In EVE Online there was a patch to the launcher that caused large amount of players to be unable to log in. The CSM jumped on doing its job, protecting CCP from players, claiming that everything is absolutely correct and there is nothing wrong in what CCP did, mistakes happen with everyone.
Let me clarify, mistakes do happen and there is nothing in the World that could prevent a stupid bug from making a system being totally nonfunctional until fixed. I don't blame CCP for not being perfect.
I do blame them though for not being error-resistant and I do blame CSM for not suggesting them to be. Having a car accident is a disastrous bad luck. Not being able to give first aid, not having first aid kid and not knowing the phone number of the ambulance and firefighters on the other hand is being a horrible idiot.
On the evening of the launcher fail, I just clicked the EVE icon, a short bar ran trough my screen and then nothing. Restarted the machine, clicked the icon, nothing. No pop-up, no error message, I could only see in the task manager that the eve launcher is indeed running (not even "not responding"), but it used no CPU, read and wrote no disk, it was just there. Having some basic knowledge about IT I knew that it is waiting for some other process or resource, probably on the net. I started digging the forums and after various pages of "launcher doesn't start CCP is ruining my life" and countless copies of the same error messages I found some suggestions from players.
The first one was to run repair.exe which failed with an error message I couldn't understand. Went back to the forums, searching for the error message, I found nothing but players whining and copying the error message again and again.
After some more forum digging, I found the Chribba link for the updater, some info how to apply it and I could do it. What does it mean: the error wasn't fatal like a server power outage, could be circumvented, but the way of doing it was provided by players and not developers. This is unacceptable and equal to the car accident victims helped only by bystanders and no response from 911.
So these are the things I expect from CCP:
I used to watch zkillboard.com for horrible loss reports and make a moron of the day post but I got bored of it. After all, you can see the same things if you filter for 5B losses. Still, today a moron is provided, sent in mail by the killer. The point isn't that Sherman Potter lost an 1.4B pod in a 45M horrifit retriever. The point is that the killer managed to convince him to pay 50M for his frozen corpse, since you can regain implants from your frozen corpse. Or maybe not.
Let me clarify, mistakes do happen and there is nothing in the World that could prevent a stupid bug from making a system being totally nonfunctional until fixed. I don't blame CCP for not being perfect.
I do blame them though for not being error-resistant and I do blame CSM for not suggesting them to be. Having a car accident is a disastrous bad luck. Not being able to give first aid, not having first aid kid and not knowing the phone number of the ambulance and firefighters on the other hand is being a horrible idiot.
On the evening of the launcher fail, I just clicked the EVE icon, a short bar ran trough my screen and then nothing. Restarted the machine, clicked the icon, nothing. No pop-up, no error message, I could only see in the task manager that the eve launcher is indeed running (not even "not responding"), but it used no CPU, read and wrote no disk, it was just there. Having some basic knowledge about IT I knew that it is waiting for some other process or resource, probably on the net. I started digging the forums and after various pages of "launcher doesn't start CCP is ruining my life" and countless copies of the same error messages I found some suggestions from players.
The first one was to run repair.exe which failed with an error message I couldn't understand. Went back to the forums, searching for the error message, I found nothing but players whining and copying the error message again and again.
After some more forum digging, I found the Chribba link for the updater, some info how to apply it and I could do it. What does it mean: the error wasn't fatal like a server power outage, could be circumvented, but the way of doing it was provided by players and not developers. This is unacceptable and equal to the car accident victims helped only by bystanders and no response from 911.
So these are the things I expect from CCP:
- A verbose field of "what I do now" of the launcher. If anything fails, the launcher should be clearly be able to tell where did it fail.
- A wiki page explaining what each step means and what are likely causes and what countermeasures the player can do if any.
- A dedicated forum topic on the top level of the forum called "most recent error" where only developers can start topics. This forum should be the source of information for players.
- As soon as either a dev finds an error that affects players or the GMs are getting mass player reports of an error, an employee is assigned to forum duty. His job is not to code a solution but to communicate, help players with the problem and devs by getting informed. He keeps the topic aggressively moderated from whining, demanding and same-error-reporting, leaving only posts which offer either a new error message or some workaround. He keeps the opening post updated constantly for fast info.
I used to watch zkillboard.com for horrible loss reports and make a moron of the day post but I got bored of it. After all, you can see the same things if you filter for 5B losses. Still, today a moron is provided, sent in mail by the killer. The point isn't that Sherman Potter lost an 1.4B pod in a 45M horrifit retriever. The point is that the killer managed to convince him to pay 50M for his frozen corpse, since you can regain implants from your frozen corpse. Or maybe not.
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