Formal letter sent to GOA.

[BimboBane]

This is a copy of the letter i sent to CEO GOA today. I will keep you posted when i get an answer.

//Johan Fischer

----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Sirs

We are writing this letter to you due to the late failure of the Prydwen database.
All of us are Daoc account holders playing on Prydwen within the Norrsken Alliance.
Since the last database failure have caused much frustration to people playing on Prydwen we ask you to provide us with you assurances that this situation is never going to happen again. We would like you to publish a statement posted on either your official site or the Dark Age of Camelot section of www.freddyshouse.com, announcing why this happened and what steps your company has taken to prevent this from happening again.
We also feel that it's essential for us to know what to expect of the service we're paying for. Both minor and major incidents have occurred, the hacking of the servers causing Prydwen to go offline for several days as an example. Therefore we suggest that an SLA (Service Level Agreement) would be made between GOA and the end customers (the daoc account holders).


Signed by Guild Masters of the Norrsken alliance Prydwen on behalf of the Guilds members

Yours

Johan Fischer alias BimboBane Drakstrypare GM <Bulle af Fetstryk>, Alliance Leader <Norrsken>

Following guilds are represented by the Norrsken Alliance of Midgaard Prydwen
<Bulle af Fetstryk>
<Svea Ulvar>
<Ragnarök>
<House of smek>
<Maelstrom>
<Grimnurs guard>
<Nordland>
<Das Liebers>
<Murder inc>
<House Draakenberg>
<Maud'dib>
<Nordsken>
<Brynja freedom fighters>
<Skånes Befriare>

 

[CstasY]

Please tell me you're fucking joking?

 

[Thorwyn]

lol IRL

 

[Shanaia]

Please tell me you're fucking joking?

quoted for truth (I hope)

 

[rampant]

about as useful as a chocolate teacup...

 

[Melachi]

good idea, and fuck the lot who think your taking it too far, there just those types who hate to raise a fuss and just like things to be kept quite.

Im waiting nearly 9 fucking days to get my stuff back, im trying to get a phone number for goa and im going to give them an ear full, its fucks like those in this thread that lets companies in europe get away with such awful customer service.

 

[Azathrim]

It's pretty common for service providing companies to have a SLA. It's not really a big thing. It's just a description of what level of service you can expect from the product. That doesn't mean it have to be top notch service. It just means it have to be minimum values that the costumer can expect.

To be honest, nothing wrong with expecting that as it's quite common. If you research your ISP, Im sure you can find a SLA as well.

On the same note, it would be nice if they included descriptions of their information levels in the SLA. Personally I belive their information is great on FH.

For the majority of the costumers that doesn't read FH, it's beyond subpar though.

 

[Bugz]

about as useful as a chocolate teacup...

LOL!

 

[Morchaoron]

about as useful as a chocolate teacup...

i only drink icetea fyi....

 

[Zede]

nice idea, shit letter.

it happened, jeez if your gonna write a letter like that, tell em to nerf bainshees ban all classes with a bow !

id sign that one np

 

[Deepflame]

nice idea, shit letter.

it happened, jeez if your gonna write a letter like that, tell em to nerf bainshees ban all classes with a bow !

id sign that one np

Dear GOA,

Please grant me GM rights so I can ban everyone who pisses me off.

Thank you.

^^ Much easier.

 

[Haazheel]

we ask you to provide us with you assurances that this situation is never going to happen again

Simply impossible to assure anyone on this. Servers issue appear, in every company, gaming or not.

 

[Appendix]

Simply impossible to assure anyone on this. Servers issue appear, in every company, gaming or not.

It's not a matter of server issues, it's about complete loss of customer data, i.e. our daoc toons. In any serious real-life application, an event like this would likely have put the company in question out of business.

