Your Customer's Trust, Confidence and Loyalty

[Shug]

Well Guys your acting like Complaining is gonna make things better.Just let SE deal with it and wait thats all you can do.Saying your gonna quit isnt gonna do anything in fact no one cares if your quiting.From the start of beta all i have been hearing is stupid complaints.Like one time a girl stated SE didnt say thank you for playing there beta.I mean are you serious!.Seriously guys times like this we all need to come together as a community and give SE all the support they need.Not support like ugh if SE doesnt fix there shiz im gonna quit.

So if you buy a house and the roof leaks, and the builder patches it up 1,2, 10 times, you still going to give him your support. I hate how you people think SE can do no wrong. Probably on the payroll as a PR Rep.

[Design]

So if you buy a house and the roof leaks, and the builder patches it up 1,2, 10 times, you still going to give him your support. I hate how you people think SE can do no wrong. Probably on the payroll as a PR Rep.

If the roofer handed you a User Agreement that states "The roof from time to time may leak, and in the process water will come into your house and we may have to patch it several times due to[List of Reasons]. Sign here if you accept" and you read that would you sign it?

WELL GUESS WHAT, YOU SIGNED THE SE USER AGREEMENT POLICY WHEN YOU LOGGED IN THE FIRST TIME:

""5. INTERRUPTION TO THE SERVICE

From time to time, in order to provide our customers with the optimal gaming experience, it is necessary for SQUARE ENIX to conduct routine maintenance on the computers and/or servers that support the Game. During these times, access to the Game or support services may be interrupted. Access may also be temporarily suspended in whole or in part, without notice, due to emergency repairs, fire, flood, explosion, war, strike, embargo, governmental action or failure to act, the act of any civil or military authority, act of God, or by any other causes beyond SQUARE ENIX’s control, or any other reasons for which SQUARE ENIX, in its sole discretion, deems that temporary suspension is necessary. You acknowledge that disruptions of service may occur and waive any causes of action against SQUARE ENIX in any way arising from or related to any such disruptions of service.""

[ClaireBear]

OK. So I'm going to respond to this but I don't want this to be seen as apologetic, just informational:

The truth about this whole thing (and that most people probably dont want to hear) is that the issue is very likely a remote hardware issue. Does this mean it isn't SE's fault? Absolutely not, but let me clarify.

Despite what people seem to think, purchasing a server is not as simple as going to Best Buy. The server build and architecture was decided months ago, as purchasing anything from an HP Proliant to a Dell PowerEdge takes quite a bit of time and money. As such, the servers that SE co-located in the US and EU can not be physically adjusted on the fly (or even in a few days). What we are seeing is a bunch of software patches and work-arounds to try and tighten up a system that was never designed to handle the amount of people. I read something today that said more than 30% of the preorders were done in the last few days. This means that even if SE planned for everyone to be able to get on any server they wanted simultaneously (not really possible for a myriad of reasons), a sudden increase of this much during EA is simply not possible to expand the hardware to handle. If this were simply an issue of expanding Virtual Machines or buying more bandwidth, it would have been done already.

The truth is, there isn't really much they can do until Monday as far as severe updates to Hardware. However, there are several software adjustments that could be made (such as expanding the Queue or auto-logging out) which they COULD do, which would help. As far as that, I would submit the following:

1. They are planning on doing just this, but since it wasn't planned, the coding would take longer than a few hours
2. They CAN'T do this because the code requires too much adjustment to do in a timely manner, so it would take FAR longer than a few hours
3. The issues are so severe with the hardware, these adjustments wouldn't help (I find this less likely)

These things and the fact that the programmers still need to eat, sleep, and poo like everyone else puts a fair limit on what they can do, which leaves them trying small bandwidth and Threading adjustments, (all of which really aren't going to fix something like this).

In conclusion, I expect the following: There isn't going to be any kind of fix for this previous to Launch. If there IS a fix, it will require all of the servers to be down for a length of time before launch (possibly most of the day Monday evening). As a result, I would expect several more maintenance before launch and lots more "bear with us" messages.

For my part, I have started a character on Ultima and encourage all other legacy people (or non) with this problem to do the same. It is better than nothing in the mean time. You may even meet some new people to play with. I will get back to my legacy character eventually.

