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EVE Online: Players Receive Skill Points, New Ship Due to Downtime
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
CCP Games is doling out additional skill points and a new Primae ship, whose main function is to extract resources from planets as part of the newly introduced planetary interaction feature, as compensation to players for an extended downtime resulting from a server move that was recently carried out.
View the official announcement here.
Comments
Maybe just to obvious so it was not included in the article, but they do not get a day or so extra subscription?
Thank you ORE, looking forward to take it for a spin.
GG
Where's the official announcement? lol
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In the link at the bottom of the article?
We do not get an extra day, only a extra pre-set amount of SP for everyone with an active account at the time. Also the ship wasnt for the extra downtime, it just happened to be in the works so they will just release those two extras at conveniently at once.
errmm this is better then an extra day sub lol your getting a new RARE ship that will never be given out ever again and skillpoints to spend on whatever you want so INSTA train mai skills ccp thank this is more then enough to compansate
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The article...is broken. Missing text, no link, etc.
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The thing about compensation is that it isn't just about giving something back to the playerbase, it is also a punitive move on the company for dropping the ball so hard. At 50c per day, a 24hr downtime has wasted very little of my money, but when you multiply that by however many actives Eve has right now and you're talking a serious disincentive for this kind of fubar to happen in future, and that's the component that is missing here.
To an extent it's great that CCP are finally taking some degree of responsibility and offering players a form of compensation, but the method they're using doesn't cost them anything, and that really means that this isn't going to change their... "interesting" approach to live changes. The last 6+ years have shown that CCP are better at placating the masses than they are at doing effective QA. This is better than nothing, which is what we normally get, but it's still not the way it should be done.
Luke
Well they were planning on giving us something free on the 29th anyway, this just informs us what it is. As for the downtime they are hot-dropping a day and a half of free skill points to spend in what skills you want as well.
http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=3963&tid=1
Am more then happy with this, prefer the bonus skill point pool then a free days play
So your point is that CCP should be punished whenever something unforseen happens and the server becomes unavailable for a period of time? That kind of logic would only result in CCP being less inclined to make upgrades, both hardware and software/do it less frequently. The idea that CCP isn't already doing everything within reason to avoid problems is stupid.
We get a free ship, a day+ worth of skills and people still cry over not getting a free day put on their sub? really!?
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Waiting on: GW2, BP
What link?
Luke, Luke, Luke...
Please tell me the way it should be done. I'm fairly sure skills were still training during the downtown, when I looked at mine it seemed the appropriate amount of time had passed.
Now I get extra SP as well? More then good enough for me and MOST no doubt.
There are two kinds of people in this world. People who pick their nose.. and liars.
hmm, can't find a way to edit the above post. 'downtown' = downtime
There are two kinds of people in this world. People who pick their nose.. and liars.
Hehe, quite the spelling error
Edit is next to the 'Quote' and 'reply' of your post.
Not if you post directly from the news page (y'know, clicking on the article from the main page). There's only "quote" and "reply." Anyways, good move on CCP's part. We all know most companies don't bother giving and compensation because, technically, they don't have to. We all agreed to downtime and such, and if there's too much, cancel.
Ahh right didn't think of that.
On topic: Personally I think that these gifts will create a precedent where people will expect to get something every time this happens. Not sure that's a good thing...
I think Luke has a valid point. While it's nice to have the free ship and some SP (no problems with either of these), there have been suggestions in the past on how to minimize downtime on the server(s). For example, if CCP would care to "advance" themselves into the current day of technology, they would already have some sort of Cluster set up for the Production environment (the Game space server, or servers) - an active-passive-passive (three-way) cluster would work well. Each day during their downtime, they could switch to one of the other cluster nodes. The process is called a "fail-over" which can be automatic (the active server crashes) or manually-induced (a "controlled" fail-over). Clustered scenarios are in wide use today by many Companies and Corporations - we, as users of many of their Services, never even notice that they may have failed-over to another node. The Cluster scenario is also great for planned, or contingency outages - you can continue operating under an active-passive setup, and do what ever work is needed on the third node (the additional passive system, or hot-standby) by temporarily taking it out of the Cluster. With this type of set-up, EVE could essentially become a 24/7 environment. Unless you needed to "refresh" or rebuild the client application running on your system (PC, Mac, whatever), you'd never need to log off/out of EVE (even this functionality could be updated, where it could be done in the background while the client is running).
