Albion E&E's

[Kinetix]

Why do you have to track issues?

When you report to Requiel: ML7 is bugged, and ML7 gets reset after half an hour, you kill it...
Next week someone reports the same bug to Xalin, it repeats...
On the 3rd week, someone contacts the 3rd GM.
On the 4th week, someone does it when no GM is online and curses for hours, looks for E&E in vain, etc.

All GMs would say: Well, once in a month it gets bugged, maybe by a bad pull.

If they would track issues, they would know: Same error happened everyweek. If they look in the log: noone pulled the boss in that week. So when the boss pops, it pops bugged, when it spawned manually, it is working. With that information they might fix the problem.

If they check it after the 2nd report (to look for the cause of bug and save work hours) and check it when it spanws (try to kill it with volunteers, etc) and they see: It is buged, etc. they can use that information.

This is why RN is better than listening to players online. This is why they need a database.

Mate we dont care if its buged manually or automatic or even if elvis buged the encounter or how they fix it, we want the problem solved asap not 3 days after. As for how they do it i dont care.

 

[Thorwyn]

And one more question: if you still trust GOA staff over RIPE, etc. I would ask one question: why that would make you automatically right?

(Edit: Asked the wrong person...)

I guess I`m "the right person" then...

You have a problem, dude. Your problem is, that all your arguments are based upon assumptions. And during the process of writing them down, they magically turn into facts in your brain. You´re lacking the flexibility to realise that you might have insufficient or false informations or that you might not see the whole picture.

Like in this case...
Where ON EARTH, do I say that I trust GoA above all and that they´re always right? (I also never said that classic would save the game, but I won´t start that discussion now, it´s a waste of time). If you care to read through my post history, you´ll find that I`m criticizing GoA quite often. All I said in this thread was, that your suggestion of an online bugtracker is a pile of bullshit because it´s creating more problems than good. And apparently this automatically labels me as a GoA fanboy in your books.
All you have done in this thread is trying to tell the world what a company like GoA is supposed to do because you are of course in the know. And YOU have the cheecks to call me a knowitall, moron and whatnot.

You´re belonging to the most annoying group of customers a company can have. The people who think that they´ve seen the entire house just by lurking through the keyhole once and who think that they´re the ultimate fonds of wisdom and the company should just listen to them. People who´re constantly flaming, complaining and whining are ok. But people like you, who keep making up things and connecting them to obscure constructs are plain and simple a pain in the ass.

If you don´t like the way DAoC is hosted, there are tons of great companies out there. All of them are waiting for your wisdom, I´m sure.

Now welcome to my ignore list

 

[Esselinithia]

Lets verify a few facts:

GOA claimed only OpenTransit has backbone routers in frace: I claim sprintlink and Vivendi both has routers. It is easy to verify it if you want. GOA lied. And if they lie about sources of problems, their claims about what was the source of problem doesn't prove they weren't careless.

Why? Because they defended themself by lies.

 

[Esselinithia]

Mate we dont care if its buged manually or automatic or even if elvis buged the encounter or how they fix it, we want the problem solved asap not 3 days after. As for how they do it i dont care.

You want it fixed asap, I want it fixed asap. You don't like the current state of service (Slow, not enough support staff online, you run into bugs), I don't like the current state of service (slow, not enough online pressence, not enough communication so you run into bugs).

The only difference: I have asked, how GOA can know if the encounter is bugged and how they can know if it is fixed. None of these questions are trivial and both are essential for fixing any bug. If there would be an easy check without trying the encounter, they would automate it, so it is likely that most such bugs can be detected ONLY when someone tries the encounter. Even then it might be hard to tell what is wrong.

This is why no quick fix by E&E (using macros) and this is why it takes days (or weeks) to fix bugs. And we don't want 160 people to go to a raid for nothing, even if GOA is busy fixing the problem. And asking for information on Rightnow isn't good: Takes too much time for BOTH sides.

 

[IainC]

We know an encounter is bugged when it gets reported to us and we can verify the report - and no we don't have to do the encounter to verify a bug as we can work through the AI code for the encounter and see where it gets stuck.
We know it is fixed when the quality and testing team send us a fix for the encounter - either produced in house or from Mythic depending on what the problem is.