 

[rampant]

It's not a matter of server issues, it's about complete loss of customer data, i.e. our daoc toons. In any serious real-life application, an event like this would likely have put the company in question out of business.

no it wouldnt and you are completely wrong!!!!!

in any DR situation, you have to goto the last known good backup - in pry's case this was a frikken 4 hour roll back - i bet the GOA team are wasting lots of time on the sad gits who havnt lost ANYTHING - and yet are being greedy trying to get summat for nowt.

Lets look at the actual FACTS of the problem - a database corruption occured, which took nearly a week to identify and resolve (this is what you should be complaining about!!) - imo this is poor support from mythic to GOA - and GOA should be taking this up with Mythic. GOA-bods are now working flat out to recover/replace items 'lost' on toons - and all i see is QQ'ing on these boards about it!

any notice the lack of screenshots of 'emptied toons or vaults??'

as obi-wan-kenobi once said:

'Have patience my young padawan' (i think it was him anyhow - but it could have been yoda )

 

[Stinko]

Simply impossible to assure anyone on this. Servers issue appear, in every company, gaming or not.

Ofcourse the server can go down and downtimes may happend. But loosing customer data is veery bad. If I'm ever gonna look at Goa as a professional and serious service provider with 10000+ customers I wanna see how they are gonna prevent this from happening again.

And this was no way a normal rollback and how the h-ll can a DB get so corrupted so fast and brought back online with so many errors (like one certain healer with 15 weapons equiped, even on armor slots) unless the ones in charge of the DB are total newbies with no sence of responsability and service mind. I know I would be in DEEP trouble of this happened to the data warehouse I'm responsible of (as a professional DW consultant).

 

[xxManiacxx]

any notice the lack of screenshots of 'emptied toons or vaults??'

Have seen plenty. Have also seen a ss of a healer with 15 weapons equipped. That´s right, every armor piece was a weapon suddenly.

 

[Outlander]

Have also seen a ss of a healer with 15 weapons equipped. That´s right, every armor piece was a weapon suddenly.

nerf heal0rs!1!!

 

[Axuk]

Wouldn't a rollback have been preferable to this total chaos, with people waiting for stuff to be replaced and other people getting stuff they didnt have before? And other people not even able to check because their account ran out the day the servers came back up and the down time isnt being credited until the mess is solved meaning those people have to renew an account just to see if they have lost anything or not?

 

[Farbaute2]

I understand many excaliburians who don't play prydwen have hard to understand how many errors we have here. 8 of my 16 toons on 2 accounts were stripped or equipped with bugged items. the situation is the same for all on prydwen. you have to log in the char to see "the new char", and most of us have probably only logged in active chars. This problem will stay for months. alot of lowbie chars are running around with robes here in midgard now for example. my newly /leveled 21 shaman has a complete BG1 infil set equipped.

anyway. we are a couple hundred active accounts behind this letter Bimbobane sent.

/Narve

(p.s. can i please keep the 15 weapons on my aug healer? some of the jambayas has 17.5 dps)

 

[Appendix]

Lets look at the actual FACTS of the problem - a database corruption occured, which took nearly a week to identify and resolve (this is what you should be complaining about!!)

I disagree, I would rather have seen two weeks of downtime if that would have helped fixing the database corruption without loss of data. A rollback is bad but leaving it to the customers to list what items have been lost is totally unacceptable. If they truly have a working backup system in place they should rollback every toon individually. If this means some items will be duped, so be it.

any notice the lack of screenshots of 'emptied toons or vaults??'

Luckily I have been unaffected by this whole thing but yes, I have seen screens of stripped toons and vaults or toons with obviously corrupt items equipped.

 

[Karatakus]

The 4 hour rollback was the last useable database they had but still had corrupt files in it, from what I can understand. If they rolled back to an uncorrupted database, u'd have probably been looking at a couple of weeks rollback which is obviously not acceptable.

The fact of the matter is a lot of people lost a lot of stuff, and it is very hard if nigh on impossible to remember everything u lost, so yea there will probably be some mis-claims. Personally I had 5 toons stripped (1 on my first account, 4 on my 2nd) and I'm still waiting to get my items returned.

