Keep Quiet - No one will notice!Follow

Actually nobby, From what I understand the login servers started having problems Saturday night, so it's about a 30 hour problem now.

I'd like to take this thread as yet one more opportunity to plead for a better login application: one that posts login status, patch status, and really important news right up front, in our faces, *before we log in*.

We shouldn't have to resort to external applications, third party applications, poorly updated web pages, and message boards to learn what the current status of the EQ login server is. The login application is 5 years old. It is antiquated and needs more than a new graphic to bring it up to speed.

If you wish to keep EQ chugging along for another 5 years, would you at least consider bringing this small but very important piece of EQ into the 21st century?

Guides DO get free accounts lhuffman

Actually the GM's actually have a way to hide when you hit the /who all GM list it is blank this prevents blatent tells from people when there answer some thousands of petitions each day... Granted Each guide account they are to meet at set expectations of there time that they need to log in or they get removed from the GM account( plus the gm's have there own servers they go to to unwind which server dont know )

OK, I suppose I have the problem wrong then. Excuse me.

There are GMs there but they refuse to respond to valid petitions, though you petition and wait for hours...on several different occasions. Ok, that makes things alriht.

Whether there is a GM there or not they do not respoond. I am not the only one who has experienced this...there are threads on every forum detailing the same.

They used to be responsive. A GM would show up within a reasonable amount of time and actually help. Now you do not see them or hear from them...you cannot see if there is one online. How hard would it be to block direct tells while showing the onlinge GMs. They could have a specific pop up that shows online GMs that has no interaction just to let us know they are there is nothing else.

So your defense of the GMs has actually made me feel worse about them...because if they are there they are ignoring us and that is worse. in game assistance is part of what we pay for and they are not there for us when we need them anymore. Further...try to take an in game problem to SOE...they tell you to petition! You petition and hear nothing...ever.

I died while zoning from the Nexus to the Bazaar...it said that I fell for 3k damage or something to that effect. I petitioned to get my XP back and nothing. Later that day...nothing. Next day...nothing. So now about once a week I petition. I want a GM to at least respond and tell me to leave them alone...but silence. I have a valid petition and nothing at all. The XP I lost means nothing at all now, but I intend to get a response from a GM at some time. Maybe if I petition once an hour every hour I am on.

The login server would almost have to be the problem. When you click on your EQ icon, it connects you to a patch server. This runs a patch process that updates your sofware. That was working fine. Then it connects you to the login server, which takes your username and password. That was failing every time. Somewhere between taking your login information and presenting you with a list of servers to connect to, it would fail. That pretty firmly puts it on the login servers IMO.

As to the .net stuff. I would assume they don't use something that "common". There's no need to. No one should be connecting to their login server with anything other then their login process. Thus, they will want to make it proprietary and use their own methods for securing passwords and such. Heh. Of course, that means that they can ***** things up on occasion as well...


lhuffman. I don't know what to tell you. I guess you are just cursed then. I do find it odd that a particular small set of people have continuous horrible problems with SOEs CS, while the rest of us don't. Are you sure you're petitioning every week? What happens? Last I heard, you can only have one petition at a time in the queue (and it'll give you a message if you try to petition a second time). How long are you staying online after you /petition? The GMs handle issues in an orderly manner. If there's 20 people before you, it'll take 20 people worth of help before you get helped. If you're /petitioning and then logging off for the night, they'll never help you.


We had a problem right after the patch where a group member got pulled through a wall by a mob, and killed. Maybe we got lucky, but a GM was literally onsite and summoned and rezzed him within 15 minutes of the incident. Note that through that entire process, even though I was talking the the guy getting the summon and rez and watching it happen, I could not see a GM, nor could I do a /who GM. Just pointing out that they may not be visible at all even when fixing your problems.

