Pizzutz
Gallente
The Freelancer's Mining Cartel
Fidelas Constans
   |
Posted - 2010.06.29 15:21:00 -
[1]
You know, we have this argument every patch. CCP is not stupid. They know just as well as we do that whatever time the servers are scheduled to come back is going to be off by 2-24 hours. We all know that in IT, unexpected things happen occasionally, like last week. Even my generous +6hrs that I add to every patch schedule in my head didn't come close to covering that one, and I believe there were real problems that they didn't expect that needed to be fixed. (Of course, we never got the dev blog about it that we were promised, so who knows)
My point is, this dt extension issue is normally not an IT issue. it's a marketing issue. Their marketing department has told them that they are better off giving a early estimate of return, and extending it 1-2 hours at a time. If you think about it, it has a few advantages from a business standpoint.
1) With shorter announced dts, there are less people complaining in the weeks leading up to the DT
2) By extending the deadline 1-2 hours at a time, it forces people to visit their website constantly to get the new restoration time, increasing hits and traffic.
3) by intentionally making the restore times on the early side, there is no pressure to meet them, which takes the pressure off the it team, and effectivly allows them to take all the time they need to do their work properly, rather than sacrificing quality for speed on patches.
4) Believe it or not, bringing the servers back early would lead to a number of complaints too. ("The servers were supposed to be back up at xx:xx, and I logged in at that time to find my POS RFed already by people who had been logged in for 2 hrs already)
While I personally would rather have the DT end earlier than scheduled, (or even on time, just once!!), and I suspect the actual community liasons like CCP_Navigator would too, from a company perspective , I see why they run things the way they do.
Pizzutz - SHAPE Personnel Manager
Pizzitz - SHAPE Research Director
Pizzotz - SHAPE Employee |