Unacceptable

[StupidNoob 3]

My server recently went down. I checked and saw there was staff intervention.

Now it's back up and we've lost the last 10 or so hours and have a different IP.

I know, I'm telling a familiar story for these forums, but I'm not here to complain.

I'm here to offer constructive feedback.

 

My personal experience up until now, I had no complaints. The server would stop here and there but I expected some technical hiccups given the under developed state of multiplayer on this game and it was easy enough to just start it again, at most a couple minutes were lost.

Now we lost around 10 hours of progress and I have to communicate a new IP to all of my players. So we traded a very mild annoyance for a big pain point, purely due to this occurring without any communication or loss mitigation occurring.

 

I started my server a couple days ago and read in these forums at the time that some sort of optimization was occurring with some servers which was causing this problem for some people. I started my server after this began and so I reasonably presumed my server would have been created with this already present. If it's such an urgent fix that warrants an “emergency” style fix being applied, surely new servers are being deployed with this integrated...right?

Apparently not.

I was in fact manually saving the server periodically, just in case, but it just so happened that this occurred for me shortly before I was about to start my day. So in that sense it was just unfortunate timing in terms of the actualized loss but the point however remains. The fix should have been integrated into new server deployment.

Stopping the proverbial fire from spreading should be given top priority, otherwise you're just ensuring all your new customers become pissed off customers.

 

Now what should have happened, is this should have been performed in a maintenance window and stakeholders like me should have been notified before hand.

All of the pain points this has created for me could have been prevented simply by following basic change deployment standards.

Had I been informed something to the effect of:

“We'll be performing a migration on your server between X and Y time today. This will result in a change of IP. Game progress during this window may be lost.”

I could have planned for this. I could have informed players. I could have gotten up an hour earlier to log on and do a manual save.

Since it was a surprise though, I had no such opportunity. It's just loss and angry players that could have been prevented or at least mitigated.

 

I'm not asking for an apology or compensation. I'm asking you to do better.

All of these pissed off customers you have now, including me, it doesn't have to be this way and it's not hard to prevent.

Simply organize your deployment and communicate with your customers.

Develop a change management process.

If you had a proper one in place, you wouldn't have 99% of these pissed off customers.

 

This is my humble advice as a long time Survival Servers customer and an IT professional.

I have long found your server performance to be good and your prices quite reasonable. I would very much like to continue using your service and recommending it to others.

This however, has to change. You can't go flying by the seat of your pants when you're charging people for a service, it's not professional.

Moreover, I hope you see that it is in your best interest as a business to do this. Quantify the time and expense caused by your unhappy customers and compare it to creating and following a proper change management standard. There's a reason this is the industry norm.

 

Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope you will sincerely consider improving your process.

 

 

[StupidNoob 3]

Just a quick follow up post to give credit where credit is due.

Since the migration my server has worked flawlessly. I haven't had a random server stop or disconnect since the change was applied.

So for all the fault I find with how it was applied I want to acknowledge that it did in fact resolve all of the technical problems I was experiencing.

[Micr0o 0]

Wish I could say the same from my experience. We lost player data twice now.... I am tired of this lack of communication. This post captured the process of how things should be handled perfectly. We lost hours of our time...

It seems like player data is just missing but not fully. Some areas of the map are still discovered as it was before but all progress is gone, this indicates that something is missing. Please implement or offer a fix like other platforms are currently doing

[StealthyMartian 64]

1 hour ago, Micr0o said:

Wish I could say the same from my experience. We lost player data twice now.... I am tired of this lack of communication. This post captured the process of how things should be handled perfectly. We lost hours of our time...

It seems like player data is just missing but not fully. Some areas of the map are still discovered as it was before but all progress is gone, this indicates that something is missing. Please implement or offer a fix like other platforms are currently doing

If you still have this issue I can try to find any missing data on our system.

[Micr0o 0]

I would really appreciate it. If that would be possible. 

[Micr0o 0]

Sorry, just realized that I did not quote for the notification

Edit: Not sure how to delete this lmao

Edited January 29 by Micr0o
mistake

[Micr0o 0]

26 minutes ago, StealthyMartian said:

If you still have this issue I can try to find any missing data on our system.

 

13 minutes ago, Micr0o said:

I would really appreciate it. If that would be possible. 

I did it again lol, sorry