Servers Dead?

[Breon]

Gone link dead twice now in 5 mins.

From the posts on BW looks like its not just pryd thats having problems

 

[Gromnir]

servers are still running but the population have dropped to early afternoon level.

Since its not everybody, there is a good chance that is not GOA but an ISP (opentransit) that has fucked up.

 

[Deadnala]

It was goa after all.
Excalibur still down

 

[the_hermit]

aye, still down now..... no doubt they are standing looking at the mini-tower case wondering what is wrong with it...

"Zee server iz fukked."

EDIT: Just realised it's Sunday - let's hope they are up and working on it, despite the lack of news on the webpage!

 

[Phixion]

I am guessing the servers won't be back til Monday...

 

[York]

aye, still down now..... no doubt they are standing looking at the mini-tower case wondering what is wrong with it...

It could be that the screws at the back are too tight.

 

[the_hermit]

It could be that the screws at the back are too tight.

Work-Experiance Tea Boy tripped over the wire marked "EXCAL - IF UNPLUGGED, REPLACE WITHIN 48HRS (GIVE OR TAKE 24HRS)"

That or one of the trained monkeys is using a GameBoy Emulator to play Super Mario

 

[Thorarin]

It was goa after all.
Excalibur still down

It was Opentransit originally..
Perhaps all the relogging because of the LDs was part of the reason the Excalibur lobby server has crashed (the zone-servers were still running normally as I understand it).

 

[Omtara]

Albions were about to take back the relics stolen from them the night before so the Mids cast a greater link death spell. we will have our revenge on the evil little trickters

 

[Marczje]

tbh u wouldnt have taken the relics, not with so many waiting at mjoll, tho sure could have been a great fight

sm parked at mjoll atm ^^

 

[Job]

Hey us Hibbies were ready too, don't know how many exactly, but my framerate was 1 a min, woulda been a great scrap.

 

[Czaedes]

Aye was looking forward to a big 'ol fight as well. Shame this happened last night tbh.

I don't know, but I think the least we could expect from GOA is to appology for the recent server probs if they can't give us any news about the 24+ hour downtime just yet.

It really makes me worried though that they aren't posting any news on their site. Either they are just lacking greatly in their communication with the playerbase, or they actually haven't found out what the problem is. And if they haven't even found out what the problem is after 24h I'm really starting to question the competence of those Admins they got over there :/

Czae

 

[Archeon]

Make DAoC a 2d side-scrolling platform game!!!!! That way the super-bisexual-xionis-telemarketting-flib-flab-floogly servers won't crash. EVER!!!!

As an added bonus they could probably run five clients off the same server, so we could have as many as 10 english speaking servers with normal playset rules... Oh, and Ingame CS because the only problem would be that you can't see yourself admid all the other 16-bit characters!


Damn i'm so clever, why didn't i think of this before? 2D DAoC fortehwin

 

[BlitheringIdiot]

Make DAoC a 2d side-scrolling platform game!!!!! That way the super-bisexual-xionis-telemarketting-flib-flab-floogly servers won't crash. EVER!!!!

Im beginning to think that maybe, just maybe you made that technical server name up, it had the word Macintosh in it last time.

 

[Shroomz]

Also no response to my Rightnow entry regarding the Excal server problem, being down is one thing, but I cant go on Pryd cos I get the Account already logged on jobby


Fix it or I send the boys round - just give me your address

 

[Svartmetall]

Also no response to my Rightnow entry regarding the Excal server problem, being down is one thing, but I cant go on Pryd cos I get the Account already logged on jobby


Fix it or I send the boys round - just give me your address

I'm airmailing a hardcopy of a formal letter of complaint to Mythic HQ tomorrow...I've just about f**king had enough of GOA and their endless second-rate incompetence.

 

[Twisted]

Well its all probably quite simple .... its the weekend 2 days after New Year ... GOA team are still probably nursing HUGE hangovers .. thats assuming they have even sobered up. No other business i know is up and running to speed at this time of year .. so its VERY unlikely GOA will be either.

Id imagine there hasnt been anyone in the office since New Years Eve ... however we do pay them for a 24/7 service and they dont deliver ... the only way Mythic is going to care is if we all just walk out of the game .. and therefore hit their profits.

Twisted

 

[Teh FnoRd]

I'm airmailing a hardcopy of a formal letter of complaint to Mythic HQ tomorrow...I've just about f**king had enough of GOA and their endless second-rate incompetence.

Please share. Maybe if a big part of the comunity sent the same hardcopy mail, they might (I know it's a longshot but hey) understand that this crap service doesn't hold.... :touch:

 

[Svartmetall]

Here's the main text. To make it formal, add your own address at the top right of the letter...

"Dear Mythic,

I am writing to you as a dedicated Dark Age Of Camelot player from England, to complain in the strongest possible terms about GOA, the company entrusted with the game in Europe.

