Paid Services. Status Update Please.

[oldo65]

Could we please have an update on the status of when we can expect the return of paid services?

3 months, 6 months, a year? I and a lot of others judging by the threads in this forum are waiting hard for the return of these services. Should we reroll instead of waiting for an undelete or create a new character on a server we intend transfering to?

Please tell us so we can move along or wait patiently.

Come on Carpe, throw us a bone.

[bennyw2784]

Like Like Like. Turbine any info?

[KillGore81]

I would love to have a couple characters undeleted. You'd think that since all they care about is $$$ now that they'd have this up and running like... yesterday.

[Thornelas]

Sapience and Carpenoctem either don't know when these will return, as said in the sticky, or they don't have permission yet to talk about it in public. As soon as they have information and are allowed to share it with us, it will be done through that sticky.

I know this isn't the answer you want to hear but it's all we've got now... Nothing to do about it but to remain patient.

[oldo65]

Sapience and Carpenoctem either don't know when these will return, as said in the sticky, or they don't have permission yet to talk about it in public. As soon as they have information and are allowed to share it with us, it will be done through that sticky.

I know this isn't the answer you want to hear but it's all we've got now... Nothing to do about it but to remain patient.

Yep, I know all that. The fact is it has been over three months since they were suspended and the lack of communication with the playerbase is irritating to say the least. All we want is some communication. "Paid services have been suspended indefinitely, the minimum timeframe for their return is six months. We thank you for your patience." Not very hard to do and keeps people around.

I think I'll go download the Neverwinter client to give me something to do and Turbine may have lost a customer if I like it. A customer they need not lose with a little communication. Not a lot to ask.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Yep, I know all that. The fact is it has been over three months since they were suspended and the lack of communication with the playerbase is irritating to say the least. All we want is some communication. "Paid services have been suspended indefinitely, the minimum timeframe for their return is six months. We thank you for your patience." Not very hard to do and keeps people around.

Sapience talked about Turbine's internal decision process when discussing why outage announcements are made with a day or sometimes even less warning. Turbine has a process where the decision makers sit done periodically. They make a go no go decision. If the decision if "Green in Turbine speak". The implementation will occur within 24 hours or less.

I suspect that is what is happening for Paid Services. There is a periodic meeting. No idea what time frame is. It is probably weekly because that is what we use at work unless we are in final countdown which results in daily meetings. The only information that Sapience could give us is something that was drive us crazy like this:

1) Week 11 for 2013 meeting - Paid services not ready. Will discuss at Week 12.
2) Week 12. Paid services not ready. Will discuss at Week 13.
.
.
.
18) Week 28. Paid Services not ready. Will discuss at Week 29.

Carpe would put this line in the sticky. The line changes every week. It does not provide us any useful information beyond the - Carpe updated it on June 20, 2013. That means it is down until at least June 27, 2013.

One thing I have noticed from working at lot of different companies in software development. Companies and their employees do not like to talk about their process. How things are done. For some unknown reason, this information is considered valuable information. It is kept secret. It often kept secret from each other in a company.

[oldo65]

I also work in software development. When my project lead comes to me and says a lot of customers are asking about feature X, when will it be available? Well then I look at our roadmap and reply "it's not even started yet but it is part of the new feature update tentatively scheduled for november, so five months at the earliest if all goes to plan."

I assume Turbine have a roadmap and work schedule of sorts. Not hard to look it up and give us an estimate, any sort of official comment on this would be welcome as long as its not "We will let you know when it is available."

[Yula_the_Mighty]

I also work in software development. When my project lead comes to me and says a lot of customers are asking about feature X, when will it be available? Well then I look at our roadmap and reply "it's not even started yet but it is part of the new feature update tentatively scheduled for november, so five months at the earliest if all goes to plan."

At my company, we will have a feature that is tentatively scheduled for November. Sometime in October we will get a date of November week 3. On week 3, management looks at the feature to determine launch on week 3 or reschedule for week 4. From now on, every week is launch or another week delay.

My company has features that have received double digit delays. There was one horrible feature that I was lead for on that I had to go to a weekly launch meeting for more than six months. Of course, the customers were upset that we could not keep a schedule. They were pleased when we finally gave them a feature that worked the way they wanted.

The alternative is to always launch on the specified date. Deal with the customer complaints because the feature does not work right. You see a lot of this kind of process in non critical applications like games.

You really do not want to start selling cell phones to customers that lock up internally when you push buttons in the wrong way. The customer has to remove the battery to reset the phone. This situation is a common problem in development. All the development phones have easy to remove batteries.

I can't remember the last time a feature released on schedule. Sometimes we hide this information from our customers. We decide that we should be finished 4th week of June. Launch will be 1st week in November. We get done end of August. We wait two months after we finish to launch the product. Not a good way to handle it.