GOA general discussion

[Monkee*]

i havent been playing soo long, and have never really needed to get any support...

so i dont really have anything to back up a yes or a no to this arguement. So a "i'm not sure" is fine for me

 

[svartmetall]

..."Primordial Exploding Troll"? Do tell

 

[Aarweenie]

are they capable of running the servers?

well... it's a question of defenition imo... the servers are up most of the time... so in that point of view they are doing a good job running the servers...


but... there service isn't just the servers... they have a customersupport that you'll be happy if you get a answer... and the answer often seams to be "Sorry, but we can't help you"

when the servers go down we often get no info at all... the info we get is a time... like "The servers should be up and running by 14:00cet" as an example... then when we look at the time and see 21:00cet and the servers isn't up... we got no word at all from GOA about it... how long they will be down... if people are working on it... if something else is happening...

wouldn't take to much for Kemor and/or Zargar to post some info here on BW if servers go down... last night I knew many people were worried that their passwords would be emailed to annother email that they don't have anymore...


so... what my point is that they can keep their servers up and running... what they don't know that much about is how to provide a feeling of service and security among their customers...

 

[ilias]

Before reply no u should try to play Ultima online or Diablo 2 ...then come back and talk about about lag and server instability.
I have friends who played UO for many years (3-4) and want to come to DAOC for one reason only(ofc game rocks imho) ITS LAG FREE !!!
Dont think i know any other game played from Greece on both 64k isdn and 56k modem that is so smooth.
Everyone who played Diablo will know what i am talking about...

So my vote goes to 'YES' and well done whoever u guys are in GOA.

 

[Monkee*]

but diablo and diablo 2 is kinda different is it not? As a player actually hosts their own server do they not? so it depends on that one persons connection!?!?

or am i talking complete bollocks?

 

[Whoodoo_RD]

I voted yes. Im sure any other company would have endured the same issues we have seen here, in fact worse. Some here have compared this game's servers to games like CS, news flash, theres a little difference between 16 ppl on a small map and 400 ppl in one clip zone, let alone 3000 ppl playing the whole server.

GOA do not get all the profit from the game. They are also liable to Wanadoo, the ISP who look atfer their connection, and also I would imagine to Mythic who probably treat the Euro servers more as a franchise. Hence they cannot afford the customer relation opperatives that the US can.

From what I have seen and heard, each server has its own CSR, just one though. The US has the money and resources to provide several per server. Other departments in the US all have their own ppl, where on Euro, one man does several jobs, from CSR to bug fixing to making the daily croisants warm.

In the near 2 years (including beta) I have played, I can really only account for about 4 whole days in lost play time. Out of around 540 days played since Euro opened its doors for business, i dont consider that too bad tbh.

A lot of the time GOA were not even to blame, other things that have hamperd the game include DoS attacks, poor code from Mythic, Internet related problems (like when France telecomm had severe problems) or just lack of funding for new kit.

Rightnow is really their only big problem, but rather than complain about it, why not come up with some sensible suggestions. Oh, and on that note, consider reading 500+ emails a day from your server alone maoning that their char stubbed his toe, sorry to say it but some of the issues getting raised on rightnow are probably as sad as that.

Have a heart eh.

 

[lothlorion]

Well i voted yes but there is a BIG BUT!
Genrealy ive enjoyed my time playing this game, servers have been up 99% of the time and the only time i had to use customer support i was answerd in 24 hours.
BUT....... as many peolpe have already stated this is not the case for everyone..... i have 3 accounts and just got my 3rd password through and thank god thay all work ok, but it does saden me to veiw the boreds to see people being sent wrong PWs ect, that must be so frustrating
No one, not even GOA can claim this to be a small hitch,and just a few lines on the home page that hasent been updated now for some 15 hours is imo lazy and quite rude tbh..... and kemor where the hell was he???? when we wanted some answers?

anyway as i said i voted yes but tbh my vote was and will continue to be on a knifes edge.

come on goa just give a little to the people that pay your wages...

 

[ilias]

Yeap u are correct ..Diablo 2 was using Client - Server model
But that didnt make any difference lag wise...
Diablo 1 and 2 where both lagging like hell most of the times...

 

[Molten Lava]

They seem

No, They seem to be capable to run GERMAN and FRENCH servers....they cannot seem te be arsed to support the (smaller) English player-base...

1. Info about important things like the recent crashes appears on the day itself on the German and French page...they take up to a week to put something on the English page

2. French/German get in-game support. English servers dont

3. French/German-servers were updated weeks before the English one. We had to wait a few months to get our own Bi-Gayon servers...

