Don't blame SE, they try their best!Follow

Ok, my beef isn't that they do or don't 'try' it's that they consistently make a block of time for server maint., and then modify it by huge ammounts. I personally don't care if they took the server down for 3 days, but IT DAMN WELL BETTER WORK WHEN IT COMES UP. Instead of half-*** patches and bum-fixes, I wish they would take the proper time to fix the problem once and for all, instead of 10+6 or 10+2 hour blocks. I do have to make time to play, and it sucks when you do that (according to the schedule they post) and then you have to wait (long enough so your play time is over.) I'd just prefer straight / honest stuff, and I don't think they are 'trying' to do that.

Hope you don't think this is a 'flame', just another POV.

I know everyone is tired of these threads. Some people think SE sucks donkey nuts, some people seem to lick the cheese off SE's figurative scrote.

Both sides seem riddled with inherent flaws.



The first problem with this is, "reliable" is a completely subjective term. Maybe to some people, having a system that allows you access 80% of the time is exceedingly reliable; while to others, outages of 2% or greater are unacceptable.

The second problem with this is that in a capitalist environment, you voice your opinion (or disgruntlement) with your wallet. If you're still paying for the proffered service, then it can't suck too bad, huh?!



The first problem with this is someone outside the organization seems to think they can objectively evaluate the degree of effort SE is putting toward providing reliability or addressing customer complaints. As stated in countless other threads / posts, a degree of down-time is understandable (and, dare I say it, even encouraged!). Repeated outages indicates the "problems" aren't adequately addressed initially. Repeated extended outages, without proper heads-up, and with continued sub-standard results is simply, well, sub-standard. For anyone to step back, take a wholistic look at this situation, and say "it's just ducky!" is absurd.


Most everyone here already knows the pros and cons of continued payments / continued maintenence. If it ever becomes unbearable, stop paying. If enough people do this, FFXI goes off-line (it would take a LOT!).

And then nobody gets to play, even those who jim-john over themselves for an 18-hour update. SE counts it's fat stacks of cash, sinks lots into it's next project, and the investors roll around in your green, nude, on the bed, singing "Oh, Kyle's money! OooohhhhhH!"

enjoy.

-spanky

It's not that it's half-assed. Well, it might be, but we'll never know. But you should realize that testing a network and servers with this many users is essentially impossible. There are a lot of problems that will only come out with real-world testing, stuff you can't simulate. They at least do a decent job of addressing it as it comes up. And frankly, if you're surprised at this point when the system has problems shortly after it comes up from major maintainance, your pattern recognition skills are lacking. I know most people figure this out -- they joke constantly about how they don't believe maintainance will be over soon.

Hopefully you are not scheduling your life around when the servers come back up. I say better to try to get it done in as little time as possible and extend if need be than take things down for longer than necessary. If you prefer the "it had better be done even if it takes 3 days" mentality, then what you should do is this: whenever they announce a maintainance, just assume that FFXI will be inaccessible from 24 hours from the start of maintainance. Probably over half of this time it will actually be accessible, but in your eyes, they will have fixed the problem completely once the "time" is up. They'll have just used some live testers.

Sex with wife >.>

Thats productive...

i will blame SE all i want..--

Hey I agree that SE try there best but I am just going to post what i did in another thread cause Im to lazy to retype and I thought what someone else said (which I was thinking the same thing but was guttless to post) which makes sense.

AS for go do something else with your time, well we pay for our leisure and time to do what we want to do. How many times do you pay for a service that mucks up!!! If it happens alot well you do ring and say ..."heyyyy WTF"

Whne my bank account go down, I am sure bill collectors are not as patient and make sure I get downtime big time untill they get there money!!!

It goes both ways!!!
never the peoles though ....bummer!!!!!!

Anyway here is my other post to my opinion....


I was actually thinking the same as you just posted.

Quote:
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Well, it certainly is frustrating but crap happens. I'll probably head to bed soon anyway.

But I was thinking of a possible solution. The company I work for also has utilizes a server. Due to the type of work it is, we cannot afford to go down, even for attacks/viruses/maintainence. So we have two servers, both identically powerful. When one goes down, we switch to the other (although it doesn't happen very often). We may go down for a few minutes while the server is switched, but we've never had any major downtime.

Perhaps if SE did this, the long periods of downtime would be greatly reduced, if not eliminated altogether. Just a thought... :)
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So....
With a game this popular and the money they make from it you would think they would have backup servers, servers for testing bugs, changes etc.
OMG has anyone ever seen Yahoo, Google or E-Bay have this many problems.
I know it is a little different but still server related. Im not an expert on the subject but the game is unbelievable and i know the maintenance upkeep is unbelievable also.
So be twice as Smart SE get a backup server.
Use the refunds people want as money to fund it, I am sure they will be happy to know there 75 cents has gone to a worthwhile upgrade!!!

As for people getting upset and having a *****.
Freedom of speech, if they want to complain, Let them!!
Listen, debate or go to bed and dont waste your time telling the people that complain or even want a refund to get a life.
You just wasted a tad of your life complaining about the complainers.
I love reading what people think, I agree, learn and also disagree and also have a good lafffff as well.

Laters

Ekkkkkkkk no spell check OMG ......LOL ok you lot get the jist, I cant spell......and I am not going to correct it to make myself look good either!!!

I agree with the OP and also with a majority of the others.
SE has provided us with a great game that EVERYONE who posts on these forums enjoys.
I love this game, sure, the updates suck, the maintenence sucks, but 9 times out of 10 the game is better after the updates and such. Getting new quests and new items is always fun, as is discoving what other changes have been made.
Anyway, I had some more points I wanted to make, but I cannot seem to remember them (damn stoner moments).

I basically agree with you here. What's a couple more hours of maintenance amount to? I think it's completely understandable if you consider the scope of the network that they run. Things are going to happen. Machines don't always cooperate. When you have humans doing quick equipment and programming changes on-the-fly, chances are good that there will be some problems that need to be fixed. All of these things take time.

On the other hand, yes we are paying customers who expect our service to be working when they say it will. Perhaps SE is over-promising on a time table that they may not be able to deliver. We all know to take the estimated server maintenance times with a grain of salt, and from a customer-service perspective, that's kind of rude of them, kind of a "we get there when we do" attitude.

Perhaps they should over-estimate their maintenance times more than they do. If they think the work will be done in 3 hours, and they estimate 4 hours, but it actually takes 6 hours... hmm. perhaps they should have estimated 8 hours in the first place, to allow themselves time to break the stuff and fix it before people start getting angry.

Yes, difficulties are going to arise with any update. Subscribers need to be understanding of this. But SE also needs to allow for it in the times they promise. It's way better to finish a long maintenance period 2 hours early then to finish a short maintenance period 2 hours late!

As a related issue, to the people who get REALLY mad over a mainenance extension of a few hours: for pete's sake, go do something else for a while! yes it's frustrating, yes you want to play, and so do i. but it's just a video game, so suck it up and go interact with the real world for a while, and you'll be better off for it! FFXI will come back soon, I promise!