of value that was lost.Quote:
Originally Posted by TinDragon
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For many players, "fair" means "what ever I can manage to extract from the other party". Whereas "fair" would be adding 2 days onto the subscription because that was the only thing of value that was lost.Quote:
Originally Posted by TinDragon
I don't think people were overly bitchy, unfriendly, or out of the line. Some trolls excepted of course.Quote:
Originally Posted by Solastrion
LOTRO is great, we love it or we would not be here. If it is the best in the world I can't say as I never played WoW (has more players).Quote:
Originally Posted by Solastrion
Eve is pretty good and I swear it is at least as intense as lotro (spreadsheets in space!).
Touché!Quote:
Originally Posted by Solastrion
I do think they do what they can given the resources they have assigned. In my eyes, they do a decent to good job. There are a few things that I personally criticize (like the API access or lack of it, see different threads). I you allow the comparison: With EvE online I feel a bit more in touch with the game makers than I do with LOTRO. Interface and third party tools are incredibly big there. Database dumps, API access are dreamlike. However: LOTRO the game is really to my likes and wins my 'time' at the moment! As for your 15$ a month: Please do not extrapolate from you to others... In my case, I spend way more buying and using these points :-).Quote:
Originally Posted by Solastrion
While I agree with most of your comments (or essay I should say ;)) I think that the level of details for the current incident, appreciating the attention it drew, is still below par.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ailedra
I seen outages for other games (see above for one example) and was given WAY more details.
Agreed, I was not criticizing the outage itself, but the explanation of what happened. I think to satisfy our curiosity is a valid issue to consider.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ailedra
How much time did you spend in the forums or on Facebook? There was a lot of that going on.Quote:
Originally Posted by Singbard
Agreed. However we still have issues with communication that seem a bit odd. Ie, we have a news feed that's not being used, instead players who are unfamiliar with forums must first go into the "LOTRO General Discussion & Feedback" to find this thread. Even before the new forums we used to have default widgets for news and that was constantly out of date. News should be going there. With the new forums I would at least expect news about this sort of event to show up somewhere under the "Official LOTRO News and Information" section. If this was a newspaper I'd want to see this on page one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khafar
I'd like to see a "News" tab at the very top along with "The Game" and "Community". Even if it just has pointers back into the relevant forum threads.
Forums are nice and all but most players don't read them. Even the announcements in the game loader have been incredibly sparse over time.
This does not work with Facebook. That gives me a mostly blank page. I presume I need to log in first before anything can be seen.Quote:
However, it's not exactly difficult to find them. Either append "/lotro" to either web site address,
(update: it does show stuff once I allow "akamai" through filters)
It does work with twitter but as I said the information there is difficult to read and find, it's a single thread with all sorts of too-short comments mixed up together. Twitter is not designed to be used for dissemination of information, it's for rambling chatting. Currently the front page does not have any links to this thread or information about the outage, and the top post which presumably should be the most important one on a news site says "ALL players stand a chance" which is gibberish if you haven't been following the thread from the start.
I'd rather have an official news source that is NOT social media. Maybe the official news source is down sometimes, in which case the social people can relay the information to the forums.
...but that's exactly the point: it's a matter of curiosity. There's no action you could take based on it...everything you need to make a consumer decision on whether you want to continue spending your money and time here was contained in the outage itself and the explanation that was given. Any additional details would simply be a cool-to-know "ah" thing, not something you need to make some kind of decision. In every online/hosted game I've ever played, I've never seen the level of detail you're asking for (preventative actions going forward, troubleshooting timelines, plans for specific system redundancy changes) provided for a simple outage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Singbard
API details are a different critter; if you're going to open up your API for add-on developers, that level of detail communication is critical, so that the developers can actually make functioning add-ons (and update them with patches, etc)....again, there's an action for somebody to take based on the details.
Could they give us those details? Sure....if it doesn't reveal more than they want to about their business than they should on a public forum; corporations have limits on what confidential internal information they can publish as a legal obligation to their shareholders. Are they obligated to satisfy our curiosity with un-actionable details? No, regardless of the attention the issue garnered.
Maybe this is cultural difference, we are after all a very international community. I can appreciate your point of view but I disagree to the above statement that all relevant information was given with respect to my actions that I might take. As a player, I trust that we are taken seriously and that our interests do matter. The feeling of being taken care of and looked after makes a player like me not only happy but also creates trust. Without it I cant' see how a player should be motivated to spend money.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ailedra
The current situation is IMHO not dealt with poorly but neither greatly either. If more information would help people like me feeling more comfortable, that would not hurt anyone, would it? This is of course my personal view and I can't speak for others.
Anyhow, we can discuss the complicated relationship between consumer and provider in private, or in a thread more fit for that topic.