I must admit tho that this "formal" letter had me laughing. What an exercise in self importance and pomposity from its authors. All I can say to BimboBane is do us a favour m8 and don't pull people from sorting out our claims to answer stuff like this. At least wait until they finished to request a SLA or whatever.

 

[atos]

Well done, I hope we'll get a nice and formal letter back.

And to those who try to ridicule this letter. You are worse than the dirt on my shoes. uke:

 

[cemi0]

as obi-wan-kenobi once said:

'Have patience my young padawan' (i think it was him anyhow - but it could have been yoda )

Just to sort out a historical FACT! It was Qui-Gon Jinn who said it to Ben Kenobi, later known as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace >.<

On subject
Real companies take live backup, not backup each 4 hours or whatever the rollback was. Live backup makes sure you dont lose anything when a database gets corrupted.

Its hard to judge where the fault is here, because we dont know a thing about it. It could be GOA, it could be Mythic - noone knows what exactly is written in their agreement.

And I do agree we need some sort of SLA.

 

[Heta]

Just to sort out a historical FACT! It was Qui-Gon Jinn who said it to Ben Kenobi, later known as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace >.<

ehh? tought he got known as Obi-Wan Kenobi in episode 4 - Starwars


hows getting the facts right working for you?

 

[Alan]

The first paragraph was really good, formal, polite, and asking for an official statement on what happened and what plans are in action to minimise it happening again. But then the 2nd paragraph just makes you look stupid (sorry tried to think of a nicer word - but couldnt)

 

[Quinlan]

They are gonna have a good laugh at the first meeting after this letter arrived

 

[elisera]

GOA will do their best to make your Player Account accessible permanently, except for interruptions required for technical and maintenance operations necessary for the a game like DAOC and referred to in article 1.
GOA can however not be held responsible for difficulties in accessing DAOC that may be due to your Internet access conditions and, more generally, for any malfunction of interruption to your Player Account connected to or resulting from an act of God.
Neither GOA nor any person or entity involved in creating, producing, editing or distributing all contents or services related to DAOC, nor any of their respective directors, managers, employees or agents, can make any guarantees whatsoever, in particular regarding the results that may be obtained by using your Player Account or the ability of your Player Account to work without interruption or error.
Using your Player Account, including but not restricted to all DAOC communication functions, is at your own risk. In this respect, you irrevocably agree to waive recourse of any kind and you guarantee GOA and any other entity involved in creating, producing, editing or distributing all contents or services related to DAOC, including their respective directors, managers, employees or agents, against any recourse or claim that could be made by any third parties due to the contents, data or any other information that you may provide when using your Player Account.
Neither GOA, nor any other person or entity involved in creating, producing, editing or distributing all contents or services related to DAOC, including their respective directors, managers, employees or agents, can be held responsible for any incidental or consecutive, indirect or special damage caused by or connected with the use of or inability to use your Player Account, even if GOA had been informed beforehand of the possibility of such damage occurring.
Whatever the circumstances, the amount of damages to which you could be entitled will be limited to the rights, if any, paid by you to use your Player Account.
Neither GOA nor any other person or entity involved in creating, producing, editing or distributing all contents or services related to DAOC, including their respective directors, managers, employees or agents, can be held responsible for the accuracy or reliability of any opinions, advice or declarations, nor do they endorse or guarantee any propositions that could be made to you by a third party user through the intermediary of the DAOC communication functions. Consequently, GOA wishes to point out that it is your own responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, comprehensiveness or utility of any information, opinions or advice that you could be given via the DAOC communication functions. You are advised to use your own good judgement and be careful should need be.

That not close enough to what your after?

