January 18, 2007

Gah. Why SoE Frustraits me so

Stargrace, the slacker

So, a little bit of a rant this morning. Have to get it off of my chest. At 8:55am, smack dab in the middle of poets palace, the servers start spamming that they are coming down in 5 minutes, for a 4 hour update. There was no warning previous to this, nothing on the update notes, nothing in the forums, so you know it’s some random bug they’ve got to be fixing. Updates are typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, rarely on Thursdays. There was some speculation that it was unrest going in, but that’s been stated to be in game as of the GU (game update) 32, which is some time away.

The message also said it was just the US servers coming down. Of course, I’m in poets, on the third floor, with my 18 hour lockout already started. I looked at Shadowgeist and said “ok.. we better get moving”… used my sol ro miracles, and we sprinted off to the fourth floor. Completed all four named, in 4 minutes, out of breath and with me dead since I ganked agro too soon, nothing worth while dropped and I was pissed off that servers were coming down at all with no warning.

10 more minutes go by. Then 15. Speculation on other servers about what’s going on. Apparently a few servers had come down for their 4 hour updates. LDL however, was still up. It’s now 40 minutes past the down time set by spam, and the server is still up.

Sighs.

It wouldn’t bother me quite so much if I felt that SoE gave even the briefest thought to any of their player base. I used to think they did, but the past few months have just gotten progressively worse.

Yesterday I could not re-activate my account. I had station access, and wished to drop it. They ask you for some secret password though and to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never ever chosen one. So to drop station access, I cancelled my account completely ( I’ve done this in the past as well ) and then when it was closed, was prompted to re-activate. Well. I get a 403 “Forbidden” error when I try to access the “my account” section at all. So I follow the help commands. Live Chat is also not working. I get an error / timed out message. I try email support. Also not working. So I finally bite the bullet and decide to call them long distance and find out what’s going on. I have raids that night and would rather not miss them.

20 minutes on hold from Ottawa Ontario to San Diego and someone finally (a real person) is speaking to me. They tell me it must be my credit card. . . . uh . . . Pardon me? I can’t access the site at all because of my credit card? I can’t even get to the ‘type in your password’ portion. So I attempt it one more time, and low and behold, the site is working agian (I checked the forums, this was an issue for a few people, since the 15th roughly).

Sighs again.

I have little patience, I know. But come on folks I’m a paying customer here. I know a few people are feeling the exact same way. Like we’re being ignored completely while things are going on. I don’t mean to bash away at SoE, I do still play the game after all, but my patience is wearing thin on some issues that I think are important.

Now that the rant is done, on a completely different note. Stargrace hit 87 and almost 88 ap’s yesterday. We did a labs raid with three healers, that was.. interesting. To say the least. We did wipe a few times, but came out fairly unscathed. We also only had three groups and one group didn’t have a healer at all the entire time. No wonder people are one grouping the trash in this zone.