4. French/German XML has been working (better) than the English one for ages now.

5. French/German servers get much more ingame events (remember mids playing soccer, duel arena's etc)

6. Friday news???

All in all the company doesnt seem to care about the english players and dont 'deserve' to cash-farm us

 

[Monkee*]

hehe think u pushed the wrong "quote" buttong there ilias

anyway as for my previous comment about not really being able to have a say as i havent really been playing the game very long. I must agree with lothlorion, althought i have never really had to use the customer support myself, others have and have not been very successful. Another thing is i think they could at least tell us what is going on, and give some ppl some answers. After all, not saying anything and looking as though you are ignoring the customer, is what makes those ppl hate the company...

 

[Lanfaer]

One of the reasons I believe that they shouldnt handle daoc here in europe is the following, how can they possibly justify that it should take up to 24hrs for all players to get their new passwords?

Let's assume that they've got a program generating password randomly, assigning the password to a user in a database, extracting that users email and sends the mail to the user.

Some number crunching and we come up with ~36000 mails per hour, and if they're using an uptodate database-system (sql or similar) then the process of fetching 10 users per second fro mthat database and updating them shouldn't be a problem. The random generator shouldn't be a big setback, since it's an 8-9digit code with standardchars. So assuming that they're using a cluster of machines doing this then we should all have our new mails within an hour, but them geniouses at GOA has probably put some poor apprentice doing it manually

One argument against my argument could be "but hey, what if they don't have that kind of a program?", and the answer would then be, how fkin hard can it be for a multinational corp like GOA to get their filthy hands on a programmer who can give them this program within the hour?

 

[ilias]

Originally posted by Monkee*
hehe think u pushed the wrong "quote" buttong there ilias

anyway as for my previous comment about not really being able to have a say as i havent really been playing the game very long. I must agree with lothlorion, althought i have never really had to use the customer support myself, others have and have not been very successful. Another thing is i think they could at least tell us what is going on, and give some ppl some answers. After all, not saying anything and looking as though you are ignoring the customer, is what makes those ppl hate the company...

hehe indeed i have "quoted" myself..lol corrected now...
On topic i have used rightnow 3 times so far and the time frame was 8 hours max...
I dont say there is no space for improvment in GOA but i am sure they are doing the best they can with what they got...
Otoh i am considering myself kinda "soft" in many issues so i might be wrong in the "communicate with customers" topic.

 

[svartmetall]

Re: They seem

Originally posted by Molten Lava

2. French/German get in-game support. English servers dont

WHAT?!?

Is this true? Because if it is, then that's appalling.

 

[Monkee*]

the english servers r meant to arent they, tis a quick /advisors command and it brings up a list of players who r in game support boffs. Problem is the list is always empty

 

[Whoodoo_RD]

Re: They seem

Originally posted by Molten Lava
2. French/German get in-game support. English servers dont

Is this true? If so Im with Svart on that!

3. French/German-servers were updated weeks before the English one. We had to wait a few months to get our own Bi-Gayon servers...

True, and I agree that was quite appauling

4. French/German XML has been working (better) than the English one for ages now.

Never looked, but again is this the case?

5. French/German servers get much more ingame events (remember mids playing soccer, duel arena's etc)

Everytime someone here has posted an interest in doing something of this nature, we have had it. For example Midstock 2002, and the Hibs had a poetry reading thing too, with support from Kemor and Zargar. I did offer to try another Midstock, but I got hardly any replies! Sometimes yu get out what you put in. GOA did and will do all to help if you onyl ask.

 

[ghoul]

I think they do a good job, i've never had any real problems with them, and I dare any of you whiners to do a better job, dont tell me you can, go and prove it instead.

 

[Whoodoo_RD]

Originally posted by Monkee*
the english servers r meant to arent they, tis a quick /advisors command and it brings up a list of players who r in game support boffs. Problem is the list is always empty

Maybe true for other realms / servers, but never for Mid Excal

However, we are not CSR's, purely advisors for gaming issues and general advice.

 

[halgaard]

i voted NO

I have played mmorg games for 5 years now, starting with ultima online, Darkage on the US servers and now Darkage on europe.

as said above, ultima online had some issues about server stability, but the ingame support was outstanding imo.

how GOA ever got an agreement to "share" this game with mythic i do not understand. This company have no idea what customer service is. If you want to run a mmorg game hosting 26000 people, you better be more than ready to support those people. /appeal ingame doesnt work. Rightnow is a braindead customer service imo!! you log in, then you have to click on a random question before you even get the option of sending a message to the goa support staff, THEN you have to wait for multiple days for an answer. I can tell you first hand it is NOT funny getting stuck ingame and have to wait 5 days before they even reply ( done that, tried that )

Patching. the fact that we, on the english servers have to wait 3-4 months for goa to translate the US patches is braindead aswell. English server = copy/paste mythic patch. Why do WE have to wait for so long on a translation we wont ever use?

as i mentioned above, i have played on the US servers aswell and the customer service there is great. You have a problem, you just /appeal and within an hour or two you get a reply from a CSR. If you have a lets say billing question you make an email to the support email and get a reply within a few hours..