Maybe we got lucky? The thing is that everytime I've personally been involved with a /petition, it's been handled in a reasonable amount of time. When I hear people talking about how they never get their petitions listened to and go on and on about how horrible the CS is, I have to wonder how much of that is hyperbole? Maybe you really are just unlucky. Maybe you're doing something wrong? I have no idea. I really haven't seen any reduction in the real amount of ingame support in EQ. Heck. If anything, it's gotten better IMO. The longest I've waited for a response to a petition happened when I died to a bug back in the Velious age. That was about an hour and a half.


I just think that alot of people's feelings that GM support has gone downhill is based on their perceptions. They can't see that GMs are on, so they think that there's no one responding. Because of that, many people state that GM response has gone down. That feeds on people's thoughts that GM response has gone down, so they believe it even more. It's all placeboe effect IMO.


But then, I don't end up petitioning for a GM that often. I'm just saying that when I have, I've never had to wait that long for a response. And neither has anyone I've been grouped with who's petitioned. It's all perception I think...

Aye, I couldn't believe the Direct X upgrade thing a few days ago. How hard could it have been to start putting a warning in the News about 2 weeks ahead of time, or at the very least putting a blurb on the main Sony/EQ webpage. I was sitting there thinking one of my driver files somehow got deleted, couldn't find anything on any websites, and finally did a search and found a very brief thing about that file being related to Direct X's new version and that I needed to upgrade.

Now all the support sites like this one have it out there with links to the upgrades, but its not like Sony didn't know this was coming. I would have much rather spent 10 minutes doing an upgrade ahead of time than waste 2 hours researching a missing .dll file!

I've been petitioning for a surname problem for at least two months now. I did once get a response from a guide who was able to see that I was on an alt and sent me a tell there. But they were unable to do anything and said they would send it up to someone who could....uh..that was a month ago. Do I need to start sending a tell every day instead of every week or so? Its getting to be a bit rediculous.

Couple months back there was a server crash and I lost at least 10 baking skill points and some items. I petitioned but they said they couldn't do anything. Well why not reimburse me for all the goods I apparently wasted when *they* had a problem?!

Kelti. Did you try to just wander around the area doing a /corpse? I've had corpses get stuck in spots where I couldn't see them before, and have never had to petition a GM to get it back.

A locate corpse wand would have gotten you to the area if it moved to a "safe spot" (which can happen sometimes). Alternatively, you could have asked someone to summon it for you.

My point is that there are a whole lot of things you can fix for yourself in game with far less inconvenience then trying to get a GM. I certainly would not have waited to the point of letting the corpse rot.

I'm positive that if you'd popped into PoK and explained what happend in ooc or something, you'd have gotten a half dozen high level necros who would have offered to help you out. EQ is a social game. Try for a social solution before running to "the cops". Just a suggestion for next time...

I had several people who were kind enough to help me. I did consents and let people look and did the /corpse command, and they did the /corpse command (I didn't have a necro summon, either none in zone or none who wanted to help, and I did not have PoP), but some of the people helping me were higher level and tried different things like see invisible. It simply was not there.

I also had no idea that a corpse would move, and I knew exactly where I died, since I was right next to a landmark, and my helpers spread the search out from there, and didn't let me get killed while looking.

Agreed. But there's a huge difference between the support model for a company that has 2000 customers (each of which is presumably paying a significant amount), and one which has 500,000 customers, where each is paying $10 a month for your product.

You can and will make every effort to respond quickly and consistently to those 2000 customers. Each one is valuable to your business.

You simply can't ensure (or even afford to ensure) that every single one of those 500,000 customers is guaranteed a speedy resolution to any problem they may have with your product. Especially not when they're paying only $10 a month.


And even in the case of the former model, there is no expectation of being reimbursed for lost business/time/whatever. For a couple years, one of my jobs was to manage file servers. We used Network Appliance machines for the job. Guess what? They do occasionally crash. Even at the pretty high licence cost, and the half million dollar per server price tag, it could still take an hour or two to resolve a major problem. And I have never heard of them (or any other vendor) refunding license fees based on downtime, let alone reimbursing businesses for costs related to downtime. It simply does not happen. I could provide you with a laundry list of vendors I work with, and not one of them does that.

