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System problems & communications
Hi sky folks,
As I've been sat in a frozen deep stack tournament I've had an hour to compose some thoughts for you, hopefully they'll be taken as constructive criticism rather than the moaning I'm seeing elsewhere
So: the problem is games "freezing", particularly system-wide freezes (well, on MTTs at least) as we're experiencing right now. Lost revenue, P'd off players so I know you don't like it any more than us punters, but perhaps there's some way to make this less of a hassle than it is at present?
The problem, to my mind, is a lack of communication. We've been frozen for almost 2 hours and the only comms from the sky end has been a single "We're looking into it" message on the lobby message scroller, well over an hour ago. Of course many people won't bother to check the lobby/forums, and even if they did there's no solid info. Imagine if you were sat on a train platform waiting for a 2 hours late train with no staff around and all the screens out...that's what this feels like.
of course people could just drop out (I'm in a £2.20 tourny so no big deal really) but when you've invested time in the game you don't want to do that while it's in limbo, in case it returns to life. Dudeskin8 also mentioned he'd spoken to CS and they said drop outs would not be refunded, which is a pretty poor approach to customer service if you ask me.
Anyway, things happen, I think all players know this and are happy to forgive technical problems so long as they're dealt with in the right way. In this case I think that should mean a clear policy and procedure for "frozen" games. The main issue I've heard from players is that they'e in limbo with no clue what to do, so perhaps this would overcome that.
How about:
* As soon as problems become apparant a "looking into it" message is posted in the lobby and, if possible, as a pop up to individual tables
* Engineers triage the problem and an ETA on a fix is communicated to players at their tables if the techs have any solid clues/know what to fix right away
* After a set time, say 30 minutes, engineers make a decision on whether the problem is fixable very shortly. If not all frozen games are ended and players refunded. If the engineers think they are getting somewhere this is communicated to at table players as a "Please bear with us, we hope to be only X minutesaway from a fix" message.
All pretty simple I'd hope, and I'm 100% sure you'd have much less grumpy people at tables and on the forum saying they're jumping ship to other sites.
Compare and contrast to the freeze which happened when you were testing rebuys: players were messaged at table, tikay was doing the rounds speaking to people at individual tables and keeping us updated, and the end result was that despite a frozen tourny there was a lot of great banter and everyone seemed pretty happy.
Sorry, got a bit long winded there but something you'll take into consideration I (and many other players) hope!
As I've been sat in a frozen deep stack tournament I've had an hour to compose some thoughts for you, hopefully they'll be taken as constructive criticism rather than the moaning I'm seeing elsewhere
So: the problem is games "freezing", particularly system-wide freezes (well, on MTTs at least) as we're experiencing right now. Lost revenue, P'd off players so I know you don't like it any more than us punters, but perhaps there's some way to make this less of a hassle than it is at present?
The problem, to my mind, is a lack of communication. We've been frozen for almost 2 hours and the only comms from the sky end has been a single "We're looking into it" message on the lobby message scroller, well over an hour ago. Of course many people won't bother to check the lobby/forums, and even if they did there's no solid info. Imagine if you were sat on a train platform waiting for a 2 hours late train with no staff around and all the screens out...that's what this feels like.
of course people could just drop out (I'm in a £2.20 tourny so no big deal really) but when you've invested time in the game you don't want to do that while it's in limbo, in case it returns to life. Dudeskin8 also mentioned he'd spoken to CS and they said drop outs would not be refunded, which is a pretty poor approach to customer service if you ask me.
Anyway, things happen, I think all players know this and are happy to forgive technical problems so long as they're dealt with in the right way. In this case I think that should mean a clear policy and procedure for "frozen" games. The main issue I've heard from players is that they'e in limbo with no clue what to do, so perhaps this would overcome that.
How about:
* As soon as problems become apparant a "looking into it" message is posted in the lobby and, if possible, as a pop up to individual tables
* Engineers triage the problem and an ETA on a fix is communicated to players at their tables if the techs have any solid clues/know what to fix right away
* After a set time, say 30 minutes, engineers make a decision on whether the problem is fixable very shortly. If not all frozen games are ended and players refunded. If the engineers think they are getting somewhere this is communicated to at table players as a "Please bear with us, we hope to be only X minutesaway from a fix" message.
All pretty simple I'd hope, and I'm 100% sure you'd have much less grumpy people at tables and on the forum saying they're jumping ship to other sites.
Compare and contrast to the freeze which happened when you were testing rebuys: players were messaged at table, tikay was doing the rounds speaking to people at individual tables and keeping us updated, and the end result was that despite a frozen tourny there was a lot of great banter and everyone seemed pretty happy.
Sorry, got a bit long winded there but something you'll take into consideration I (and many other players) hope!