Goa is incompetent imo and should never have been given the control they have over a mmorg game.

The way they are handling the current situation shows there lack of capablity aswell. If you openly say to your 26000 paying customers that the security is breached ( yes i know this is not confirmed, but everyone suspect it ) the customers WILL loose faith in the companys security and trust will be lost.

as specialdave said, if they indeed makes approx £2.5m per annum, i would very much like to read the license agreement between mythic and goa, since the service we get here on the English version of darkage, aint worth jack.

Stability of the servers are up most of the time, and I am not complaining about this part, but when we look at the amount of money they get pr. annum, it would be Very strange if they couldnt afford some decent servers to host this game.

my 2cent why i voted NO

 

[Breni]

Originally posted by svartmetall
..."Primordial Exploding Troll"? Do tell

My level 34 (Class Rank: Primordial) Exploding Troll is available for minor SC jobs, being as everyone seems to want 1100+ spellcrafters. I've managed 4pt OC with him several times now, and he only has ~730 Evocation.

Back on topic:

I have never heard of the localised servers having in-game CSR, but if it's true, it's another case of Goa showing that they favour their continental customers over we island-dwelling types (this is expanded to include anyone that plays on Excalibur and Prydwen in this instance )

 

[Belsameth]

Originally posted by granny
GOA are certainly capable of running the servers, no question there. However the mmorpg market is turning into a highly competetive one and I think GOA would be well advised to seriously consider how they are perceived by their customers.

Poor service, subscribers feeling alienated and unsafe... these are the kind of things that lead to us going elsewhere :/

well said. tho GOA is not nearly as bad as most of you seem to think. It is time they hired a more active comunity manager tho, or whip Kemor and Zargar into being more forthcomming.

besides that, someone mentioned his favorite Q3 servers where always up: running a Q3 server from home, for 32 players is slightly different from running a bunch of server clusters in 3 different language, each populated by a few thousant people

 

[Bleri McThrust]

Voted yes ..... almost voted maybe. If it hadnt been for the last 5 days I would have never considered a maybe

Ive played other games and apart from the fact that there is no in-game support of any kind Ive found there out-game customer support fine. Servers are stable and up

Why did I almost vote maybe ?

Well it was last week that the situation arose and despite our pleas for information and assurances no one came forward to speak. In fact we managed to get more of out pooe Sanya than GoA

The way they handled the situation made it a bigger, worse situation than it needed to be IMO. To put it all into perspective though, I've seen worse Customer support and worse instances of In-Game security breaches. Lets hope this can be put behind us and that theres no long term lasting damage.

 

[thegreatest]

Yes, they are 'capable' of running the servers...Its not the servers thats the problem, they need to improve their custommer support...The servers are fine most of the time, with very little downtime...But once it goes wrong (like now), it goes really wrong. They are not capable to fix a problem in a short time, without cousing more problems. 50% of the people now have a bigger problem because 1. they have an old emailadress in their profile, 2. they got there password but its not working ...

 

[eziliafreda]

from my point of view (as a new sub, bought game 6 days ago)
i can´t say anything about the game servers because i´m not able to play the game at all, but i can say st about the CS:
it does not exist !!!!!!!
Imagine a person who is fairly new to the MMORPG stuff
I installed the game and wanted to activate my free month
and play but WOOT the servers are down.
Next thing i found out was that the only way to contact the CS
is down too.
i checked official site for info --> nothing

Now 6 days later and nothing has changed.
Services down, no clear info (eta for reg servers or st)
still not able to contact CS.

Reading thru several boards makes me even more depressed
cause i coudn´t get more infos but had to realize that there are nice things like buffbots or hacks like odins eye in the game
and that i shouldn´t expect a lot of roleplaying.

I think this is the worst start in a mmorpg u can inmagine
and im very disappointed about things are done by the officals

 

[GReaper]

Most of the time, its generally a decent service if you don't need any support or whatever. The uptime of the servers is generally great.

However!

Far too many disasters and bad points really give GOA a bad reputation. First patch day (1.45), took ages to sort and a few days later we got a rollback. Shrouded Isles patch day, took all day to patch and many people were unable to register the patch because of the slow website. Security problems yesterday and yet another entire day ruined in the history of their service. I don't mind downtime, however various days have had people unable to play the game. I can accept that there will be downtime involved, but something always screws things up on the important patch days.

The ongoing problems with patch 1.62 still exist. We still lack sounds ingame from many things. Are these going to be fixed sometime soon? It's a minor annoyance if the problem is there for a few days, however its awful to see that this problem hasn't been sorted for weeks now. Before 1.62 it was the ongoing XML problems which could never be fixed. Are we paying for a second rate service?

