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Originally Posted by
FoxyBunneh
First of all, Tamu is trying his best to be helpful and to point out that the problem is not on the Evony server side. Flaming him for it is despicable at best and shows a distinct lack of character.
I would guess you're talking about the recent response from MG95. If so, then yes, I agree, it was angst-ridden and aimed at the wrong person / entity, as TAMU is just a fellow customer.
That said, there are legitimate reasons why people get so upset with the tech support infrastructure around here. TAMU attempted to help, much like I have attempted to help in the past. The thing is, what TAMU pointed out is what I've been struggling with you mightly to get you to understand. Those peering connections are what I've suspected to be at least one source of problems for around the past 5-8 months. The "Any2" exchange and other peering points in the Los Angeles, California, area comes up repeatedly when obtaining routes from people who are having problems.
What you, as an employee, and now as a regular customer, seem to fail to understand, is that it is not a customer's responsibility to contact Cogent, XO, Level3, or any of the other peering partners along that chain that TAMU mentioned. Why? Because they are providing a service to Evony, not to the individual customers of Evony.
Sure, you could state that it's "not your problem" and demand that the customer do all the work to call XO, who will then likely tell them to call their ISP because Evony's customer doesn't have a customer relationship with XO. The customer will then call their ISP, and the ISP will say that it's not their issue either, and that the Evony customer should "reinstall their operating system" and/or contact Evony.
That is commonly referred to as "the run-around", and customers don't much care for it...
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If we have thousands of players online, and they are all connected to the server, it is not "down". Don't give me that "it's down for him" garbage, please. A server being down means that it is not currently operating, online, and available for login. The server isn't down if you are the only person who can't get onto it.
Instead of being totally hung up on the word "down" and thus going into total denial mode, what would save people a lot of frustration, including saving yourself from frustration, is to simply translate that word in your mind when you hear / see it as the customer is saying the server is "unavailable" to them.
Demanding exacting precision in wording from customers, is, well, being too demanding. It'd be different if your only customers were, for example, NASA launch employees who have to be extremely precise, or CDC employees who also need to be precise when dealing with an outbreak. Instead, your customers tend to be "average Joes", ranging in age from 13 to in their 60s. If you can't just internally translate the word in your mind, then the next best thing is to ask questions to try to get the customer to phrase things that make more sense to you / do not get you as agitated.
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Evony isn't Apple, or Microsoft, or Emachines or HP or Dell. They aren't your ISP. They aren't the "Geek Squad" who comes out to your house to fix your computer problems. They can offer some general assistance to help you get connected to the game, but it isn't feasible or reasonable or even possible to provide in-depth diagnostics and support to the people who can't make things work. They aren't in the computer support business...they are in the business of creating and running a game. That's it.
Here again, Joe Schmoe Evony Customer, generally speaking, cannot call up Evony's ISP, Colocation host / provider, peering partner / bandwidth provider. Evony has to do that, and it most certainly is a part of "running a game". Pushing all problems off on a customer, when they can clearly demonstrate that it is not their system at fault, will, not might, but will, anger a large percentage of people.
To re-illustrate, here is the situation that the user "Cane" experienced. They were subjected to this kind of "it's your computer's fault" stuff...
http://ploader.net/files/6b7462c661f...2eca78cb4f.jpg
This kind of situation is NOT a problem with a customer's computer, because if it were, switching to a proxy would not have solved the issue. He was also able to authenticate WITHOUT the proxy, so that means his connection made it as far as the login servers, but then got dropped along the way to the game server. Still, his computer was blamed, and he was allegedly told to stop talking about the issue. :dizzy:
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While I know the tech team and customer service all have sympathy for those who have issues like this, and they'd love to help, their options are extremely limited. The problem isn't at Evony. I don't know where it is, but 1000's of people aren't magically finding a way around the servers being 'down'.
Again, there are many different pathways to reach the servers through the Internet Cloud. When one route is affected, say, for example, the route that traffic from The Philippines takes, you see an area that cannot access, while other areas are not impacted in the slightest. The fault then was not the people's computers, nor was it their government blocking Evony, as was alleged at the time. It was a peering problem, and I don't know why it is that difficult to understand that it happens more often than you appear to think it does, and it has nothing to do with a customer's computer.
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Your computer was able to access it previously if you played and spent before this. So here's your clue: Figure out what changed. SOMETHING did. I'm sorry for your frustration, but we've all gone through it with one game or another at times, or with some piece of software, and eventually you need to either take the responsibility for fixing this yourself or shrug and move on.
Customers cannot "fix" a problem that exists beyond their system. What "Cane" went through demonstrated a potential problem within Evony's LAN. I wish you could understand that problems exist that are not in the jurisdiction of the customer to correct, and that working together to solve the issue would be less stressful than both sides saying "not my problem"...