Repost: GOA as Daoc service provider

[Marc]

ya rly, I suppose if your car broke down I could laugh at you because you can just walk instead! You grow more retarded with every post I see you make :/

We're paying for a service, which many (over 60%) feel is substandard, and that gives us a right to complain. Personally, I feel their handling of the corrupted prydwen database was (still is) apalling, but otherwise it's alright - some support at weekends would be nice however.

And if my car broke down would i start spitting all over my monitor by writing "omg ford suxxor" on the top gear website? No ofc not. Shit happens. I think GOA do a sterling job considering 90% of the customer base are whining children.

 

[Chronictank]

And if my car broke down would i start spitting all over my monitor by writing "omg ford suxxor" on the top gear website? No ofc not. Shit happens. I think GOA do a sterling job considering 90% of the customer base are whining children.

The car is not a service is it...
if your car broke down and the breakdown service
1) tried to convince you your car hasnt actually broke down but your imagining it
2) Blamed those damn roads, the cars not broken its a problem with the road your on
3) ignore you for a few hours
4) take 3 weeks to arrive
im sure you wouldnt complain, after all they are doing a sterling job and your one of the 90% of the customer base who are whining

 

[scorge]

The car is not a service is it...
if your car broke down and the breakdown service
1) tried to convince you your car hasnt actually broke down but your imagining it
2) Blamed those damn roads, the cars not broken its a problem with the road your on
3) ignore you for a few hours
4) take 3 weeks to arrive
im sure you wouldnt complain, after all they are doing a sterling job and your one of the 90% of the customer base who are whining

you missed the classic support line of

5) have your tried turning it off and on

 

[Flimgoblin]

My main gripes with goa are that they refuse to believe something is wrong until they get a large number of complaints and people start yelling. Rightnow was supposed to allow every case to be investigated, not make it easier to ignore the users as you dont have to talk to them.

Can see partly why they do this...

"I crash on login" is _usually_ caused by bad drivers. If everyone starts getting it though then it's something different.

"I can't connect to the server" - that's caused by your home network being odd, or your ISP being dodgy. If lots of people have that problem it's something different.

"I keep going LD" - the number of people just in my guild who's LD problems have vanished when they actually followed the instructions to upgrade their network card drivers and turn off any silly checksum options is really quite impressive. Of course if _everyone_ starts going LD lots (and not just on release/porting when there's people around) it's something different.

Technical support works by eliminating the obvious problems and then going on to the not so obvious. Unfortunately an obvious problem of "OT is borked" isn't really something you can fix (and the real problem is something non-obvious hidden within another company's network).

I see a lot of people get very angry at being asked the "well is your monitor switched on?" type questions - but the tech support don't know you from adam so they have to cover the bases.

 

[Eeben]

Shit happens. I think GOA do a sterling job considering 90% of the customer base are whining children.

yes shit happens but not 5 times every month? I bet ppl would not whine if it maybe happent once every 3 month ..

If i had a car that broke down 5 times a month i would get abit pist an demand my money refoundet but guess that just me

 

[Flimgoblin]

The car is not a service is it...
if your car broke down and the breakdown service
1) tried to convince you your car hasnt actually broke down but your imagining it
2) Blamed those damn roads, the cars not broken its a problem with the road your on
3) ignore you for a few hours
4) take 3 weeks to arrive
im sure you wouldnt complain, after all they are doing a sterling job and your one of the 90% of the customer base who are whining

If your car broke down and you phoned up ford to complain they'd ask things like "is the key in the ignition" "is there petrol in the tank" before sending round an engineer

not the best metaphor.

If you phoned up the local road maintenance board and said "it's all very bumpy around here" they might ask if you've checked your tires before sending out a pothole-filling team (or if your in edinburgh a pothole-deepening team...)

 

[Chronictank]

If your car broke down and you phoned up ford to complain they'd ask things like "is the key in the ignition" "is there petrol in the tank" before sending round an engineer

not the best metaphor.

If you phoned up the local road maintenance board and said "it's all very bumpy around here" they might ask if you've checked your tires before sending out a pothole-filling team (or if your in edinburgh a pothole-deepening team...)

was just illustrating a car was a silly metaphor as we are paying for a service not a product, ultimately we dont actually "own" anything aside from the Game discs and arguably the cd keys

 

[Fafner]

Would love it if they moved location of their servers somewhere else

 

[occy]

If goa was illustrated as Ford they would be making Christmas cards by now.

 

[Samaroon EatsCheese]

Really unhappy - they suxxor

 

[Herjulf]

Yeah, it seems as they dont put any effort in to solve the problems.
Atleast they dont SHOW they do any effort.
no reporting on the webpage, what we see there is some, hey look at my right hand magic trick.

XML been down.. 6months(?)
Lag since patchday to current.