Thank you this was informative. However, I don't recommend anyone to jump servers to make a new character because in the long run you're not fixing the problems you're just putting yourself up to encounter them again because I'm sure many players will think the same thing and a large influx of players will switch serve only to find themselves back at square one.

[Ascensi]

Do realize that a vast majority of the games people have purchased, Square hasn't seen a penny from yet. All the preorders that weren't directly from Square (And possibly PSN?) haven't gotten to Square. Heck, Amazon hasn't even charged people yet.



Frankly, if you are a network engineer, you'd understand why these situations are happening and wouldn't be saying that. You'd also not make an example as if you were a single person in charge of all the connectivity issues.

You're right, SE has not seen the money from the other companies yet.

Also, I am a MCSE/Cisco Engineer and I can tell you from experience, they WOULD single target people on that team, and they WOULD fire them one at a time, especially if they couldn't resolve the issues in a timely manner, or have communication in lieu to the events set forth causing such a catastrophe. Secondly, I do understand why these situations are happening, and from experience, these issues should be resolved in a timely fashion, and should have been tested before the product was released post beta.

Amazon doesn't go down for more than a couple hours, and most of the time that is for updating. Backbone wise, this shouldn't happen, what it boils down to is...

People paid for a product that they cannot use due to the company's failure to develop and test properly. If you bought a bike without a seat or tires because the company forgot to put them in wouldn't you want to be compensated?

Square Enix is lucky there are no lawyers present because ultimately they could be sued for defective product liability. While it is vague to classify it as so, the fact is: it is a product people paid for and are not getting their satisfaction due to defective design and improper testing.

[Menoski]

So many excellent facts posted on this thread, I hope it hits the eyes of SE. This is a brilliant thread! The only thing I gotta say here is that there's no way i'm going to be shelling out the subscription fee come the 27th. I refuse to put more money towards a game that I will be lucky to get to play for a few hours every couple days. :/

[Design]

IN THE USER AGREEMENT POLICY:

"5. INTERRUPTION TO THE SERVICE

From time to time, in order to provide our customers with the optimal gaming experience, it is necessary for SQUARE ENIX to conduct routine maintenance on the computers and/or servers that support the Game. During these times, access to the Game or support services may be interrupted. Access may also be temporarily suspended in whole or in part, without notice, due to emergency repairs, fire, flood, explosion, war, strike, embargo, governmental action or failure to act, the act of any civil or military authority, act of God, or by any other causes beyond SQUARE ENIX’s control, or any other reasons for which SQUARE ENIX, in its sole discretion, deems that temporary suspension is necessary. You acknowledge that disruptions of service may occur and waive any causes of action against SQUARE ENIX in any way arising from or related to any such disruptions of service."

If you clicked Accept, well then. I got news for you...

[Colvin]

So many excellent facts posted on this thread, I hope it hits the eyes of SE. This is a brilliant thread! The only thing I gotta say here is that there's no way i'm going to be shelling out the subscription fee come the 27th. I refuse to put more money towards a game that I will be lucky to get to play for a few hours every couple days. :/

If you are expecting that the problem will never get fixed, you shouldn't worry about that. Either people will leave and logging on will get easier, or they will fix it and people will stay. In either case, this problem will not be a permanent fixture in the game.

[Menoski]

IN THE USER AGREEMENT POLICY:



If you clicked Accept, well then. I got news for you...

Exactly, good point however...there's an extent to how much interruption is acceptable. Interruptions are one thing, not being able to login period for days on multiple occasions is another.

[Ascensi]

It's an old joke among system administrators. "We'd have 100% uptime if it we could just keep the users away."

The sarcasm must've been lost in translation, and SE thought that was the way to run a datacenter.

HAH ! I didnt even see this post until after my comment, but it is true. We learned that saying in college, and the first network I ran for a hospital, the old director of IT said that to me. LOL!

[Starforsaken]

WELL GUESS WHAT, YOU SIGNED THE SE USER AGREEMENT POLICY WHEN YOU LOGGED IN THE FIRST TIME:

You do realize that no matter what the user agreement policy says, it's not a valid legal document right? It may work in some countries but in mine, it has no value in court.