Goa Fix The Market Explorer - !

[IainC]

Ok, it has been a week now and we haven't yet had one informative reply from GOA, what we demand to know is how the fix is progressing and a rough ETA. We pay GOA and they pay Mythic a licence fee, someone needs to take ownership of the bloody problem and push push push for an immediate hotfix.

And how do you know that someone didn't take ownership of the problem and was pushing for a fix?

Besides this, the Market Explorers are still not available, but our teams and the teams at Mythic are of course working on that issue so that they can quickly do their job again.

To be honest at the time that was posted, we couldn't really say any more than that. We acknowledged the problem (again, as we'd already mentioned it in the post-patch news) and reassured our players that we were looking into fixing it. We've learnt the hard way not to give rough ETAs, because if we miss them we get spammed with complaints for breaking our 'promise'. It's a no-win situation. We either give you information when we know 100% it is accurate (which is usually with very little notice as there's no point sitting on a working fix just to give people more notice of it), or we post speculation which we know we'll be held to.

As it happened we had some files from Mythic last Friday but for various reasons we never, ever apply fixes or patches on a Friday (mainly because if it breaks things worse, things will stay broken till Monday). So we applied the fixes this morning and now everything is working again. We'll keep an eye on things to make sure that there aren't any new problems introduced as a result of the fix but that's not something that we could predict on Friday when the news was posted, for all we knew the fix may not have worked or it may have introduced serious problems to other systems.

 

[Thadius]

Me's are working \o/

 

[Rellik]

Me's are working \o/

horrah!

 

[cHodAX]

And how do you know that someone didn't take ownership of the problem and was pushing for a fix?


To be honest at the time that was posted, we couldn't really say any more than that. We acknowledged the problem (again, as we'd already mentioned it in the post-patch news) and reassured our players that we were looking into fixing it. We've learnt the hard way not to give rough ETAs, because if we miss them we get spammed with complaints for breaking our 'promise'. It's a no-win situation. We either give you information when we know 100% it is accurate (which is usually with very little notice as there's no point sitting on a working fix just to give people more notice of it), or we post speculation which we know we'll be held to.

As it happened we had some files from Mythic last Friday but for various reasons we never, ever apply fixes or patches on a Friday (mainly because if it breaks things worse, things will stay broken till Monday). So we applied the fixes this morning and now everything is working again. We'll keep an eye on things to make sure that there aren't any new problems introduced as a result of the fix but that's not something that we could predict on Friday when the news was posted, for all we knew the fix may not have worked or it may have introduced serious problems to other systems.

Requiel, I am not having a go at you personally but you are defending the indefensible. Yes the problem was not caused by GOA and it seems that whatever contract you guys (GOA) have with Mythic allows them to at times take the piss when it comes to hotfixing important bugs for us EU customers. That is why I made the comment about ownership and someone pushing Mythic till they got their thubs out of thier collective arses and started giving proper support to their paying customers/licencees in the E.U. Someone high up at GOA really need to start badgering Mythic about the support they are recieving because it blatently is not upto par. The only thing I can fault GOA for is lacking the confidence to tell the paying customer that they may have a fix but they won't be 100% sure till they can properly test it, at the end of the day if you keep the customer fully informed then they will be alot more understanding than you think but keeping them in the dark is not acceptable and just causes alot more hassle than it should.

Now for Mythic, 5 days to come up with a fix for a bug that they should never have shipped to you guys in the first place is bloody appauling and Mythic have to take 100% blame for that, right now E.U. probably has as many active customers are the U.S. but they still continue to treat us like a second class region because we play via a third party. When something needs fixing on E.U. it never seems to be a priorty for them and that is certainly the way many of us customers feel. As for the bug, 5 days to track down an fix important bug like this is disgusting, they have all the source code and have worked on this code for years, yet it takes them the best part of a week to come up with a fix. The truth is they didn't class it as 'vitally important' because we aren't flooding thier support systems, again poor GOA get the flack for Mythic's mess and lack of support. Requiel I know that this isn't all GOA's fault so please don't take it that way but you must see how frustrating it is for us, the only thing you guys can do to make things better is have the courage to tell us how it is warts and all even if that means big delays, at least we know what the problem is and roughly how long we can expect to wait before the problem is resolved. Yes some people will whine but the vast majority of us will just be happy to be informed and aware.