[TERA PC & Console] En Masse is closing, but TERA lives on! We will continue to support TERA PC (NA) and TERA Console until service is transferred. Stay tuned for more information.
[TERA Console] The Grotto of Lost Souls update (v85) is now live! Read the patch notes here: https://bit.ly/TERACon_v85
[TERA PC] The 64-bit update (v97) is now live. Check out all the changes delivered on August 11 here: https://bit.ly/tera64_patchnotes
[TERA PC & CONSOLE] Summerfest Part 2: The Beach Bash is on from August 11 until September 1! Participate in event activities to earn tokens redeemable for costumes, consumables, mounts, and more! Details: https://bit.ly/tera_sf20
Comments
coming from some weeb named "desu sky" you really shouldnt be insulting others you silly child.
he does not have a point of view. hes taking his anger of the game out on random people on the forums, just like you
At least I had the forthcomingness to open a support ticket to ask for mine outright.
*** SPOILER ALER T***
They told me no.
webzen is smaller than bhs/nexon and they test every single class leveling from 1 to cap and every single sub class for c9, i know i used to do the fighter testing for them as a vl, maiet was a smaller dev company and the only issue raiderz had while it was open was the publisher not wanting to fix server stability as they were just milking the game. also what do you got to say now about the failed patch and lies that they will be monitoring and it wont take days to get a response? who is going to refund our wasted time waiting for this event and again they learned nothing and left the office with no one there incase something like this happened again? what excuse for this gross negligence and lying are you guys gonna make up this time?
so how about people being upset now? still going to ride EMEs [filtered] after another failed civil unrest?
The fact it failed again is on BHS. The fact that there wasn't someone monitoring it live in light of what happened last weekend and ready to respond immediately if there was a problem... that's on EME. Apparently they just trusted that BHS would have fixed it.
Do you? Because I work in network infrastructure for a major isp and I DO know hwat happens in the background to provide customers with applications and services. Full discloser I work for TELUS, my opinions are my own.
While we do not sell games (we used to and we do support servers for some businesses, it is not however BAU - business as usual), we do provide TV content, servers, domain space - basically everything an ISP would be expected to sell or support.
I can tell you that if we were launching a new channel or a new service, support is demanded for the first few days of launch. In some cases if volunteers are not available, mandatory overtime is drafted -although there is almost always someone willing to make a few exra dollars. Major events are treated like gold. If the olympics or a PPV event is happening there will be 3x the staff on shift and onsite to make sure everything goes smoothly and to make sure support is there if it does not.
In the event of disaster or outages.
First lets be perfectly clear, a bad outage is something a customer sees, second those outages rarely last more than 5 minutes and ANY interuptions means weeks of paper work and action plans to make sure it never happens again. Anything over 5 minutes and an incident support team, managers, directors get involved, beyond 30 minutes vP's and depending on customers affected (100s to 1000s) it could go all the way up the chain to the board. And let me tell you unless its a national disaster (flood, power outages etc) if it goes to the board someones probably job less at the end of the day. __Simply put it is unacceptable to have a major/national outage due to lack of oversight or neglect.
Next reaction time. All of our equipment is alarmed that means the moment a switch port goes down or communication is stopped, or maybe flooding is detected (DDOS) etc .. all of this is monitored. There is ZERO excuse in any IT department for this basic necessity not to exist. ShT does happen though, so we have SLA-service level agreements. That means that within X window of time we need to have the service failed over to another device or working or we get penalized for that outage. Some SLA's are contracts, some are nationally driven by government but the vast majority are self-inflicted and at the end of the day affect how much our bonuses or performance is rated. Like I said above 5 minutes of customer facing outages is a big deal. This means everyone employed has a vested interst in making sure nothing stops working.
BUT --- stuff does break it's the nature of the beast.
So you plan for outages, or malfunctions. We have 24-7 on call staff, for critical services/live content people are onsite 24-7. If there is power work, people are aware of it before hand and someones on site to walk through and in a disaster all hands are on deck be it 3am or 3pm everyone drops what they are doing and goes in. It's even similar for smaller outages the moment you pass 5 minute point traige teams are activated devs, dbas, rack technicians etc everyone who might be needed to resolve the outages asap are brough online/onsite to resolve it. And communication we literally dedicate someone to just send out updates for the duration (in somecases multiple people). Now I realise that this is an isp and there are more people in general, but we also have more services, more applications, and much much more varied portfolio than 1 service with a handful of bladecenters and f5s - honestly /s.
The point is, people do know how this stuff works and that is why people are so frustrated with eme in general, because they do not care. If there was even one shred of thought, when there was a 2 hour lights-out-outage SOMEONE would have been like "man we should say something on the forums or in game". EME Whiteknights might be like "they are not legally required to do x" - Sure they are not. Morally objective though, they absolutely are.
From my perspective the EME team is too small, and too diverse (working on multiple projects) management/ceo does not care; It's a money stream and that's it. I also think the Upper management is so far removed from the game they have no idea what's going on. I also think that the 'community council" is a joke, a popularity contest of randomly drawn indidivuals who have no idea what is going on. Any REAL attempt at engagement would be going to the top guilds of each server and the largest guilds of each server and asking them for a representative. In this way you have skilled players, and casual/social players and in somecases they cross - that would be logical.
The scary part is, being here since closed beta - with a couple 2 month breaks, we the players have been in situations like this far too often and major critical events (such as this past januaury, pre ABHM etc). These are events that had HUGE player number drops, due to BAD management and bad marketing decisions (the people not the role). So if the goal for the company is to make money but they constantly have massive roll overs, why are they still employed?
webzen is much larger, and formerly had their games published by gpotato...i know, i played a couple of them. along with acquisitions and mergers of other firms...
BHS 51-200 employees
webzen 501 - 1000 employees
that's quite a difference, and note, publishers don't do a damn thing to help develop. and...wouldn't call their games glitch free...not even up to the standards of tera. and having several that failed...some with expansions that had bugs that would completely crash the servers that had been played on a test server and they KNEW about it...but sent it live anyway.
The big issue compared to the business world you and I work in is that we have business customers with SLAs and other expectations that are established by contract. But, for whatever reason, game companies (particularly F2P gaming companies) can't see past the fact that it is ultimately a game, so they don't view downtime and failures with the same degree of severity. Somehow, in the back of their mind, they rationalize everything with "it's just a game." And again, given how bad the competition is, it's not like their failures will change anything.
It should not be this way, and as someone who works in a business-to-business environment, the level of "sloppiness" is appalling to me. But this is the nature of this industry. Until they start treating their whole operation a lot more seriously and treat their customers the same way we'd treat our business customers (where failure is unacceptable, SLAs are maintained, issues require an immediate explanation including root cause analysis, and performance is measured based on KPIs that include customer satisfaction)... it won't change.
That said, I'm sure that -- from their point of view -- they simply don't have the resources invest, and "if you build it, they will come" has not borne out -- particularly given that they are ultimately held back by game decisions they can't control. I would really like to see EME greatly improve their customer service... but I suspect they're in a precarious position right now. I'd like to say they could have prevented it, but honestly probably not much.