Funcom plz tell why Most players have unaceptable pings

[kalston]

If you say so. But you do realize how small AoC playerbase is, right? I mean even on the "populated" Eu you play with the same few players every day

[Vedmed]

If you say so. But you do realize how small AoC playerbase is, right? I mean even on the "populated" Eu you play with the same few players every day

I can only guesstimate how big/small community is.

But I can tell you for sure - I'm sick and tired of all posts about exodus of thousands players. And all those posts from small number of the same people. Makes me wonder how big number of leaving players with active subscription really is.

[Kurt2013]

Probably not even funcom knows, because of the subscription and f2p model. For example, if you have a game that limits access to people with a monthly sub only, you will know the effects of your doings quite fast (next month). If you have 3 month, 6 and 12 months subs it complicated things (because players are listed as "active sub", while they don't play anymore at all or in worst case spread the news amongst others). Now add third party revenues like the item shop and a f2p access that complicates things even further...

Then there are people with multiple accounts, groups of friends and whole guilds...if a critical point of annoyed players are reached it can become a snowball effect fast and your population can appear larger or smaller than it really is. That is a good reason to pay some respect to customer feedback and not belittle people as "whining and crying". A company/customer relation is not a onesided favor by the company and if players leave or stop paying (worst case are players NOT leaving, but trolling doom all over global on crom or running pvp amok on fury like certain people) those players save stress, money and time, while the company has to keep struggling.

[Invino]

Invino, what if EU-PVP players are not majority of AoC's paying playerbase?
I feel for EU folks, but whine on forums won't change anything....

Belated reply, wasn't at work today

Majority are based in EU and east of EU, not in US. PvPers or not. I am willing to bet at least 30% are from Scandinavia alone.
Raiding is a bit trickier now, as some folks who were on 150ms already are now on 250ms+, which is very noticable.

I can't whine as my ping is 95-125ms. I am lucky to have Virgin cable in London, and only 12 steps to AoC server, while some EU members went from 30ms to 200ms due to 22 steps.

[Zatochi]

I can only guesstimate how big/small community is.

But I can tell you for sure - I'm sick and tired of all posts about exodus of thousands players. And all those posts from small number of the same people. Makes me wonder how big number of leaving players with active subscription really is.

mh playerbase must be huge when they merge everything to 2 servers. an losing thousands of subscribers over 5 years is not really a good argument for being succesful or making right decisions. there where over 1 million copys sold just aorund release. mot included ppl buying and subscribing the past 4 years.

No, playerbase isnt big, otherwise funcom would megre everything over to the us well knowing how that will affect many subscribers. they just hope not many will leave. time will show whos right.

i for myself didnt log in for more then 2 hours since server move and my sub will end with may. of course funcom wont notice much in the next days. subs wont end in the next few days alltogether.

there is some other point which i think funcom didnt recognize. eu ppl giving aoc a try over steam wont be there for long if they see those ping numbers. so there will be ppl leaving which subbed until now and the new players wont start with aoc when seeing such high pings while f2p.

[Maark]

And in any case, EU players are now getting a downgraded product for the same price, so it's no wonder that they are complaining.

100% agree with this.

Gameplay is not as smooth/fun for me anymore and I still have a resonable mS. I think the PVP:ers from eastern Europe draw the shortest straw here and I can understand if they feel the need to vent their frustrations. They dont need to here stuff like 'stop qq and just quit' or 'I play with mS 400 from Australia' etc. like if that would do any good.

I totally understand that Funcom wouldn't have done this if it was not a necessity to keep AoC up'n'running. No company, there are exceptions (hello Telia), wanna p*** off most of their customers just for the sake of p****** them off. Also we don't have to embrace every change that Funcom does with a /bearhug and bowing down to the people who makes changes (for better or for worse) just for letting us play this - in many ways - awesome game.

I have a sub running to july 2014 and will keep logging in for raiding and chatting. And I do look forward to playing with the peeps and peepettes from the US. But gameplay isnt as fun as it used to be for me, that's for sure.

[aocjv]

I should also point out that Funcom made decisions based on data before, which did not turn out to be in the game's best interest. Just sayin' ...

That's a fair point, and one that may need clarification on my side.

First:
1.) Making a decision based on facts ("data-driven" decision-making) is the industry standard in almost all industries, be it commercial, manufacturing, industrial, technology, service-oriented, product-oriented, business IT, video games, medical, etc. (There may be some exceptions to this, but nothing comes to mind at the moment). In other words: Science + Math > Guessing + Hunch + Intuition , or we can acceptably present it in short form as: Science > Guess
2.) Making a decision with no data (no available data, or no data gathered, or didn't bother to examine and analyze available data) is inferior to data-driven decision making.