Reported and verifiable issues get fixed as quickly as we can do it. If we need to wait for a fix from Mythic, that may add a delay, it doesn't mean however that we are not tracking the issue or that we have no interest in fixing it in the meantime. Any fix has to be thoroughly tested as well to ensure thatit is not introducing additonal bugs or causing unforseen problems. In my experience, reported bugs are usually closed within 2-3 days as long as they don't require complex investigation or input from external sources.

We have internal bug tracking tools that allow us to share and track information about bugs on live servers. For a lot of reasons that info is never going to be public information, having a live 'status list' is not at all realistic.

I have no intention of being drawn into a discussion of your other points. I suggest you use the search function to find my previous replies to your somewhat fanciful delusions, the answers I gave then when I had more patience are still true today.

 

[Golena]

We have internal bug tracking tools that allow us to share and track information about bugs on live servers. For a lot of reasons that info is never going to be public information, having a live 'status list' is not at all realistic.

One thing I am curious about is that after reporting the bug with Katorii the only way I actually knew it was fixed was by luckily catching a GM online and asking them.
Would it be possible to at least let the person who reported the fault know that a bug involving a bugged ML encounter has been looked at. If a raid reports a bug, it gets fixed 48 hours later, but no-one says anything, the only way of finding out is by getting a group of people together again and once more being frustrated by the fact the issue hasn't been resolved yet. This seems like a fairly poor solution.

I have no intention of being drawn into a discussion of your other points. I suggest you use the search function to find my previous replies to your somewhat fanciful delusions, the answers I gave then when I had more patience are still true today.

I've yet to find any thread in the last 4 months posted by you containing the word E&E. Since the thread is about the decline of E&E's and if the system needs rework inlight of the fact that 90% of raids these days fail to get hold of a GM when encountering problems, normally with zero E&E's about anywhere online, when a year ago this wasn't the case then your reply adds about as little to this thread as the fanciful delusions of players wanting a way of contacting a GM that could fix a problem before the 160 people online fail a raid during office hours, when there's supposedly GM's about fixing bugs.

I guess support for the game has now hit a pathetically low level however as banning someone for emote spamming 2 days ago appears to be more important for a GM than 160 people unable to advance on a bugged encounter. Congratulations for your lack of patience, or to put it another way, your lack of "being arsed".. It must be a skill to hold down a job where the best response you can give to your paying customers is "go find someone who cares".

Up until your reply I had actually defended GOA's support on most of the subjects. It's a pity to see I was completely wrong with the situation however.

 

[psyco]

One thing I am curious about is that after reporting the bug with Katorii the only way I actually knew it was fixed was by luckily catching a GM online and asking them.
Would it be possible to at least let the person who reported the fault know that a bug involving a bugged ML encounter has been looked at. If a raid reports a bug, it gets fixed 48 hours later, but no-one says anything, the only way of finding out is by getting a group of people together again and once more being frustrated by the fact the issue hasn't been resolved yet. This seems like a fairly poor solution.



I've yet to find any thread in the last 4 months posted by you containing the word E&E. Since the thread is about the decline of E&E's and if the system needs rework inlight of the fact that 90% of raids these days fail to get hold of a GM when encountering problems, normally with zero E&E's about anywhere online, when a year ago this wasn't the case then your reply adds about as little to this thread as the fanciful delusions of players wanting a way of contacting a GM that could fix a problem before the 160 people online fail a raid during office hours, when there's supposedly GM's about fixing bugs.

I guess support for the game has now hit a pathetically low level however as banning someone for emote spamming 2 days ago appears to be more important for a GM than 160 people unable to advance on a bugged encounter. Congratulations for your lack of patience, or to put it another way, your lack of "being arsed".. It must be a skill to hold down a job where the best response you can give to your paying customers is "go find someone who cares".