It's just that from my perspective, the expectation of support levels from customers of SOEs product just seems outrageous. I work in a field where we pay vendors for the use of their software/hardware products. I know exactly what the industry is like and what is a "reasonable" level of support. IMHO, even taking into account the worse horror stories I've ever heard about SOE's CS, I firmly believe that on average, the players of EQ get a pretty good deal for $10 a month.

You just have to have reasonable expectations. That's all.




Again. This is really a matter of perspective. How many is "enough"? I don't know what the salary for a GM is, but let's say it's a modest 20k a year. That's about 170 users who's entire payment is eaten by a single GM. The unfortunate fact is that SOEs bean counters know this. They will hire GMs right up to the point at which they project they will lose fewer then 170ish users if the didn't hire that GM. How many people each year will quit the game if there wasn't one more GM working? If it's not 170ish or higher, they wont hire more GMs. That's the math they're going to use here...




I agree completely on this one. I think the real problem this last weekend was that it was the login servers that were down, so folks couldn't even get into the chat to be able to see the banners and whatnot that would normally give them ETAs.

Better estimates has always been a problem with EQ. I can sympathise with that one though. Often, the IT guys are pressured to make very short downtime estimates by management that wants to make it look like something will go smoother then it really will. SOE is also a company, with different departments and a pretty typical decision making process. They have to ask for downtime and justify it. Often, you are forced to shorten the estimate to get the go ahead for the downtime in the first place.

Worse yet, sometimes the "big wigs" will put a cap on downtimes: "We don't want any downtime longer then X". This means that lots of litle things get pushed off because they aren't big enough to justify their own downtime, but then get lumped into a big bunch of stuff when you do get the ok. Of course, you've got to promise them that you wont exceed that downtime window or they wont approve it in the first place. Trust me. It's a lot easier for this sort of thing to happen then you might think. There's a saying we have in the IT world: "It's easier to ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission". Sad, I know. But very very true.


Ideally, that policy shouldn't be passed to the consumers, but often there's no way to prevent it. Honestly. I just assume that I wont be able to play on patch days at all. That way, when a patch goes over time, I'm not disappointed. If it turns out that I can get on and play, it's a bonus.

There are enough other things to do in life, that a day without EQ will not kill me.

Okay then...to all of you who keep telling us that SOE's service has been nothing but great for you...fine. Then why do I not ge the same level of service you do? If it IS so great, how come so many have the opposite story. Do you pay more? Are you friends with a GM? Hwat makes it so great for you and lousy for the rest of us? If they have a great support team that is responsive and doing a great job then they must purposely be ******** some of us. (of course I do not think this...because they DO NOT have a stellar support system).

As I said earlier...just because your experience has been good does not mean that it is good for everyone. I would expect many to have good support experiences...but there are far too many who have not.

Want to have fun...go into POK and in an /OOC ask how many people have had bad luck getting GM support. I had over 30 people respond that they hate the level of support they get from GMs. Now...it was late at night and there were only 82 people in the zone. 30+ out of 82??? Nice. Another thing...only one person said no, they have always had good support.

And I agree that communications need to improve.

That's all I posted about.
There are oodles of threads about the quality of tech support/server relisiance etc. Can't be ***** to get into those. My post was exclusively about SOE not having the basic sense to keep people in abeyance

It's so simple! When people know what the problem is, they'll patiently wait. When they have no information, they'll agitate/Invent conspiracies/Counter-brief/quit.

(PS - Login Server bcame unstable Sat am my time - message not posted on CS page until Sun pm - problem persisted until Tues am without any updated message)

Like I said - 30 seconds taken to keep us up to date would negate 80% of the adverse sentiment.

It's quite clear to me that SOE are a bunch of technocrats who can't see the difference between technical skills and customer service skills. Imagine putting a bunch of Public Relations people in charge of maintaining servers It works both ways!