I, among many others, am continually frustrated when I have to continue checking the clock when the server downtime is getting near. It's a bother because you can't engage in anything that's going to require some serious playing time. The downtime may be convenient for them [CCP] (it's roughly around lunchtime for them, so do the server re-start/boot funciton and take their lunch break), but it's not "lunchtime" for many of the rest of us - it's an hour (or more) of valuable playing time that we're being robbed of, from a very small time window of our 24-hour day . THIS, is the real inconvenience that I think we should be compensated for.
"Live long and prosper" .....
I for one am sufficiently happy with the way they handle things most of the time...
Having said that I understand that they don't always do things the way your Industry/Business does but then they may not have the resources available to just do things that way to start with... It's one thing for a Major multinational corporate outfit to throw the kind of money it might take to set things up that way but then considering how they started on a shoestring and have worked their way up the ladder the hard way I think we should give them a break and a Thank you for what they have done..
They could probably make more money by being cheaper than they are and doing thigns like most MMO's do but then EVE wouldn't be EVE would it? Like most everyone else I'm as entitled to my Opinion as you are and I cannot say someones Opinion is wrong, only that I disagree with it...
Perhaps those of you with the greater experience at setting these systems up should put in an App to CCP and maybe they'd be interested... Or not...
Daily server restart time is about 15-20 minutes. I believe a year or two ago it was an hour or more. When was the last time you played? This downtime was due to physically moving the servers. And, yes, there is a failover, but the part about bringing the servers up to current day tech was a good read, as you are talking about one of the largest and most advanced supercomputers in the industry.
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Well I'm no server expert by any definition, but I dont think it would work. They aren't just having the downtime for a simple restart, but because certain operations need to be carried out daily that can only be done when noone is on the server + serverside fixes.
Again I'm no expert, but I have read a lot of smart sounding 'solutions' from the Eve community regarding servers and such and as soon as a CCP dev enters the ideas are shot down for good practical or technical reasons I wont pretend to understand
Downtime is 1 hour per day - a great deal more convenient than the game being down for the better part of a day once per week imo (like those "other guys" do it). if EVE were 24/6 instead of 23/7 I can guarantee that my day off would be on maintenance day - and that would really be irritating.
Unless an environment is implemented such as the one Sparcdude suggests; there has to be some sort of maintenance period, and whenever it is - in a global community, someone is going to be inconvenienced by the timing. My vote would be to rotate downtime from week to week in sort of a 'flip-flop' scenerio so that each major TZ (North America, UK, Russia etc...) has downtime rotate through their prime time playing period. Then, everyone has equal opportunity at their point in the rotation to be playing right after DT and have access to the advantages that it provides - such as access to newly spawned grav sites/anomolies and asteroid belts etc.
To clarify one point - the free ship is NOT compensation for the downtime people. Nor is it rare since every active paying account will get one (altough it could be considered uncommon since it will not be available to build or buy after the one-time gift). The ship was a planned - before the unexpected lengthy downtime - gift/promo for the new PI feature. The fact that they are giving both the ship and the free skill training time on the same day is simply a smart move on CCP's part because it makes the ship appear to be part of the compensation and lessens their workload by doing both at the same time.
As for the free skill training time for every active account (including trial accounts which were active at the beginning of the downtime), which IS compensation for the extended downtime, I personally am very pleased and, quite frankly, amazed to be getting it. In my eleven-plus years of MMO gaming, I have never known ANY company to take the time or responsibility to compensate players for downtime (although somewhere in the back of my mind I do seem to remember someone giving a worthless cosmetic babble once, but I may be wrong).
I give CCP
for this unprecedented move. The free skill training time is a much more usable recompense than a day of free time and is tangible to every player. I mean, c'mon. Really. Who would even notice that their sub payment was moved ahead by one day? And who would even care? Not to mention the fact that such a move would lead to all kinds of headaches and potential problems and errors while changing every single account's due date to add one day. How many accounts would get billed twice, or get changed erroneously to one week or month, or get dropped altogether, or, with the various pay plans, have their plans changed unexpectedly to a different plan?
Kudos to CCP.
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Surprise~! I remember, one time WoW does reimburse game-time due to unplanned downtime. This was before TBC.