MegabitOne
Caldari
The Black Ops
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Posted - 2010.06.26 11:38:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Nathan Jameson
I wasn't really inconvenienced by the extra downtime. I'm mature enough and have enough to do in real life to keep myself occupied, so the free SP is more of a nice gift than something I should feel is necessary. I enjoy the game enough to keep playing, despite any temporary setbacks.
On CCP's side, however, they have a commitment to excellence as a business. It's their job to be professional in everything they do. They may not be a company that provides hospitals with medicine, per se, but the business model still applies. They should be doing everything in their power as a company to make sure they can provide reliable service to their paying customers.On their end? They need more redundancy, quality control, and fall-back options. And I'm one of the few players who wouldn't mind paying a little more each month, if the problem really all boils down to lack of funds. Though I suspect it's a combination of more complex reasons.
I largely agree with the above point of view. One point where I disagree is to see the SP's as a nice gift. People saying they couldn't play for a day: true. But so could none of their competitors, so the status quo was kept: no one gained anything, no one lost anything. So far as for what the game is concerned.
On another level, CCP as a company clearly didn't plan for failure. No one does. But they also have a commitment to us, paying customers. People are saying there is no compensation. This is not entirely true from my point of view. All accounts will get free skill points to make up for lost time. So actually CCP is paying us back. Since training skills costs time; read: money. If the outage took one day, about 1/30th of Ç/$ 15 should be compensated, or about $Ç0.5. How much is this worth? In Isk, the calculation is fairly simple: a plex costs 300m and lets one play for 30d, so 1d = 30m Isk. In skill points, on average most people can train about 1m SP per month. 1/30th of that is 33.333 SP's. If CCP gives anything more than that, this would be a bonus and a gesture on their part.
For me the SP's are in fact a good compensation. Throwing iskies around will get everyone a bit richer, but will also cause inflation, which is not good. Skill points is a far better compensation if you ask me.
I would certainly hope that CCP and the CSM would agree that this system of compensation through skills should be a standard way of compensation from now on for all unplanned downtime. To measure this, CCP should make some kind of Service Level Agreement stating what the expected up-time is (99%, 99.9%, ...). Of course this doesn't include the standard 1h downtime each day. If the total server uptime falls under the SLA, CCP should start compensating their customers. CCP might even "gain" uptime again for every minute their systems are up sooner than planned. I haven't heard anyone moaning so far that most of the time the servers are up at 11:30 instead of 12:00 in the week-end, so actually being able to play more than the 23/7 CCP offers.
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I'm not as bad-ass as some of my corp mates, but I'll pwn you anyway!
-= In God we trust, all the others pay cash =- |