Up until your reply I had actually defended GOA's support on most of the subjects. It's a pity to see I was completely wrong with the situation however.

angry letters, nothing better

 

[Killswitch]

angry letters, nothing better

I dunno...+1 replies have something going for them too

 

[IainC]

One thing I am curious about is that after reporting the bug with Katorii the only way I actually knew it was fixed was by luckily catching a GM online and asking them.
Would it be possible to at least let the person who reported the fault know that a bug involving a bugged ML encounter has been looked at. If a raid reports a bug, it gets fixed 48 hours later, but no-one says anything, the only way of finding out is by getting a group of people together again and once more being frustrated by the fact the issue hasn't been resolved yet. This seems like a fairly poor solution.



I've yet to find any thread in the last 4 months posted by you containing the word E&E. Since the thread is about the decline of E&E's and if the system needs rework inlight of the fact that 90% of raids these days fail to get hold of a GM when encountering problems, normally with zero E&E's about anywhere online, when a year ago this wasn't the case then your reply adds about as little to this thread as the fanciful delusions of players wanting a way of contacting a GM that could fix a problem before the 160 people online fail a raid during office hours, when there's supposedly GM's about fixing bugs.

I guess support for the game has now hit a pathetically low level however as banning someone for emote spamming 2 days ago appears to be more important for a GM than 160 people unable to advance on a bugged encounter. Congratulations for your lack of patience, or to put it another way, your lack of "being arsed".. It must be a skill to hold down a job where the best response you can give to your paying customers is "go find someone who cares".

Up until your reply I had actually defended GOA's support on most of the subjects. It's a pity to see I was completely wrong with the situation however.

My post above was directed to Esselinithia and his rather 'unique' view of what is or isn't possible in DAoC. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear and you felt I was replying to the thread in general.

Mostly when a fix is run that will have a noticeable effect for players, we post details of it in our regular News. With the ML7 steps we reset the encounter after it was reported and attempted to determine what was causing it to stick. As it turned out 'nothing' was causing it to stick but a different bug was found during testing which we fixed instead, this is why there was no report in today's news - the step wasn't bugged and thus there was no fix for it run.

Just to clear something up. GMs don't fix bugs. What we do with bugs is try to verify them and then send them up the line to the quality and testing team. They keep track of all the fixes so that they can reimplement them all if necessary after server shutdowns and patches, also they are the ones who liaise with Mythic to find out if reported issues are bugs or features. All a GM can do with a reported game bug is to verify it's existance and repeatability and then forward it for fixing. We can obviously reset encounters too but we don't change game code, if it's broken then it'll stay broken until it's fixed properly. If it's just derailed then we can put it back on track.

Regarding E&Es. We currently have a good coverage of E&Es. Whle one or two have left the program recently, most of those listed are still active. My feeling is that the issues people are having with finding E&Es is symptomatc of the general summer slowdown where there are less players overall during the summer holidays. E&Es, just like the rest of you, take holidays and have other distractions during July and August. I continually monitor the number of volunteers and their acivity levels and, should it be necessary I will invite more to join. Currently I don't believe that's needed for the reasons I stated above.

 

[Golena]

My post above was directed to Esselinithia and his rather 'unique' view of what is or isn't possible in DAoC. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear and you felt I was replying to the thread in general.

Point accepted

Regarding E&Es. We currently have a good coverage of E&Es. Whle one or two have left the program recently, most of those listed are still active. My feeling is that the issues people are having with finding E&Es is symptomatc of the general summer slowdown where there are less players overall during the summer holidays. E&Es, just like the rest of you, take holidays and have other distractions during July and August. I continually monitor the number of volunteers and their acivity levels and, should it be necessary I will invite more to join. Currently I don't believe that's needed for the reasons I stated above.

Is there any way GOA could look at adding an easier way to find E&E volunteers in game? /who E&E or something similar. Please note that i'm in no way demanding that this is done, just enquiring as to if it's even possible. Something akin to the advisors channel, or even hijack this for E&E's since it doesn't appear to be used much as it is atm. My housemate has a char listed on the advisors and has received one query in the last 2 years! That way it would be much easier to find them if required, instead of hoping that someone happens to know which alt the one E&E that's currently playing happens to be on at the time.