These statements ("true facts" ) are nothing new. They have been known by businesses since forever. The quest for better information, better processing of data, better modeling and better production of statistics have directly caused improvements in the fields of math, statistics (e.g., quantitative methods), and our much beloved computing industry (mainframes to PCs, microchips, etc).

Now, just because you always choose 1 (data-driven) over 2 (guessing / hunch-driven) doesn't mean you will always succeed.

The reality is more complex than that, which is why decision making, especially when it comes to the executive / strategic level, always involves Risk Assessment (risk identification, avoidance, and mitigation).

All businesses know this, but lots of businesses across all industries eventually fold (go bankrupt, evaporate, kaput). Because practicing data-driven decision-making is not a cure-all. And sometimes, quite frankly, you are going to be screwed whatever decision you do. Market competition is usually a zero-sum game (even though there are lots of economic situations that aren't strictly zero-sum due to the nature of certain goods and services), and when your competitors have simply cornered the majority of the market, you are out of luck, and it's possible no amount of data-driven decision making will result in you being triumphant. Tough, but that's the real world.

In other words, yes, I agree that Funcom has made lots of decisions in the past years, and we assume they (like any reasonable, normal company) made these decisions after studying data on hand. Even though they have not exactly conquered WOW, that does not mean data-driven decision making is flawed. For all we know, it could simply be that, even if they make all the right choices, the premise / starting position / initial vector is wrong (doomed to fail). Success and failure at any endeavor is affected by more than just the active decisions of the party involved (we'll call these "internal factors") - lots of stuff outside of that party's control (we'll call these "external factors") can contribute more to the eventual success or failure of an endeavor, such as pre-existing market conditions, economic conditions (recession or recovery), appearance of substitute goods (an economic concept, not exactly the "lay person" meaning of substitute goods, because there is a specific nuance that the economic concept posseses), acts of god / force majeure, technology change that obsoletes the current products (think of the film camera companies when digital arrived, mainframe companies like DEC, Alpha, Data General when the PC arrived, and so on), etc. The list of external factors goes on and on.


Cliffs: Data-driven decision making is a pre-requisite to any successful business, but it is not a guarantee of success. In many, many cases, a person/company/business can consistently make the "correct" decisions based on carefully gathered and analyzed data, but they may still lose/fail/go bankrupt anyway due to uncontrollable or insurmountable external factors.

[aocjv]

you are definitely right!!! a bit harsh post maybe, but you got the point...

Yeah, I realized it was too harsh after seeing moderator Grizzly had to clean it up.

(By the way, Griz, you have my gratitude that you did not simply edit out the entire post (which would have been easier to do) instead of editing out specific portions and rewording some of them. That's painstaking surgical work. Thanks!)

I had a less than ideal day at work. I'm the Chief Software Architect for a current project for a government institution, a project for several priority systems to be rolled out on a national level. However, because the Project Manager is always absent (and frankly, quite incompetent and doesn't seem to be interested in actually doing his job), I am also the de facto project manager for the project. And today was the 2nd final presentation to the Executive Committee ("Execom") of the government institution, and it was, frankly, terrible.

Turns out, while I and my team were busy actually assembling the systems, the rest of the teams (implementation teams, core infrastructure teams, etc) were idling around for weeks. It was brought up on the execom meeting, and fingers were pointed. It was a facepalm moment for me (I told you, the PM is incompetent). I had to run around to the different Divisions just to make proper PR and damage control, and assuring them that the lazy teams will be dealt with accordingly.

OVerall, this day was a net-negative for the project, and for me personally too (I take my reputation very seriously as a consultant, so I take great care to maintain it, and the embarrassing project missteps discovered today are completely unacceptable).

Oh well. I guess I was still a bit pissed (I thought I wasn't anymore) when I drafted that post I made.

[Rathothis]

In other words, yes, I agree that Funcom has made lots of decisions in the past years, and we assume they (like any reasonable, normal company) made these decisions after studying data on hand. Even though they have not exactly conquered WOW, that does not mean data-driven decision making is flawed.

Your argument is that Funcom as a rational market player is likely to have factored in some loss of revenues, and that their projections of this loss - based on their data and assumptions - will have been smaller than the projected benefits (mainly cost savings) from shutting down the EU servers.