Support is awful. Still reminds me of when I got stuck in Camelot back in March 2002. Took 3 days to sort that issue out due to the lack of weekend support. This is a typical high priority issue which takes 2 minutes to sort at the most, why did it take days to even acknowledge such a problem? RightNow was disabled for days during the Shrouded Isles patch and is also disabled now. Is this acceptable for support for a service?

Communication needs improving badly. Most of the news we get is usually restricted to the Friday news once a week, which we haven't had for the past 2 weeks. We still don't have any updated news on the current problems.

I'll continue to play DAoC from GOA as it would be pointless switching now. However would you ever play another game hosted by GOA? I certainly wouldn't.

 

[~INCOGNITO~]

Lose count how lng i been playing. Well over a year and well to be honest ive only once not been able to play when i wanted to & ive had no other problems.

Not a great time for a poll like this though.

Edit: Oh didnt want to play for the last two days so none of thishack malarky has affected me.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

I've abstained from voting because my answer is mixed (and yes, he's rambling again, get the coffee out )

I think GOA do a good job of mainting their servers. I haven't had much in the way of technical problems because I can sort most of them myself, so possibly I'm not a good example of someone who needs much customer service. Very little server downtime, very few problems. There have been a few unacknowledges glitches, around Christmas where I was positive the problems lay with the GOA network but shortly afterwards they upgraded anyway and the problems went away.

The few times I have had to contact them I have had a prompt response and when things like alliance issues needed sorted they got done very fast.

A lot of peeps like to flame Kemor and co, but here again I've only got good feedback to give. Not many may know that on the last relic campaign I got in touch with GOA via Kemor ahead of the raids to warn that the server may be stressed with a lot of Mids hitting the Alb frontier on Pryd. He got their techies to make sure there were no glitches and monitor things closely as the server population grew in the affected zones that weekend.

Its often unsung, but this type of feedback and response is a very high quality - I don't think you could ask for better and I bet even Mythic would struggle to achieve this.

And now the not so good bit...

I do not think GOA should be running the English servers for while they do a good job of what they do, its not actually in the best interest of the players on the English servers. The English servers should be maintained directly by Mythic, partly because we are not given as much variety of realms to play than our European cousins and partly because in general, there do seem to be more and better feedback on the DAoC homepages for users of those servers. I've lost track of the number of threads appearing here from those servers and someone has to translate for us so we know something has been going on.

GOA quite rightly focus their resources where the players are and that is the French and German servers. The number of servers for each language is the evidence. (It would be interesting to see just how many accounts on the US servers are owned by European English speaking players - I know several players myself that just upped and moved to the US servers.)
The downside of this focus is English players believing they have a raw deal. There isn't the population to support an extra server, but this problem would be eliminated if the English servers were maintained by Mythic along with their other servers.

You'll note I don't include the delays on patching as a valid reason for Mythic maintaining servers, and at the risk of falling out with my fellow players, its just impatience and jealousy that makes people want to get what they see across the pond instantly. Because GOA have to make sure all the servers they support are consistent with each other I think the patching rate is not too bad.

 

[Tilda]

Re: Re: They seem

Originally posted by Whoodoo_RD

Is this true? If so Im with Svart on that!
[/B]
True, and I agree that was quite appauling
[/B]
Never looked, but again is this the case?
[/B]
Everytime someone here has posted an interest in doing something of this nature, we have had it. For example Midstock 2002, and the Hibs had a poetry reading thing too, with support from Kemor and Zargar. I did offer to try another Midstock, but I got hardly any replies! Sometimes yu get out what you put in. GOA did and will do all to help if you onyl ask. [/B]

I think your over reacting.

They support events equally, alb has had dueling competitions and a fair.

THey upgrade on a need basis. prydwen hasnt been upgraded but then it dosnt need to be. FYI we acctually have better servers on excal than they do on all of the US servers.
I dont know about the ingame CSR's on german and french servers, if it is true, i would presume that its due to them having more paying customers and so its acctualy financially possible to pay CSR's.

 

[chutney]

my vote was yes, based on personal exp, needed rightnow bout 4 times each time got a speedy reply, got my new pw last nite, downtime on the servers is quite good i think

 

[Stormm]

again. this question makes GOA seem like they are doing okay when really we all know that its the feedback/communication from them which is the real problem.

and the main reason people are getting pissed about it

 

[Driwen]

Re: Re: Re: They seem

Originally posted by Tilda
I dont know about the ingame CSR's on german and french servers, if it is true, i would presume that its due to them having more paying customers and so its acctualy financially possible to pay CSR's.

IF (which i highly doubt) the french have in game support it s appaling, but it most likely is just some GM who came into the game to talk to someone and fix something. Which happens here on the english servers aswell.