EVE General Discussion

And yet we pay for the EVE entertainment service, just as we pay for other business services that might fall under the "serious" category.

Dependencies on ancillary systems are just as critical for review as is the primary functionality of the newly implemented logic and UI. Regardless of what caused the failure, CCP's EVE subscribers were faced with a service that was rendered unavailable without some under the covers technical tinkering on a widespread scale. The perception was that the launcher had utterly failed even though it was content / data feeds which were buckling under some unknown pressures. On top of these problems, there was little-to-no communication from CCP that they were intending to foist some significant new functionality on their users. Given a few days notice, players would have set their long-train skills and gotten assets out of harm's way. Instead of properly setting the expectation of a patch day, CCP surprised its customers in a bad way. This is a big no-no in the world of customer relationship management.

The challenge that CCP faces with poorly executed patch releases is one of a cumulative nature where CCP, on an annual basis, royally fucks up what they market as "expansions" with game breaking defects or functionality that is considered to be highly undesirable by their customers. The list is long with these ****-ups and EVE subscribers have even longer memories.

When CCP pulls a completely avoidable stunt like they did with this new launcher functionality release, the collective perception of CCPs ineptitude is acutely focused on what has gone wrong rather than on the future potential [some might say vaporware] of CCP's long-term initiatives.

>> So you expect CCP to buy 20,000 computers to bombard the server with to ensure it can handle the load?

This is the bad it-is-difficult-to-test-so-we-dont argument again.

I am an IT professional and you have to trust me, when I say that you don't need 20.000 computers to put pressure on a web-server. You need at most a handful. Think of it: The URL you use to access this page is maybe 60 characters long while the returned HTML is nearly 50.000 characters long (excluding images). All the work in a client-server scenario like this is on the server side.

There are plenty of tools for stress testing web-servers, both commercial and open source, so the problem is not technical but procedural: Lack of proper pre-release QA.

I've always used a folder branch rather than multiple copies, so I always ran the launcher once to patch, then ran different copies of the same folder but mapped to a different location to avoid patching issues. The new launcher has just made it forget my individual logins.


I would love that yes. However have they fixed the issue with the client and cache collisions?
When you are running multiple clients, and 2 of them try to write to the cache at the same time (often when you are jumping 2 account simultaneously) it can cause all open clients running from the same folder to lock for 10 - 15 seconds. In high sec, who cares, but in null sec that can mean death. The solution to this issue is to branch your folders so each client has a different cache location. It will be utterly useless to run multiple accounts from one click if this issue hasn't been resolved.

Clearly you are not a very good IT professional if you can't understand why a rollout to thousands of players across the internet is a completely different scenario to in house testing. They can't catch everything in house, the login issues were a small blip, and were fixed same day. The fact that they were on hand to fix it as quickly as they could shows they were doing their jobs. 100% uptime and all bugs found during internal testing would be lovely but that's a dream you simply can't achieve in reality.

It's not an attack it's a statement of fact. You are stating you are an IT Professional which you are saying to make the rest of your statement more valid. What I am pointing out is that the rest of your statement makes it clear that you are not an IT Professional or at the very least have no experience in internal vs external network testing, and thus your statement is no more valid than any other end user.

If you truly think they'd have to buy even 1 additional server to load test this you have no idea what you're talking about. There are companies that provide that service for you. Do you think E-Commerce sites buy millions of computers to test the loads on their sites for the holidays? Or do they just wing it and potentially loose business?

You forgot the most important part of the new patch:

It now requires an additional click before I get to the character selection screen compared with before.

I have issues with this. Why the hell would we need to do more tedious tasks to even START the game.

Some devs must really like doing PI or something.... jeez.

Edit: Not to mention that it takes an extra click to switch accounts now... whereas previously I could just: Click login, enter login details, TAB, enter password... I now have to click "switch user accounts" in a windows-esque system that reminds me of BLOAT. Seriously, who the hell made this piece of ****?

Well I dunno about extra clicks as the process to me remains:
-Open shortcut
-password
-Connect/Play
-Select character

As for switching account I know it isn't very elegant right now, but now character swapping is SO easy. If you leave the launcher open to keep your logged in state then you can simply hit the play button again and pick another character. No retyping of password cause the client completely reset itself \o/

Well, we all know what happened last time they did that, so I guess it's not so bad, huh?

Thanks for the really good thread!

Not the point, the point is its not more userfriendly to add clicks to something that worked well before.

One click here, one click there, before you notice you click 100 times more each day.

Though, don't you have the drop down so that after the first time you can now just select the 6 account names from there?

I heard that typing the first few letters will have it guess for you too.