In the meanwhile it would be interesting to hear if the people that are still reporting problems are affected by the original issue, or if they are facing different, unrelated problems.
That is a very good proposal indeed!Quote:
Originally Posted by Lohi
Of course...and the way to make us feel better is to communicate a prudent level of information about what happened, compensate reasonably, and above all, avoid future outages.....not communicating details that we can't do anything with anyway. How those outages are avoided is less important than the outcome.Quote:
Originally Posted by Singbard
It depends.Quote:
Originally Posted by Singbard
Turbine's responsible to two sets of people: their players/customers, and their shareholders. Those groups don't necessarily (in fact, I'd bet they rarely) intersect.
From our perspective (the players), sure...more detail is cool, and it's hard to overcommunicate.
However, if I were a shareholder, and not a player, I'd be quite annoyed if more detail about Turbine's internal workings (specific vendor names, DR status and procedures, troubleshooting processes, staffing concerns, etc) were publicly made available just to scratch a few players' curiosity itch....it's certainly possible to over-communicate.
Pretend for just a second that this was preventable from Turbine's point of view, and that human error contributed greatly to the downtime; say a key member of the troubleshooting team started their holiday drinking a bit early and excessively, and that slowed troubleshooting efforts and extended the outage. That's clearly something that Turbine would need to address as an internal issue, but clearly not something they'd want to post in a public place where a competitor could use it to their advantage (or where it may have legal ramifications in dealing with that employee). Or, say a result of this issue is that Turbine starts investigating whether it'd be smart to change DC vendors...again, this is something that you simply can't make public for various business reasons.
Communication for something like this is a fine line....you need to give your consumer enough information to satisfy them that its taken seriously, but no more than that; you have to balance customer satisfaction against the business concerns that allow you to keep serving those customers at a given level. What we were given should be enough to satisfy that need....frankly, those that aren't satisfied by it probably wouldn't even be satisfied with the name and address of our theoretical drunk screw-up :)
I get wanting to know more....I guess the point is, there are reasons we generally don't see more. Customer satisfaction isn't as one-dimensional as we the consumer often like to think.
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...-your-patience
"As a special thanks for your patience during the recent service outage, we will be extending VIP subscription time. For any VIP accounts that were subscribed during the outage, we will be extending the subscription by 2 days. Lifetime accounts will receive 250 Turbine Points. Please note that these subscription extensions will be applied by the end of the month (September), and we will announce once the grants are complete.
Note: You must be an active VIP at the time of the grants in order to receive the subscription extension. We cannot extend expired VIP accounts.
Thank you so much for playing LOTRO, and we’ll see you in game!"
Just wanted to say thanks for this Turbine. :)
"As a special thanks for your patience during the recent service outage, we will be extending VIP subscription time. For any VIP accounts that were subscribed during the outage, we will be extending the subscription by 2 days. Lifetime accounts will receive 250 Turbine Points. Please note that these subscription extensions will be applied by the end of the month (September), and we will announce once the grants are complete.
Note: You must be an active VIP at the time of the grants in order to receive the subscription extension. We cannot extend expired VIP accounts.
Thank you so much for playing LOTRO, and we’ll see you in game!"
Thank you; that is very generous!
VeryBeary
Re: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...52#post6901952
Isn't this just a little bit underhanded of Turbine.
The grant of extended VIP Time should apply to ALL those accounts that had an active subscription at the time of the outage.
Those are the people who paid for a service they did not get.
To grant the extension to accounts that have an active subscription at the time the grant is made is duplicitous in the extreme.
Many VIP players will be paying monthly, and some of those may let the subscription lapse until other, more essential, outgoings are covered by their monthly salary. Then if they have money left over for recreation renew their subscription.
These people could well miss out on the 2 days compensation, for a failed service that they had already paid for.
In fact the only reason I can see for making the grant dependent on account status at the time of the grant, rather than at the time of the service outage, is to specifically reduce the potential liability by deliberately planning to not grant the extension to such players.
The people who should (must) be compensated here are the people who were paying for an active subscription at the time of the outage.
All The Best
Sapience stated why they're not extending those who let it lapse: "We cannot extend expired VIP accounts." Not "we won't" but "we can't".
Rubbish.Quote:
Originally Posted by TinDragon
Its not "extending" anything. Its dealing with ALL subscribed accounts at the point of service failure equally.
All they need to do is change the "Check Account Status @ Date x" routine from X=Day Of Grant to X=09/02/13.
It really is as simple as changing just that.
And if it is genuinely the case that they can't then ALL the "expired VIP accounts" that were active at the time of the service failure should be given the same deal as the Lifers - 250TP.
This is simply about treating all the people who were paying for a service that was not provided equally - if they fail to do that then they are discriminating against some account holders.
All The Best