And aww i feel sorry for GOA carebears GOA AWAY. (tihi i made a funny)

 

[DrunkSkunk]

i love goa

ps gm's, give free month now as promised

 

[rvn]

completely worthless, and they are the sole reason i dont play daoc anymore, (primetime sucks in us servers), and eu servers have to much problems with goa running them (slow patches, server open transit lagg, chars loosing all their equipment, and several other incidents)

 

[Kathal]

There is only one thing I can I can put my finger on when it comes to the service and that is . . . .

 

[Lorfo]

they still haven't fixed dpsdebuff/bd body debuff.

 

[RS|Phil]

I put that they suxxor.

Granted, they're fine 99% of the time but I'm of the belief that the 99% of the time it's fine should be taken for granted by us, and that the 1% of the time where they either excel, or are cock, should determine my opinion.

Crises are okay, they happen and it can't be helped. It's how they handle said crises that is a determining factor in my opinion of them. As it stands, I can't recall a time I've been impressed by the way they've handled a problem. Hell, it's normally a week later before they even admit there is a problem. Lately, they've been a bit quicker but this new situation is reaffirming my original beliefs that they SUX

 

[Mnexxiz]

Not too bothered with patches - after all they come.

But the customer service is bothering me. Sure, there are idiots out there who can't find the <any> key on their keyboard and whine about it. And who can't follow the 11th command (which didn't fit on the stone tables) : He who can read shall be happy.

But that still leaves a lot of communication open. I have a look on Mythic's website and see problems being noted and resolved. I miss that on GOA's website.

It's mainly the communication issue that is at heart of all the problems. Sure, if they don't know for sure the key phrase is "We investigate...". If there is no clue the phrase is "We have a reported issue of...".
There are ways to communicate with paying customers without giving yourself away. Ignoring problems and hoping that they go away on their own is not the right way of doing business.

Server uptime btw is not a real statistic. Customer satisfaction is. Customers are satisified if they whine about non-critical issues.
Or to make the metaphor with the car: Your car might be running fine but there are no roads to drive on. Sure, everything is fine but you never arrive where you want to be.

 

[Jai13]

can i change my vote?? i voted neutral cos i had lag but nothin like ive got now and want to put they suxxor

 

[LawBringer]

Well we have a CoC - a set of rules we must abide by, what we need is a Customer Charter, rules on looking after us and what we should expect. An update atleast every 72hrs until a problem is resolved would be nice. Even if they have no new info - a "Still working on the problem" every now and then cost nowt and goes a long way to let ppl know the dam thing is still being looked in to

 

[Maoni]

European players pay monthly to GOA for a working game not to Mythic, so we claim to GOA and GOA should claim to Mythic, thats the way it is.

Dont care if problem is with Mythic code or GOA's routers or whatever, thats to be solved between them.

Players pay for a service that it is not working very well. We can't stay still and quiet

well said!

 

[Everz]

They suck, nuff said

 

[Flimgoblin]

Well we have a CoC - a set of rules we must abide by, what we need is a Customer Charter, rules on looking after us and what we should expect. An update atleast every 72hrs until a problem is resolved would be nice. Even if they have no new info - a "Still working on the problem" every now and then cost nowt and goes a long way to let ppl know the dam thing is still being looked in to

Unfortunately if they did that you'd have people whining that they post nothing of use. Would be different people whining I'm sure

the GMs keep us updated a lot more than they used to yet it just has people whining at the GMs (see recent prydwen.net rubbish - GM's getting abuse for daring to actually try and explain things to people)

They do tend to acknowledge there's a problem on the news a lot quicker these days when there is one.

 

[RS|Phil]

Unfortunately if they did that you'd have people whining that they post nothing of use. Would be different people whining I'm sure

the GMs keep us updated a lot more than they used to yet it just has people whining at the GMs (see recent prydwen.net rubbish - GM's getting abuse for daring to actually try and explain things to people)

Then they should just issue regular statements instead getting involved in debates. Debates lead to discussions, discussions lead to whines, whines lead to anger. The dark side are they!

 

[Herjulf]

What the heck are ppl defending here?
And how can ppl justify defending em? hoping brownose will get em ITAMS?
Gifv itams mine are ghey....

After last night trying to exp some characters, really got me so pissed. its getting hard to justify playing/paying.

5-10-2005 was the day the lag started, THE DAY.

Since that day i havent been able to safely do a artifact encounter, hardly been able to RvR with a melee character due to out of view errors, LD´s.
crushed a keyboard.

And i see what to me are the most incompetent company in europe write this:

Some players have been experiencing latency issues these last few days.

And this is crap they spew out, they have NO idea or dont CARE.

Its been like this for a couple of months. not a few days.

I work with networks, if stuff like this occur, i get a trouble ticket in. I have according to the contract 8 Hours, 8 friggin hours on me to locate the error and replace the faulty part.
Or my divisionpays penalty´s.

So when people says GOA and Wanadoo isnt the same company, they must be abusing the ganj.