 

[BimboBane]

I must admit tho that this "formal" letter had me laughing. What an exercise in self importance and pomposity from its authors. All I can say to BimboBane is do us a favour m8 and don't pull people from sorting out our claims to answer stuff like this. At least wait until they finished to request a SLA or whatever.

Glad i could make someone laugh.

The issue here is that this a service we pay for, and since they are very very formal in all the agreements they have us sign to even use their service I think we atleast can request a SLA in return where they state what we are paying for.

This leads to severall sever questions for a company that only bussiness is to provide online gaming... I qoute from their homepage.

With unique experience in Europe, Wanadoo, a branch of the France Telecom group and the first Internet access provider in France, is also the European leader in online gaming with the MMORPG phenomenon.

**Its Games department offers a vast range of entertainment features for young and old. On the one hand, classic games, online or downloadable, are accessible to all via the Wanadoo.fr game portal. On the other hand, the company adapts, produces, publishes and animates massively multiplayer online

http://www.goa.com/en/index.php

Managing massively multiplayer games, GOA's premier area of expertise, is a relatively recent activity, which requires the convergence of very different skills. Organization, creation, animation and technique are all handled in different languages, with collaborators both specialized and polyvalent.

**GOA's Online Game department integrates a Community Management team, in charge of animation, content and communication, a customer support service, a trilingual localization team, a marketing department, an administrative service in charge of the game subscriptions and, of course, a state-of-the-art technical service which benefit from Wanadoo's hosting platform.

*With The 4th Prophecy, GOA acquired a level of expertise and experience which proves very useful today with another heroic fantasy game, ‘Dark Age of Camelot’, a title that has become one of the greatest international hits with its unique Realm versus Realm combat system.

What this kind of failures and "odd" way of handeling send for kind of message to the customers is bothersome for those others of us whom also does bussiness online. If a service you pay for (like daoc/wow) so blatantly fails in providing the most basic SLA for their customers and have their service waste massive amounts of time and effort (raids, farming, leveling, etc.) for their customers.

How willing will the customers be to pay for another service later?
No I think we should ask the same thing of our mmorpg service provider as we would ask from any other paid service.

I could draw parrallels to your ISP, youth communitys, mail providors, web hotells, ASP services and so on. For example would you accept that all your mail was not only randomly deleted, but have been temperd with and had text from other mailacounts scatterd all over? What worse is all your sensitive mail and dokuments scatterd over thousends of other peoples mailboxes. *shiver*

Im aware that having a DB crash is the worse scenario there is for any company that rely on databases for their bussiness. I myself work as an database specialist konsultant and I together with my customers put massive efforts in making sure that all databases are so robust and well maintained that a service critical database like this one would have been backed up and made sure that the disaster recovery plan are up to date and firmly tested. To have backups done to seldom and without properly testing them regulary is a big no-no...

And yes the tone is high, but this is the kind of formal letter I would have sent to any of my service providors that have failed to fullfill what I expected of them.

Yours

//Johan

 

[Belomar]

ehh? tought he got known as Obi-Wan Kenobi in episode 4 - Starwars


hows getting the facts right working for you?

Star Wars Episode 4 is called "A New Hope", and Obi-Wan Kenobi is his given name (it is used in Episode 1), but after the Jedi were made extinct, Obi-Wan went underground on Tatooine and assumed the name "Ben" Kenobi and took to living in the desert as a hermit.

So, about those facts again, you were saying?

 

[Deepflame]

It's not a matter of server issues, it's about complete loss of customer data, i.e. our daoc toons. In any serious real-life application, an event like this would likely have put the company in question out of business.

no it wouldnt and you are completely wrong!!!!!

What? Companies HAVE gone out of business due to database issues. Infact, crashes like this could have well meant the end of any normal business. Imagine this happening in a hospital. A while ago, in a german hospital something like this happened, a woman got told she had aids and she commited suicide. Turns out she had nothing lethal. Or imagine this happening to a bank, suddenly everyone lost their money. Seriously, database issues like this typically can destroy a company completely.