Last night, the Excalibur server crashed. Again. It is now over 24 hours later and there has been no progress in getting the server back up, no news on the GOA official site, no posts from GOA staff on the semi-official European DAOC forums…nothing. No evidence that GOA are even aware of the problem, let alone trying to work on it.

This crash by itself would not be so significant but it is, sadly, symptomatic of the greater problems faced all the time by those of us lumbered with GOA as providers of the game, and many of us have simply gotten to the point where we cannot bear the way the game we love is being (mis)treated any more…here follows a brief resumé of Life With GOA.


1: Frequent server outages with no news or announcements to us, the paying customers.

2: No customer service in-game. We in Europe always find it deeply amusing to see U.S. players complaining about having to wait all of 12 hours - gasp! – for a CSR to get back to them. They live in a land of milk and honey compared to European DAOC players, who have no chance of such support at all, while paying the same amount of money in subscriptions.

3: No customer service at all, in fact – GOA fob us off with something called ‘RightNow’, which generally involves using an online form to outline your problem and then never hearing from them again. Ever. A brief skim of any European DAOC forum will at almost any time find numerous posts by irate players infuriated by a continuing silence from GOA’s so-called ‘customer support’ tool. Those lucky enough to get any response at all receive, as often as not, a copy/pasted form response with no evidence of attention to the problem cited in the original enquiry.

4: Subscription server problems are endemic here in Europe.

5: Frequently poor translation of the game into English by GOA in each new patch. This is inexcusable, given that the game was written in English in the first place. Also the delay in getting new patches and expansions here in Europe is huge, and a source of constant frustration to players here.

6: Servers are lag-ridden at all times, almost unbearably so in any densely-populated areas (housing zones and capital towns are appalling), and link-deaths/mass link-deaths are a common occurrence even after GOA assure us the servers are fine and have been upgraded. Zone crashes are still a common occurrence here, too.

7: The infamous ‘hacking’ incident of August 2003, where somehow GM tools were appropriated and servers hacked. The way GOA handled this was atrocious, with no word at all to us, the paying customers, for weeks on end - no effort was made to communicate with the playerbase at all. We were left totally uninformed about what was happening, and with no way to contact the company who were still happy to take our money for a service we weren’t getting.

8: GOA’s official website is also deeply unsatisfactory – their XML goes without being updated for months at a time, their news is limited to a paragraph or two in often poor English once a week…compare this to the Camelot Herald and the regular flow of information updates (patches, hot fixes, grab-bags, server outages/upgrades and other announcements) on there.



The general feeling in Europe is one of extreme dissatisfaction with GOA and the very poor levels of service they continue to offer.

I would ask you seriously to consider stripping GOA of the Dark Age of Camelot licence in Europe and giving it to a company willing and able to provide consistent technical coverage and at least some customer support, also to communicate on a regular basis with their paying customers.

At the very least, please make GOA aware of just how angry many of the people who pay them money on a regular basis are with their derisory customer service, deeply fallible hardware and general attitude of disdain for us, the players of Dark Age Of Camelot in Europe.


Yours,"

Then (obviously) just add your own signature at the bottom.

Who knows? Maybe it will kick some asses that desperately need kicking.

 

[Sxert]

nice letter ^^

 

[Archeon]

Im beginning to think that maybe, just maybe you made that technical server name up, it had the word Macintosh in it last time.

I can't belive you don't trust me blithering, i work in an IT company you know. Yeah, you know the guy that does that important stuff thats really technical? I clean out his bin!

 

[BlitheringIdiot]

Svart you forgot one of the big issues, the mysterious re-activation of closed accounts, when people find out that the game they quit months ago is costing them as GOA accidentally put them on auto-renew sub.

Other that that a very nice letter

 

[Draic]

and dead again !! :Grrrrrr:

 

[Thorarin]

and dead again !! :Grrrrrr:

If you had checked the news, you would have seen that Opentransit was doing maintenance to prevent relapses of the situation on saturday evening. This maintenance would also result in some interrupted connections.

 

[BlitheringIdiot]

If you had checked the news, you would have seen that Opentransit was doing maintenance to prevent relapses of the situation on saturday evening. This maintenance would also result in some interrupted connections.

All day...

They hope it will fix the problem. How am I supposed to get my SM to 50 to farm albs now?!

 

[Draic]

If you had checked the news, you would have seen that Opentransit was doing maintenance to prevent relapses of the situation on saturday evening. This maintenance would also result in some interrupted connections.

I couldn't even get into the site at that momento, so it is kinda hard to get the news, eh...

 

[Omtara]

Up down up down exclaibure is like a yoyo.
well i managed to play till 12:30am LD once with only half a hour off not being able to log in. but now im locked in a cant play on any other servers.

Well at least this time Goa put some news about it up in Engish fairly quick

 

[Speeedy]

Very nice letter, just a shame Mythic wont really care about it think last time something like this happened we just got a post on BW asking to stop sending them :x

 

[Flimgoblin]

Hadn't actually got around to reading this before - then I caught some pretty glaring things..

1: Frequent server outages with no news or announcements to us, the paying customers.

