VertigoTX wrote: »

I work for an MSP too. We monitor a couple thousand servers internationally. Depending on the severity of an issue, we may even issue 30 minute updates. The standards that define our SLA's are driven by the fact that these clients are businesses, and system downtime has direct impact on their business. These services cost in excess of 5 figures a month.

ESO is an consumer grade entertainment service that costs $15 a month. We are not entitled to hourly updates from the Dev team. It's having a problem, so they took it down to fix it. It will be back up... when it's fixed.

Could not disagree more. I pay a small monthly fee for my internet service. When it goes down occassionally, I call an information line and they generally have updates such as "internet is down in this area, crews are dispatched, expected downtime is 2 hours".

It's called customer service philosophy, and it has nothing to do with how much you charge. McDonald's, for example, has a ridiculously strong customer service philosophy, despite you paying just 5 bucks for your meal.

If ESO gets just 1 million subscribers, then they are bringing in 15 million dollars a month, plus the initial injection of approximately 50 million in unit sales. For that kind of money they can hire a guy who's one job is to post regular, timely updates.

They could hire just a few guys to monitor chat in the various instances, instead of a third party company to process thousands of customer initiated reports of gold spammers.

Some companies have a strong customer service plan and some don't, and the word "plan" is the key. Failing to plan is planning to fail, as they say. It's about being pro-active instead of reactive and setting yourself up for success rather then failure.

Right now Zenimax is likely overwhelmed by their craptastic code which doesn't just have bugs, but has the worst kind of bugs... the kind that are game breaking experiences like bank wipes, character rollbacks, massive item loss, etc. All of the things that equate to losing time, which is the most valuable thing we players have to invest.

All the people who say you can't test this stuff in advance are wrong. You can, but Zenimax chose not to go the route of large scale, long beta testing periods, such as those being employed by a certain other MMO coming out soon, to work out the kinks. Ergo, we get to pay for our Beta. That's a very specific choice that Zenimax made, knowing full well what was likely to happen. If they did not know then they are either incompetent or inexperienced, and I don't think Zenimax is either of those things.

There is still time to fix things and a good first step will be teaching someone on the dev team how to underpromise and overdeliver on downtimes, and then announce attainable downtimes, instead of leaving us in the dark.

Even my plumber can give me a guess how long it will take to repair my leak before he comes to my house. It may only be an educated guess, but at least it helps me know if should book off work that day or not.

pecheckler wrote: »

Alyrn_Grey wrote: »

LMAO. You clearly have never done emergency maintenance on anything have you.

Seriously regular updates? ::snicker:: ROFL

I support over 50 systems on over 600 servers, most with either 99.5% or 99.9% uptime SLA. I assure you I have. It is regular procedure to provide our clients with hourly status updates on the steps of our root cause analysis.

I used to work on telephone switch software. Status reports every 15 minutes. Seamless frame swaps. No downtime. Ever. No matter what.

Oh yeah, the server Johnies are sweating bullets about now. Please, someone pass me the popcorn.

Srugzal wrote: »

I used to work on telephone switch software. Status reports every 15 minutes. Seamless frame swaps. No downtime. Ever. No matter what.

Oh yeah, the server Johnies are sweating bullets about now. Please, someone pass me the popcorn.

Bet you never had the fun of a NorTel with mismatched clock cards. Oooh that was fun. Pop out the clock card of one CPU to reseat it and watch the red lights spread across the entire switch. And then when the tech from NorTel arrived he did the same thing before I could stop him. You have to do a full power and and restart from that failure.

george.smithb16_ESO wrote: »

Could not disagree more. I pay a small monthly fee for my internet service. When it goes down...I call an info line and they generally have updates such as "internet is down in this area, crews are dispatched, expected downtime is 2 hours".

It's called customer service philosophy... McDonald's, for example, has a ridiculously strong customer service philosophy, despite you paying just 5 bucks...

...they can hire a guy who's one job is to post regular, timely updates.

...the word "plan" is the key. Failing to plan is planning to fail, as they say...

Right now Zenimax is likely overwhelmed by their craptastic code which doesn't just have bugs, but has the worst kind of bugs... the kind that are game breaking experiences like bank wipes, character rollbacks, massive item loss, etc. All of the things that equate to losing time, which is the most valuable thing we players have to invest.

All the people who say you can't test this stuff in advance are wrong. You can, but Zenimax chose not to go the route of large scale, long beta testing periods, such as those being employed by a certain other MMO coming out soon, to work out the kinks. Ergo, we get to pay for our Beta. That's a very specific choice that Zenimax made, knowing full well what was likely to happen. If they did not know then they are either incompetent or inexperienced, and I don't think Zenimax is either of those things.

There is still time to fix things and a good first step will be teaching someone on the dev team how to underpromise and overdeliver on downtimes, and then announce attainable downtimes, instead of leaving us in the dark.

Even my plumber can give me a guess how long it will take to repair my leak before he comes to my house. It may only be an educated guess, but at least it helps me know if should book off work that day or not.

Disagree all you want but it still won't make you right. Your examples do not directly correlate to Zenimax. You are comparing a utility service like electricity to a gaming service. A better analogy would be to compare to what Netflix would do. Netflix wouldn't hold your hand either and give you hourly updates. But guess who did give updates despite all the bickering and whining... that's right, ZOS updated us during the outage on this thread...

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/76915/na-megaserver-offline-4-12-14-11-47pm-edt-complete#latest

McDonalds... another flawed example. McDonald's does have strong customer service, and that's all they have. The food is crap, and the value is weak considering the high priced low quality food. Aside from the benefits of a franchise in that you can the same crap anywhere in the world in a hurry, customer service is the only thing they have going for them.

A plumber? He can give you an estimate over the phone because he's fixed the same problem thousands of times. He also doesn't have to be right, because you are going to pay him to fix it even if it takes longer than quoted. When the estimate is wrong, I hope you are not going to stand over him lecturing that he didn't update you regularly, how you you know more than he does about his business, and he's planning to fail... etc...

Lets just skip the examples and analogies, because I don't think that's working for you as planned. More to the point... ZOS clearly has a plan, but because you disagree with it, it's a plan to fail?

There was a problem. They quickly addressed it. They updated us while working on it. They brought it back online around an hour later. I don't see where they did wrong by you here.