An Open Letter to Dave Mata, and anyone else that actually works at Evony.

[missirish]

Hello Evony Overlords,

I am a reasonable person. I often defend Evony when it has random issues because as a 24/7 running game, your uptime is actually rather fantastic. In the almost 6 years I have played, your issues in regards to the game being up and functional have been minimal. But lately, your communication skills...well, they stink. And that is not ok.

In the past month, ss37 has gone down twice for a significant amount of time, with not a single peep from Evony. Truces have been broken for weeks. Not a facebook status update, not a post on the forums, not a peep on twitter, and any help tickets just sit there for a day until it gets some random response that has nothing to do with anything(*). When you did post that we would be down for 2 hours for an extended maintenance....it never happened. The short of it is, we are getting rather infuriated that you just don't seem to care. We have no idea when or if you realize there are problems, or what means we can use to actually inform you of legitimate server wide or game wide issues. I don't care if its going to take 5 mins or 5 days to fix problems that come up, I just want to know that you are aware of them and working on them. Today half our accounts went missing and we have no idea what is going on. The server randomly went down for maintenance again 30 mins ago, so it was up for a good 10ish hours today, broken. That's really just not acceptable at all.

My game suggestion is this : Communicate! Just acknowledge you know there is a problem. I don't need timelines and apologizes and free compensation packages. I just need to know that YOU know and are working on it.


*I try to be helpful and open a Help Spot ticket when something goes down. On Nov 14, 2014 when I opened a ticket to tell you guys that we could not log into the server and we were all getting a SERVER PROCESSING ERROR, I got a response 24 hours later that asked for a screenshot of my problem. That isn't help, its a mockery.

[ssfgrgawer]

i agree. Communication goes a long way. Just a heads up would be fine, Dont forget us Age 1 clingers!

[ThisBaka1]

i agree. Communication goes a long way. Just a heads up would be fine, Dont forget us Age 1 clingers!

No one could forget you SSF

[davemata]

There's no need for an "open letter".

It's simple. When a problem happens, file a ticket.

Truce is currently being worked on. When a server goes down, we have monitoring happening and we'll get notified. When your ability to reach the server is impacted, we can't watch for that, and won't get notified about that. So for that we have to rely upon trouble tickets. A lot of the trouble tickets we get aren't clear, and require a lot of back and forth, etc. So keeping them as clear as possible will make everyone's life easier and resolution a lot more expedient.

After all that, if there is a problem, message me. If I'm not responding and it's a major issue like a large number of people can't reach a server, kindly ask a mod if they'd be willing to send me a message. They know how to message me directly. However, it is not their job to do so.

d

[bum783]

In another thread I defended you because you did communicate information back, and still people complained about the answers BUT.... Come ON! "just open a ticket"??? Dave I challenge you to make an account on a server then pretend to have a problem, and just "open a ticket" The tech support never communicates back, even when they do it takes 3-5 pleads for help before support replies almost as if you finally bugged them enough to respond.... What I dont understand is the inconsistency of it. Sometimes a server goes down and the facebook page is updated, the forum is updated and everyone knows whats going on. Then 3 weeks later a server goes down and there is no info at all. Even saying we dont have any information is information.

[joeydabull]

There's no need for an "open letter".

It's simple. When a problem happens, file a ticket.

Truce is currently being worked on. When a server goes down, we have monitoring happening and we'll get notified. When your ability to reach the server is impacted, we can't watch for that, and won't get notified about that. So for that we have to rely upon trouble tickets. A lot of the trouble tickets we get aren't clear, and require a lot of back and forth, etc. So keeping them as clear as possible will make everyone's life easier and resolution a lot more expedient.

After all that, if there is a problem, message me. If I'm not responding and it's a major issue like a large number of people can't reach a server, kindly ask a mod if they'd be willing to send me a message. They know how to message me directly. However, it is not their job to do so.

d

lol again with submitting tickets? been there done that and never a real response from evony cs. just auto replys. evony has been crashing all month and all the tickets and threads were in and not one response from evony. to be honest this is the first time in a month im seeing you reply to something. i would just wish you would stop telling people to submit tickets when you know that know one will answer. believe me i know im still waiting now almost 6 months for a ticket to be answered. i wish Ucool will just admit they don't wanna take care of there games anymore. like tynon no cs there at all and no tickets being answered there as well. just last week alone ss46 had so much down time server or servers kept crashing. and there was no update from evony on any fixes. evony cs was alot better when DAWNSEEKER was here. all though i did not like him cause he was helping one person cheat. but at least he got to the bottom of in game issies. we need that kind of service. minus the cheating that is.

[MechHead]

lol nate helped someone cheat? why couldnt i get that lucky? lol

[davemata]

lol nate helped someone cheat? why couldnt i get that lucky? lol

It's funny, the evidence of that is always as good as the evidence of bigfoot and nessie.

Regarding the submitting of tickets:
We are a business, and there are many, many moving parts. Without a method of tracking issues, or assigning issues to particular people for resultion, it won't happen effectively. We have the ticketing system in order to facilitate that. Essentially, if there is an issue, we'll get a ticket. If there is no issue, there will be no ticket submitted.

I used to work in IT a long time before I got it into my mind to work in games. In the departments I worked in, that was the sop, if there is an issue, there will be a ticket. If no issue, no ticket. We work with a system akin to that, but different. We will do extra-ticket work, particularly since we're supporting major software. Long story short though, if there is a problem, there will be a ticket, and once there is a ticket, if there is an issue with getting it responded to, then you can pm me with a ticket number and if needed I can investigate.

I can't do that without a ticket.

[VeteranV]

I would just be happy if someone would address the massive stuck troop issue taking place on most Age 1 servers, as well as ss79.

Why doesn't Evony event comment on this issue? It has been going on for months. The game is completely unplayable when waves are stuck for 30+ minutes.. sometimes an hour or more.

[mattp169]

Welcome to tynon ( another uCool product) folks. we have tickets that go unanswered now for months, no new updates or anything. We havent even had Davemata comment on our forum for months, I think he made 2 posts since Dawn left. I used to play evony and loved it, it was always working and only had small issues here and there and was considering returning to evony. BUt after seeing all the sam eissues happening in evony that happen in tynon I am now reconsidering