Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Unreasonable downtime again.

So yesterday was patch day and as normal on every patch day things went wrong and it took longer then expected.  Not just longer but much longer.  In my one year of playing this has been the worst since passing the second worse by about an hour.  I am not one of those people that are going to QQ about wanting my money back or wanting a free day to make up for it.  What are we talking about there?  Pennies?  I am a reasonable person and I understand that the servers need to undergo updates and clean ups and the such once in a while to keep my game play running smoothly.

I love reading the forums and seeing people cry about it.  It is actually quite amusing how some people get so frustrated.  They all come to that "I pay to play" argument when complaining.  No one ever seems to point out that while they pay to "have access" to the servers there is no promise of your server, or any others for that matter, being up at any given time.

This will be a bad example but it is the basic concept.  You go into a coffee shop and order a coffee.  It takes them 2 hours to get your coffee to you.  That is horrible service for sure, that is way too long and it not something I would have ever even waiting around for.  But in the end, no matter how long it took, you ordered a hot coffee and got a hot coffee.  You might never go there to get your coffee again being it takes forever and the service sucks but that will be your decision.

Same goes for blizzard. You pay a fee to access their servers and play the game they made on those servers.  You pay for access over the course of a month.  You do not pay for a months service.  Those are two different things.  If over the course of the month you have access to their servers then they are holding up to their end of the deal.  Sure, the service might suck just like at the coffee shop but the same goes for blizzard as the coffee shop.  If you do not like their service you do not need to shop there any more.  Do not order another coffee at the coffee shop because it takes too long for it to some and do not pay for 30 days access because there is too much downtime for your liking.  It is your choice.  Don't complain because you made a bad choice.  It is not their fault you made a bad choice.

Now for my problem with all of this.  Five years Blizzard has been around doing these patches and they still have not figured out how to do it right.  Millions upon millions of paying customers and they still have not even taken the effort the test an upgrade before installing it?  That is just simple bad business practice.  The have a PTR to test the game and might even have another test upgrade server.  If they test it in game play and test it in uploading then how to they always manage to run into problems? 

I don't know about you but if I owned that company and had an upgrade set to install and my workers botched it that badly on a regular basis there would be a lot of unemployed people the next day.  As a business owner I would find it unacceptable for my workers to be working at that level of complete incompetence.

It basically comes down to this.  If you can not do the install then wait until you figured out how to do it before trying.  It is not that difficult.  Where is the company ownership on this matter?  Why are the people in charge of running the updating process still employed this morning?  I do not think of myself as a hard boss where I work but if one of my employees continued to work at that level of inefficiency they would not longer be working for me.  That simple.

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