MagnusGOA
English WAR Community Manager
- Joined
- May 12, 2008
- Messages
- 224
Good day!
That said, both us and Mythic want PTS in Europe. To start with, we've got a massive player base here and we want to bring in alot of players for these tests. Further, we know from experience that European players are pretty darn hard core, which is great for testing new content and finding strange bugs. Lastly, with MMO's being rather dynamic, we feel that it's important to bring in European players fully in the development process of WAR.
What I can say now is that we'll certainly not see European test servers by 1.0.5; there's simply not sufficient time to set up the systems required to do so. WAR is no short term project though and we're in this for the long haul.
As announced yesterday, character transfers are coming. We've yet to set the final date for this, but the time period we're looking at is some two weeks or so. We hope to give a definite answer by the end of next week.
I've seen my fair share of tickets which hasn't been responded to within a reasonable time. Whereas this is far from the norm, it's clearly not something we want to see more of. If you're treated unfairly or just not given an appropriate level of support, please PM me and include the ticket ID and I'll pass the errand to our Customer Service Officer who will bring out the discipline-hammer. Basically, any customer service organisation will have these sort of problems and I don't think it's justified to say that we're failing to provide customer support. We do, and most of the time it's great.
'Proper' patches are well coordinated with Mythic and we implement them the following day, as we don't want to bring down our game servers during the afternoon (which would be the case, had we opted for simultanious patching). Depending on when they're sent to us, we implement hotfixes and minor patches the same day or the day thereafter. There has been a few cases where fixes has been implemented on the EU servers several days after the US servers. There's a few explanations for this:
We're obviously not happy with the delay of the Realm WAR pages. We ran into problems which simply took longer to resolve than we anticipated and so the ETA ended up being postponed repeatedly. These issues are now resolved and the Realm WAR platform is currently being tested internally. We're hoping to bring solid news and an ETA on them next week.
Blessings,
-Magnus
The purpose of a public test server is not to gain feedback which will be used to make balance changes to the game - we've got live servers for that. The PTS is there to test upcoming patches and see if there's a serious stability or balance issue they've overseen. Just as during closed beta, these game changes are as much a response to the feedback and server data of European players as US players.So you are perfectly fine that there's still no Char Transfers in Europe and the 1st BIG balancing patch will slip through without us being able to tell our words about it?
Tbh that's quite frustrating from my pov.
That said, both us and Mythic want PTS in Europe. To start with, we've got a massive player base here and we want to bring in alot of players for these tests. Further, we know from experience that European players are pretty darn hard core, which is great for testing new content and finding strange bugs. Lastly, with MMO's being rather dynamic, we feel that it's important to bring in European players fully in the development process of WAR.
What I can say now is that we'll certainly not see European test servers by 1.0.5; there's simply not sufficient time to set up the systems required to do so. WAR is no short term project though and we're in this for the long haul.
They need to fix these issues quickly before more things come up. Since the first week we've known that the service hasn't been quite the same, with the following problems:
- Slow support, if you've got an immediate ingame problem which isn't "I'm stuck" then give up - you'll probably get a reply from support during the middle of the night by email.
- Flash site which barely works. Hardly any EU customers like the site, yet GOA shoves this down our throats as much as possible. I can't access the account management in Firefox - it doesn't work.
- Lack of Realm WAR pages on the site. They've let this issue go on and on, instead of giving us an expected date it's now become a joke.
- Certain patches/hotfixes taking a bit too long to implement. Sometimes it takes a couple of days for GOA to put hotfixes into action, which is a bit annoying. This can be a major problem near the end of the week because GOA doesn't do any game patches over the weekend. If Mythic do any hotfixes on Friday then we won't receive them until the start of the next week - highly annoying.
- No character transfers - a fairly recent issue, I could understand them waiting a bit to see how things worked out, however it looks like yet another problem due to the web team being useless.
- No test server. Another very recent issue added to the list, probably partially Mythic's fault for not coordinating, but also another web problem as you need to copy characters over.
It would be too bad if these issues were being fixed at a rate we could see, however the new problems seem to be appearing before any are being sorted. I'd guess that Mythic are partially to blame, they've probably rushed through character transfers and the test server without coordinating with GOA.
The longer these issues stay, the more the playerbase will become annoyed with the differences in service. If more issues come on the list then players will continue to become despondent with GOA's service.
As announced yesterday, character transfers are coming. We've yet to set the final date for this, but the time period we're looking at is some two weeks or so. We hope to give a definite answer by the end of next week.
I've seen my fair share of tickets which hasn't been responded to within a reasonable time. Whereas this is far from the norm, it's clearly not something we want to see more of. If you're treated unfairly or just not given an appropriate level of support, please PM me and include the ticket ID and I'll pass the errand to our Customer Service Officer who will bring out the discipline-hammer. Basically, any customer service organisation will have these sort of problems and I don't think it's justified to say that we're failing to provide customer support. We do, and most of the time it's great.
'Proper' patches are well coordinated with Mythic and we implement them the following day, as we don't want to bring down our game servers during the afternoon (which would be the case, had we opted for simultanious patching). Depending on when they're sent to us, we implement hotfixes and minor patches the same day or the day thereafter. There has been a few cases where fixes has been implemented on the EU servers several days after the US servers. There's a few explanations for this:
- Mythic want to make sure that a fix is stable and runs well before implementing it on EU servers too.
- Miscommunication and human errors. We're involved in a relationship, GOA and Mythic, and these things happen. Playing the blame game is of little use, but suffice to say, we've both made our fair share of mistakes, as we all do.
We're obviously not happy with the delay of the Realm WAR pages. We ran into problems which simply took longer to resolve than we anticipated and so the ETA ended up being postponed repeatedly. These issues are now resolved and the Realm WAR platform is currently being tested internally. We're hoping to bring solid news and an ETA on them next week.
Blessings,
-Magnus