 

[IainC]

Is there any way GOA could look at adding an easier way to find E&E volunteers in game? /who E&E or something similar. Please note that i'm in no way demanding that this is done, just enquiring as to if it's even possible. Something akin to the advisors channel, or even hijack this for E&E's since it doesn't appear to be used much as it is atm. My housemate has a char listed on the advisors and has received one query in the last 2 years! That way it would be much easier to find them if required, instead of hoping that someone happens to know which alt the one E&E that's currently playing happens to be on at the time.

We've been looking at ways to do this for a while unfortunately it's not as simple as it seems.

Ideally, the E&E tag would be searchable with /who so that players could do a quick /who E&E, unfortunately the only things that are currently searchable with this command are character names, guilds and tradeskills. Asking E&Es to put their characters into a special E&E guild is harsh as it prevents them from being able to play normally with their friends, renaming them isn't an option either and making a special E&E tradeskill would preclude them from being able to have a regular tradeskill and would need to be coded in by Mythic.

The title system is another option we've been looking at but again, an E&E title would need to be added in by Mythic and the tag would only be visible to characters in close proximity. All other realistic solutions need to be coded by Mythic and, to be honest, this would be a very low priority issue for them and so would be at the very bottom of the big list of things that get developer time.

 

[Tombha]

yattayatta.

what bout getting the e&e ppl to make a cg they join in on when they start up. maybe getting a char started at the office of goa named "e&e" or something.. that could have a cg up permanently.. then you could just go /who CG.. and find it .. join it and get the problem aired

 

[Golena]

what bout getting the e&e ppl to make a cg they join in on when they start up. maybe getting a char started at the office of goa named "e&e" or something.. that could have a cg up permanently.. then you could just go /who CG.. and find it .. join it and get the problem aired

I imagine the issue would then bg E&E's would be unable to join other chatgroups..

I'd imagine stealing the currently unused advisors channel for the task would be the most obvious, and already fits in sort of with what an E&E is.. someone to contact when you get stuck.
While it may be intended for new players to seek advice on the game, i've yet to find a new player even semi-aware of it's existance!

 

[Esselinithia]

Requel: It doesn't matter how many times GOA claims: No other backbone present in france, if backbone providers are present in france, and all official RIPE and WHOIS data shows it, they will be still present in France. Period.

You might think, my view is unique. But once I caught GOA lieing about backbone providers in france, and insulting customers who named routers (which is proof) I got to the point, where I said I have no reason to trust any GOA employee. Including you.

The momement when GOA admits: They lied about OT, they lied about relationship with their parent companies, they liead about closing main www.goa.com page, and sorry for throwing oinsult, and now willing to build up trust based on telling the truth, I will see GOA in different light.

What is and what isn't possible for DAOC: Noone said that issue tracking would be good for you, in current state of daoc, it is good for *sane* companies.

Again: This oppinion can be change ONLY, when GOA staff (including you) who lied about OT issue, lied about closing main GOA page, etc. threw insults, admits wrong and changes. Then I might consider believing in anything GOA says.

To me it is pretty clear: GOA staff caught lieing, being rude with customers, etc. because it is easier than admiting they done something wrong, and fixing the problems. Also GOA managed the game in an unprofessional way, both in how the game is run and how it is advertised. The results are visible in the player count, and the changes to it. Also it is visible when you see how people reacted when heard GOA will run Warhammer Online. (Bet on it, many will buy accounts for US servers instead)

About this issue:

and no we don't have to do the encounter to verify a bug as we can work through the AI code for the encounter and see where it gets stuck.

You know about the bug only when it gets reported: When someone started the encounter, and the AI ended up in a bugous state: Someone tried the encounter. If you would see the problem before someone pulling the encounter in AI state, you would detect it with your tools BEFORE anyone would get affected by the bug.

About issue tracking, and testing: We agree here, this is why I explained to kinetix that reporting by /send and getting it reset won't work, we agree on this. And yes, you explained nicely that bugs can interact and doing a reset isn't good, and investigating it is, since it can fix the source. Thanks.

