You can keep defending them. The simple fact was this was completely avoidable in first case.
The fact other companies are even worse is also irrelevant.
If updates were rolled out a 10am on a Monday 80,000 players would not of been affected. If you work in IT you do rollouts in off hours. You don't wait till just before everyone comes to work cross your fingers and flip the switch.
The Christmas rollout introduced problems that continued into the weekend.
The Pyromania rollout introduced problems that continued into the weekend.
This MVM update introduced problems likely to continue into the weekend.
Regular updates are most common on Thursdays making mistakes likely to continue into the weekends.
This is not a fluke this is not even a trend at this point this is a practice of conducting business.
While I may be the only one speaking up about this while a few of you guys with one server want to pile on me and praise Valve I guarantee more people think this whole ordeal is an established pattern
and entirely avoidable.
We are the cashiers for valve and if I am going to ring their cash register bells several hundred thousand times a year. I think reasonably level of professionalism is to be expected.
If you worked and IT and crashed the email servers an hour before lunchtime the CEO isn't going to say oh well he is going to ask why didn't you do it at 2am then he is going to fire you cause there is no damn answer you could give that makes any sense.
Those of us who run 10 or more servers only to be shutdown on the busiest days of the week on a fairly regular basis due to a obviously untested update get a little tired of making excuses for it.
My community does not blame me either. They are well aware who is responsible. The update issues, the bug fixes that never come, item server disconnects, steam syncing issues and the complete lack of communication have been standard operating procedure for too long. But we have a store and hats, hats, hats, oh and hats.
Move the updates up 2 days and start a Quality Assurance program and a hundred thousand gamers could blissfully be unaware any of this ever happened.
----- Original Message -----
From: "E. Olsen" <[email protected]>
To: "Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2012 8:16:37 AM
Subject: Re: [hlds] [hlds_linux] Full servers, but not?
A dose of civility goes a long way.
While I'm certainly not happy to be seeing the number/frequency of crashes on our servers (and I hope a few people at Valve are willing to give up their weekend to find a fix), I don't think hurling insults Valve's way is constructive in the least. Valve has a long history of learning from their mistakes (as any great company does), and I'm sure this will be no different....and the fact that they HAVE just released a new game mode for a 5 year old game that most of our players find incredibly fun and entertaining earns them alot of leeway in my book.
I'm confident it will get fixed - the sooner the better of course - but I'm not prepared to hurl insults at a company that has done everything it can to keep a game we love moving forward year after year. Unless you guys have experienced the kind of support (or lack thereof) that server operators get from other companies (DICE/EA, Activision, etc. etc.) you have no idea how good we've got it.
Give these guys a break. Keep feeding them crash reports/problems you find, and they'll fix it asap. If your communities are so fragile they can't handle a few days of server instability without your players heading for the exits, then I would submit that you have a bigger problem you may need to address.
Disagreement and debate are a healthy thing - but once insults start flying, then this list has lost its purpose.
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