That is true (otherwise they are idiots), but it misses the point. Because the fact that Funcom's decision may be rational doesn't mean that its customers shouldn't voice their dissatisfaction. It's actually a luxury for a company to have a qualitative feedback channel like these forums, in most businesses, getting feedback is much more difficult

[aocjv]

1. People are quitting. Unless you think that hundreds of posts here are lying, for whatever reason.
2. "Technology reasons" is not a good enough reason for existing customers to settle with their new ping. They won't pay.
3. People quitting will affect everything. Without customers, a business does not exist. Cash flow will be affected. How much, time will tell.
4. Pretty sure nobody here said they don't like the game... I'm taking a wild guess here, I'm thinking most people here like this game.
5a) no way, really? Can their data show us the future too?
b)No we don't, but we can make estimates, or ask for the data.
c)They are not guessing, they are estimating, based on information they receive, whatever and however they get it. From guilds, players and the forums. Have you been reading the forums???

1.) Yes, people are quitting. No one is saying "nobody is quitting". In any given period (day/week/month/quarter/year), there are always old people quitting and new people joining. What's important is that the result should be net-positive - more people joining than quitting. If achieving this means alienating all the old, hardcore, veteran, whatever-adjective players in order to attract more new players, then that is going to be the course of action that has the most business sense and what will have the best chance of sustaining the company.

2.) It's not meant to "convince" customers to stay. Which is why I already said they should quit. What I said was that whether they quit or complain or threaten to quit, it won't change the fact that the server move had to happen and will not be reverted. Full stop. The reason is technological, but of course, since this is a business, there is also a major financial consideration there (but that's always the case, so it is naturally implied). So I'm not stopping people from quitting (because in fact I told them rather straight on that they should just quit and get it over with). I'm just informing them that complaining and threatening to quit will result in exactly nothing, because the server move was caused by technological and financial concerns. You are free to continue complaining about it, but as I explained, it won't really get you anything, so don't get your hopes up with a shared delusion that "maybe if over 9000 of us complain and threaten them, they'll eventually return to EU!!!!", because that's clearly not going to happen.

3.) You are stating the obvious with your third point. What you are not taking into account, is that people whining in a forum does not constitute valid data. Do you know what constitutes valid data? Logs from Funcom. Logs showing player log-ins to the game. Reports showing number of active subscriptions, trend reports of new subscriptions normalized over a period (weeks/months/quarter/ or even year-over-year), trend reports of cancelled subs, statistics of time and count of F2P->Premium converts, etc. Funcom has these data. You (and everybody else here) does not. That's what I'm saying. You and the posters like you are posting doom and gloom as if you had actual refined data on hand, when in fact you have zero factual relevant data. So yes, people quitting will affect the game, and cash flow requires customers, yadda yadda yadda. But how many, exactly have quit and cancelled their subs? Is it too much? How does it compare based on the projected cancelled subs? How does it affect cash flow, will it overcome the net contribution of all remaining active subs and new subs? You, and posters like you here, cannot answer these questions, because you have no real data. Therefore, whether this move makes sense or not, the only party who can actually make a rational, informed decision based on real data is... wait for it... not you, not me, but Funcom.

4.) Lots of people mentioned that the "ping"/latency has made the game "unplayable" and "not the same game anymore that I loved". Ergo, they don't love it anymore. This is obvious and very rudimentary logic. Due to the increased latency, they don't like the game anymore, which is why they are quitting. If they still liked the game (despite it's current status, which, according to them, has unreasonable latency - a determination that they are well within their right to say since it is a personal thing), they wouldn't be quitting, would they?

5.a-c) This is the source of your frustration. You are confusing what is valid data from guesstimates and second-hand info. The delta between the two is enormous (consider: Funcom has years and years of this data, which amounts to probably hundreds of pages of reports, charts, graphs relating to player activity, subs, income, losses, as well as thousands upon thousands of pages of raw data to analyze. You, on the other hand, only have some conversations from guildees and forum posts). If you cannot accept this fact (that funcom's data is far more indicative and useful for rational decision-making compared to what us players - who have no access to extensive logs - can scrounge from guilds or forums), then we can just stop right here. There is no sense for us to continue debating each other. If you would rather stick to your flawed personal beliefs instead of accepting an age-old, time-tested, science-proven industry-standard methodology such as data-driven decision-making, then we will have no common ground upon which to facilitate a rational debate. We will simply end up talking past each other.