Requel: About bug tracking tools, when people asked why would you build something and give data in: I said you *already* have it, it is just about some view to show data from it. Telling that you has such tools isn't a big news to me.

About good ways to show E&E listing in game: What about "CSR" status? I think /who CSR should work, and if you can give them CSR status without giving them access to other GM only features it could work well.

 

[Esselinithia]

I guess support for the game has now hit a pathetically low level however as banning someone for emote spamming 2 days ago appears to be more important for a GM than 160 people unable to advance on a bugged encounter. Congratulations for your lack of patience, or to put it another way, your lack of "being arsed".. It must be a skill to hold down a job where the best response you can give to your paying customers is "go find someone who cares".

About emote spam: It can be detected by an automated tool quickly, and they don't have to fix anything for it, don't have to test, wait for mythic, etc. they can react quickly.

And if you RN an issue you get status of your issue. If you plan an ML7 raid, you can RN and ask if it is possible now, etc. if 160 members of a raid asks them about it: They just had to work more

 

[Alan]

Make the E&E L51

 

[Esselinithia]

Btw: Noone saying, that things possible for Mythic, Blizzard, EA, etc. is possible for GOA too. Why? Because GOA is part of a phone company. Other mentionened companies are in the entertainment / game development bussiness, while France Telecom is a phone company.

So for GOA it is impossible to justify using different network, for EA, etc. it is easy to choose the best.
For GOA it is impossible to justify (to tne investors) a bigger support staff, it would be compared on per connection basis with other phone companies, etc who need less support. In fact the investors, top level management, etc might point to the fact: other phone companies doesn't need a separate support staff. For the other mentioned companies: Good investment in the growing MMORPG market.
For GOA it is hard to justify hosting the game in different datacenters around Europe since they have t host it in house. For the other companies it is easy.
Most gaming companies have their share of developers, etc in house. GOA runs a game developed by a separate company.
Mythic knows what to keep as secret, and when they can tell something about how the game works: for GOA all such information should be kept safe... (requirement in the contract)

We can also speak about advertising: Game publishers, developers are in day to day contact with gaming magazines, web sites, etc. a phone company isn't. Most other mentioned companies have multiple products which improves this contact, and also the contact with retailers. (The retailers will understand their games better)

Most of the limits that make things impossible for GOA are here for similar reasons, and not as an innate flaw of daoc or MMORPGs in general. Can they change it? Probably not And it doesn't make their service better.

If we like daoc, we will stay, and will play with friends anyway. Even if we know the source of the problem. If GOA would be honest about it and would be polite, it would be better, and noone would blame them for these problems.

But if they are rude, and lie about their relationship with FT and the limits this creates: They just killed the best excuse for the problem. So now they are responsible for lieing, rudeness, and took the responsibility for the problems too.

 

[IainC]

Btw: Noone saying, that things possible for Mythic, Blizzard, EA, etc. is possible for GOA too. Why? Because GOA is part of a phone company. Other mentionened companies are in the entertainment / game development bussiness, while France Telecom is a phone company.

So for GOA it is impossible to justify using different network, for EA, etc. it is easy to choose the best.
For GOA it is impossible to justify (to tne investors) a bigger support staff, it would be compared on per connection basis with other phone companies, etc who need less support. In fact the investors, top level management, etc might point to the fact: other phone companies doesn't need a separate support staff. For the other mentioned companies: Good investment in the growing MMORPG market.
For GOA it is hard to justify hosting the game in different datacenters around Europe since they have t host it in house. For the other companies it is easy.
Most gaming companies have their share of developers, etc in house. GOA runs a game developed by a separate company.
Mythic knows what to keep as secret, and when they can tell something about how the game works: for GOA all such information should be kept safe... (requirement in the contract)

We can also speak about advertising: Game publishers, developers are in day to day contact with gaming magazines, web sites, etc. a phone company isn't. Most other mentioned companies have multiple products which improves this contact, and also the contact with retailers. (The retailers will understand their games better)

Most of the limits that make things impossible for GOA are here for similar reasons, and not as an innate flaw of daoc or MMORPGs in general. Can they change it? Probably not And it doesn't make their service better.

