Vincenzo Delloro
Lux et Veritas
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Posted - 2008.06.24 06:48:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: X Ex
To follow on from Lithia's post (for non-Network geeks about the high level Internet structure), you need to also consider that many ISPs and Backbone providers have "intelligent" devices making routing and prioritisation decisions. These are like having people do the tasks but generally faster to instigate changes and are usually rules based.
So, it's possible that any one of the networks in your path may initiate some form of interference (e.g. increase latency on some types of traffic either permanently or as required to service higher priority needs, drop some types of traffic for similar reasons, selectively reroute for damage or cost reasons, and so on).
Some of these come into the category of "traffic shaping" which is used to keep the backbones from being overloaded (flattens out saturation peaks and keeps high priority stuff flowing) and others come into the "route around damage" category (such as router outages, saturated links, high cost links, etc).
As to whether CCP *should* provide some compensation or not, I'd say probably they should but they are not under any obligation to under EULA. Welcome to being a business.
Since using any network service provider as a company should have Service Level Agreements and Compensation Clauses, they should be able to legitimately apply for real $$$ compensation if they choose. This is to reduce damage to the company which in this case would likely be to pay for the effort of keeping their customers happy. As a note, if they do not have such SLA clauses they would be very unusual and rather remiss.
If you work out the potential loss of any reasonable percentage of CCP's customer base at the cheapest subscription rate, their costs could feasibly be quite substantial; especially with respect to customer retention and foregone acquisition (yes, this comment was aimed at the CCP Marketing and Communications teams).
Flamers welcome, all I've tried to do is state some business realities rather than attack players/posters or CCP's capabilities.
Very well said. I work in a position where I'm asked to make decisions about compensation for customers impacted by loss of service fairly often, and those are exactly the sorts of things I have to consider every time.
I've been lucky in that I haven't been affected by these issues at all this time, but quite frankly it can't be any worse than the desychs we used to have to deal with. A year ago I lost my very first BS (an Apoc) on my very first mission with it because I desynched as soon as every rat in the complex targeted me. And then I lost another one a few hours later the same way.
Nowadays you kids have it easy.
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