They have to have some sort of contract on solving a fault if they are separate companies.
Something tells me this is the old monopoly situation.

Infact you can quite often hear the jargon when you speak to monopoly organisations customer service.
standard replies are "If our technician find no problem, you will have to pay for the service, do you want us to send a technician?" "have you checked your Direct-X version"
Or their customer service is automated, you never get to know what stage your reported error is in. they say it is fixed. but when you get home it still isnt fixed.

If Goa truelly is a separate company from Wanadoo, they should seriously consider relocating their serverpark.
If no valid options exist in france, look for other countries, EU etc free cross border movement of capital/companies.
If it actually is Wanadoo network that is the big cause of the problem.

Im in a pretty fucked up situation atm i really want to pause my daoc gaming because of this lag.
But kinda tied up with my work trying to get a set rvr grp going.
Hard to exp up group characters with this lag, and you end each gaming session pissed off.

 

[Flimgoblin]

I've only had lag the past week, so just because _your_ lag started in october doesn't mean everyone elses did.

Have you tried checking if your ISP has problems or if your computer has other problems?

 

[Ferengi]

Voted sucky.. Lagging getting worse.. and i was one of the peeps out for 4 days not being able to login.
The fixing of the problem was ok if not fast then ok, but plz GOA try and come out with an xplanation what it was. It does not become u to stay silent. I for one am gonna leave if it happens again Without an xplanation

 

[Boni]

My impression is getting worse each time we are asked for pingplots.

I expect GOA to be able to diagnose why 90%+ of their users are having lag without making them all run pingplots. When the entire server lags I expect GOA to be able to say 'you are currently experiencing lag due to opentransit routers and we are doing all we can to pester opentransit and correct the problem, no need to send pingplots we know what the problem is'. They should be ontop of this even if it means they run traceroutes out and back into their paris servers 24/7, its just not on to rely on paid users to diagnose problems with the french internet infastructure.

Somehow I just cant see Blizard or Sony making their euro users run pingplots when SWG or WoW has problems that affect more than 50% of the population.

 

[LawBringer]

Well decided to take the plunge - subs cancelled d/l US free trial - 14 days to give it a go. You never know GoA might have it fixed by then or maybe I will enjoy US and not come back.

Cya around.

 

[Omega]

SORT THE LAG OUT GOA FFS!!!!!!!!!

 

[Celestino]

@ Flim: If customers would whine about "goa telling nothing new in statements" everything would be fine ... we could stand those "drama queens" (per your definition) but "goa telling nothing at all" is something that annoys even the non "drama queens" and should be fixed...

I've started on a german server as thats my first language, translation was poor, massive spelling errors were the good part of it, most monsters turned up with names like "kasdfhkjsdfahaksjdfhasdkfjhaskldjfhsdajklfhasdkfjhsdkfjh" 90% of the quests did not work due to the keywords beeing not translated.
We had to guess the right english keyword to get about 70% of the quests work, some were totally broken so not even the english keywords worked.
This kept up for a long time and they've finally managed to translate all the stuff.
When camlann was released i switched over and stayed there till wow, support was never a problem, as there were none.
I would have loved to whine about gms not banning ppl in walls or above houses u can only reach with lagjumps or the /craft <realm> bug but there were no GMs at all. We had to live with the fact that bugusing and cheating was done endless times per day...
There were a shitload of pvpserver related bugs like beeing able to target rams from the inside of a keep to the gate so the enemy was unable to aim their owns.
Ofc mythic was to blame for the bugs, but its goa responsibility to ban abusers
I've once sent in a bug report for the ram issue, and was told that this ofc was a serious issue and they would put news up about it next friday so ppl know its a bug and stop using it. With that reply my question was set to resolved... i've never seen those news
Worst thing were rpsfarmers, ppl u've never heard of, lowlvl, going up 500k rps /week (was a lot at that time). Finding a grp of 15 lvl 50 standing naked in row infront of a bindstone with a twink farming them every 5 min.... Meeting rr7 shadowblades without equipment that are instakills for a mincer
One time some of the farmers were banned just to be back on other chars, this time turning off rps webdisplay...
I moved to wow and soom came back to daoc playing rvr again, up to now i needed to question right now 3 times (for example artefact theft after pulling the mob and lost items due to server crash;not pryd), and it always included about a week of sending replies back and forth... They even set one of my questions to solved without notification and i had to reply to be answered that they "mixed up" the threads

Not saying that everything is goas fault, but goa is one of those companies that shows a certain disrespect to its customers knowing that they have no alternative and thats the real problem.

Even those few ppl who defend goa on some account got to ack that point.
I don't care if there is a lag problem, but i want to see them trying to fix it as it annoys me, a paying customer, and thats where goa failed and still fails.

I've voted Really unhappy as they've already improved their service (i've seen some more bans on camlann now as well) but there is still a lot to improve