If we like daoc, we will stay, and will play with friends anyway. Even if we know the source of the problem. If GOA would be honest about it and would be polite, it would be better, and noone would blame them for these problems.

But if they are rude, and lie about their relationship with FT and the limits this creates: They just killed the best excuse for the problem. So now they are responsible for lieing, rudeness, and took the responsibility for the problems too.

No-one has lied about our relationship with FT. I have absolutely no idea where you get this from. Originally Goa was part of Wanadoo, which was partly owned by FT. FT bought the rest of Wanadoo in late 2004 and split us off to become a wholly owned part of FT rather than a division of Wanadoo. That's the whole story. I remember telling you that at the time and still you don't seem to understand the fairly simple situation. I've got no idea what you are talking about with regard to the goa.com website either. As we are FT's games brand we have just relaunched www.goa.com as a games portal for casual internet games.

We are a games company and we operate as one. FT does not run our business, we have our own press relations department who work with PR companies in our various territories and manage things like promotions and press companies. Those jobs aren't done by people who normally sell phones, they are done by people who work for a games company. The fact that FT is a games company has absolutely nothing to do with our operational situation. Sony are a television manfacturer, are you going to suggest that Sony games division is somehow tied to the need to sell more televisions? Blizzard are owned by a film company, does this somehow dilute their ability to create games?

I never said that OT was the only backbone in France, I did say that they are the major backbone who handle nearly all the traffic across northern Europe. It wouldn't matter who our host was - we could be conected via AOL dialup and the vast majority of our customers would still pass through OT hubs on their way to our servers. There are other networks in France but the vast majority of the cable and infrastructure is OT and they are pretty much the only serious choice.

Nobody has lied to you, you have just refused to understand and have created issues that only exist in your mind.

 

[elbeek]

stuff.

WTF are you rambling on about?

 

[Esselinithia]

Nobody has lied to you, you have just refused to understand and have created issues that only exist in your mind.

You say it is relaunched, I say: GOA as brand was and still there as a brand owned by a certain provider. You claimed it was closed down years ago, then I pointed to a far more cenet article.

Imho, if you say a page is closed for years, and there is a newer article on it that says, you haven't told the truth. It is this simple.

You can look up previous posts (where a GOA staff member) /if they aren't pruned as old threads/ where one of the GOA staff explained that OT is the only one in france, now you say it is the major one in that part of Europe. It can be proven wrong if someone checks it. (Harder than finding some routers)

Rest can be verified. And about relationship with wanadoo: you can check some credit card reports and see how the subs money are going.

 

[Golena]

Stuff.

How does this have any thing to do with this thread at all.
Please take your random ramblings elsewhere, thx.

Opentransit has nothing to do with anything here, so what a GM said or didn't say about it really doesn't matter now does it.

 

[elbeek]

You say it is relaunched, I say: GOA as brand was and still there as a brand owned by a certain provider. You claimed it was closed down years ago, then I pointed to a far more cenet article.

Imho, if you say a page is closed for years, and there is a newer article on it that says, you haven't told the truth. It is this simple.

You can look up previous posts (where a GOA staff member) /if they aren't pruned as old threads/ where one of the GOA staff explained that OT is the only one in france, now you say it is the major one in that part of Europe. It can be proven wrong if someone checks it. (Harder than finding some routers)

Rest can be verified. And about relationship with wanadoo: you can check some credit card reports and see how the subs money are going.

After all the crap you have posted I am sure you will be treated as a priority.....really.

 

[psyco]

i got bored after raquiel replyed... sounded like talking to tony blair, he answers without really giving you an answer, you know?

 

[Kinetix]

i got bored after raquiel replyed... sounded like talking to tony blair, he answers without really giving you an answer, you know?

eheh you were expecting a straight answer from a GM?

 

[psyco]

eheh you were expecting a straight answer from a GM?

no, everyone in customer service in the entrire world im sure takes a, answering the question without really answering the question, corse