"frequent" - interesting term for twice in the past 6 months? or maybe I've missed a week of server crashes somewhere.

2: No customer service in-game. We in Europe always find it deeply amusing to see U.S. players complaining about having to wait all of 12 hours - gasp! – for a CSR to get back to them. They live in a land of milk and honey compared to European DAOC players, who have no chance of such support at all, while paying the same amount of money in subscriptions.

Fair point - but someone was saying they got a response from RightNow after the disastrously long time of 22 minutes.

Personally I'm not fussed with in-game support, but it's your axe to grind

3: No customer service at all, in fact – GOA fob us off with something called ‘RightNow’, which generally involves using an online form to outline your problem and then never hearing from them again. Ever. A brief skim of any European DAOC forum will at almost any time find numerous posts by irate players infuriated by a continuing silence from GOA’s so-called ‘customer support’ tool. Those lucky enough to get any response at all receive, as often as not, a copy/pasted form response with no evidence of attention to the problem cited in the original enquiry.

works fine for me...

4: Subscription server problems are endemic here in Europe.

Have to agree with you on that one - the subscription end needs to be dragged out into the street and shot.

5: Frequently poor translation of the game into English by GOA in each new patch. This is inexcusable, given that the game was written in English in the first place. Also the delay in getting new patches and expansions here in Europe is huge, and a source of constant frustration to players here.

poor translation? they'd have to actually _translate_ things for that to happen - this one's laughable
You could complain about the occasional errors in the GOA-only content, but they're no worse than the typos in the quests as done by Mythic (well apart from that first raving prophet bloke he's terrible that said how many of us - including me - have been bothered to tell RightNow?)

6: Servers are lag-ridden at all times, almost unbearably so in any densely-populated areas (housing zones and capital towns are appalling), and link-deaths/mass link-deaths are a common occurrence even after GOA assure us the servers are fine and have been upgraded. Zone crashes are still a common occurrence here, too.

This is down to your machine - housing/cities are fine for me - they're god awful slow on my laptop mind you...

The zone crashes have happened three times in the past 6 months (in fact I'm sure it's just the past few days - can't remember any other zone crashes since before they upgraded the server and Mythic improved the code).

7: The infamous ‘hacking’ incident of August 2003, where somehow GM tools were appropriated and servers hacked. The way GOA handled this was atrocious, with no word at all to us, the paying customers, for weeks on end - no effort was made to communicate with the playerbase at all. We were left totally uninformed about what was happening, and with no way to contact the company who were still happy to take our money for a service we weren’t getting.

Yeah woulda been nice to hear a bit more, old news though.

8: GOA’s official website is also deeply unsatisfactory – their XML goes without being updated for months at a time, their news is limited to a paragraph or two in often poor English once a week…compare this to the Camelot Herald and the regular flow of information updates (patches, hot fixes, grab-bags, server outages/upgrades and other announcements) on there.

There's usually no news to post - I'd agree though that they need to be a bit faster to post when things go wrong, but it sounds like they're working on that (this new Erivoss person seems chatty )

"Monday: We translated something! Yay us!" isn't news.

"Monday: We made some changes to your class on our test server." is - but GOA can't make that news.

Edit: forgot to say - fair point with the XML though

The general feeling in Europe is one of extreme dissatisfaction with GOA and the very poor levels of service they continue to offer.

General feeling? the general feeling from some whiners on a message board maybe - I hope Mythic understand that this is the "general feeling in Europe" the same way that the VN Dev's round table is the "general feeling in the US"

I really hope that Mythic treat this as what it is - disgruntled grumbling from someone who can't get onto their favourite game - I imagine you'd be marching on Fairfax if you'd been playing the US version at the release of ToA (which is probably quite deserved - ToA was released about 2 months too early - not that they had any choice in that matter) and that they don't do anything stupid on the back of it.

 

[Svartmetall]

TOA was definitely released in an early-Beta form, yes, no argument from me on that one...

But...there have been a LOT more server crashes, certainly on Excalibur, than 2 in the last 6 months. Hell, there's been 3 in just the last 3 days.

Getting a RightNow response AT ALL is unusual, and in 22 minutes is incredible. Literally. As in, I'm having trouble believing it.

Lag is NOT due to my machine (XP2200, 768MB DDR, GeForce 4 Ti4600, cable conection), it's the servers. Log into Logres when there are 3,000+ people playing it, then log into Excal straight after when there are 1,500 people on it. Excal WILL be laggier.

And Flim - the general feeling IS one of extreme dissatisfaction with GOA. No amount of Xmas quests and special events can make up for their failure to get the basics right. Believe me, I would far rather be able to play the Euro/UK servers and play at the same time as my mates, but GOA's service is so execrable that I am very seriously considering moving to US servers. Which I don't want to have to do (leave behind my guild, all my other in-game friends, my 2 level 50s and other chars, and start again...shudder...). But...when there's only two shops, and the one that's near by sells only plastic bags full of shit but the one 50 miles away sells food...which shop am I going to go to?