Right because we shouldn’t have a right to be upset when this has happened almost every week for what, the past 8+ weeks?!
It’s so preposterous to think “Oh we’ve had server outages every Monday so maybe we’ll change one of our staff’s schedules so that at least one person is around to fix this shit when it happens because maybe I respect my customers time”
Even assuming that they had the money to hire a MongoDB expert, or had the time to turn one of their existing staff into one, there’s no way that you won’t have problems with MongoDB.
The message I get repeatedly from Hacker News and from more experienced colleagues is “if you care about your data, don’t use Mongo”.
I don’t know if Parse made its customers aware that they were building on Mongo (before Facebook said “hey, we’re shutting down the Parse service, so host it yourself”), so I don’t know if you can blame the devs for that one.
Same same. U.S. customer, unable to play (server time-out after battles), then unable to login at all.
That is a bit disconcerting. Thxs for sharing. Makes me worry that this is just going to be the norm.
You realize that Sirrian often stays up all night (his timezone) in order to monitor the rollout of the weekly event day on Mondays? And to do what he can to fix things?
This is a game company that goes the extra mile, folks. When you’re willing to do something new in a big way, there’s always going to be unexpected hiccups. Always.
I have been patient. And still am being patient. I didn’t fly off the handle. I didn’t type in all caps screaming at the devs. I asked a simple question. @Sirrian, @Nimhain and the rest of the dev team are very good to us. I don’t understand why I’m being chastised for putting a post in that they will see whenever they get the chance.
Maybe the server issues have you on edge too @Shimrra and @Theicla.
I made it in. Successful Explore battle as well. I don’t play PVP so I can not attest to its functionality.
One thing the IT department where I work does when there is a major outage is send out updates either every 30 or 60 minutes depending on the severity. It goes a long way to calm people down and would be helpful with cases like this. Time zone shouldn’t matter - if you have a global customer base, it’s part of the cost of doing business.
If the database service itself is at fault, and it’s happening this often (I’ve only been playing for about 6 weeks), steps should be taken to migrate to something more stable. I’d be surprised if the idea isn’t already a topic around the office.
That said, I am pleased with the degree of communication we already receive. It is better than a LOT of games. I’m just always a supporter of “there is always a way to improve”.
Well, if they’re/we’re lucky, the game problems are to do with issues other than the ones fundamental to Mongo’s design.
If that’s the case, then there’s at least a chance that they might be properly resolved. However, since there are so many possible complexities to how these things are built, there’s no way that I could comment on how hard or likely that would be.
Instead, I’ll just repeat the following characterisation of how investigating software problems progresses, which I have experienced repeatedly:
This getting to be a real pain in the rear end me and 3 other family members play this game a lot daily sevearl times a day and it gets really frustering when we’re in the middle of a game and it just freezes and goes to error please fix it soon.
Even if the instability is due to Mongo’s flakiness, it’s not impossible to migrate away from one DB to another. This is a solvable problem.
I understand issues happen and I sympathize. What I don’t have any patience for is the same result happening week after week and the Devs just rolling the dice. This should not come as a shocker that the game is unplayable on Monday. What is a shocker is that after 8+ weeks of this, the Devs aren’t erring on the side of caution.
Not only does this upset a lot of players but it also creates a ton of work for their support teams. A lot of which could be avoided if they communicated frequently and consistently (or even better, had someone capable of at least bandaging the issue until senior staff were back onsite)
It’s just common sense and the fact that they aren’t doing it either means they are absolutely bootstrapped (which doesn’t speak well to the long term health of the game) or they don’t respect their players’ time. Neither of which makes me feel particularly good about where the game is headed.
Again, I know problems happen and I sympathize but when problems are systemic and you don’t put systems in place to, at the very least, keep your clients informed, that speaks to a much larger problem.
The longer these issues happen, the more I feel like the team has no clue how to manage the hardware aspect of the game, or very poor development that uses too many resources.
If this happened at my job, I would be fired!
I totally agree about the updates with customers.
Unfortunately, though, it’s not clear to me how many people they have, or can afford to have (I have no idea what the global distribution of revenue across games like this are, let alone where this company sits within that). In my experience, good communication to customers at times like this requires at least one staff member who doesn’t have to spend most of their time on normal days actually working on development or content.
Given their behaviour on the forums, I’d guess that both @Sirrian and @Nimhain have to spend the vast bulk of their time actually working on the game, and they’re the people that you usually see here. If that’s the case, I’d also guess they don’t currently have anyone to spare for regular incident communications.
They did hire @Saltypatra to manage the community, yet I have seen less posts from them than the devs.
Friend of mine still can’t even play PVP. Says “try again later”, and no guild rewards for her either…
True, but it’s not clear to me that technical comms are part of what @Saltypatra signed up for. If it wasn’t, but she has to learn that on the job, I can only wish her good luck!
I’ve never even heard of @Saltypatra… They should have hired @ogunther! Then we’d have updates ALL THE TIME!!
We’d have updates about updates he’s about to update! It would be sweeeeeeeet…
And then people would complain, and he’d get fired, and they would hire somebody who doesn’t say much to take his place. Somebody like, oh Im just spit-balling here @Saltypatra…
WAIT! I see what you did there devs! Way to think ahead…
#neverplaychesswithGoWdevs
Whose to say they didn’t already hire and fire me?
Oh wait, I am; I’m the one to say that. 