More than 2200 ships participated, and of course the immense amount of players congregating lead to serious overload for the node that ran the system. I don't want to go any further into the details of what happened, because Ali Aras already wrote about it and CCP Falcon explained what had happened as well.
What I want to address here is the reaction of what I hope is only a vocal minority of the players involved.
The TL;DR version is: Shut up you spoilt children!
To elaborate ...
I have been working as systems administrator and systems engineer for almost two decades, and I am also familiar with HPC cluster setups like the one CCP is using to run EVE. With their "Single Shard Universe" they have not made it easy for themselves to keep everything running as it ideally should.
Now we see two massive powers fighting, and CCP is doing what they can to make things work so all those people can have their great fleet battles. This time 'round CCP failed to prepare in advance. It's great of them to even do so in the first place. But well, sometimes even sysadmins have to have some time off and can't stay watching things all night long.
It looks like the whole thing happened at a time when most staff would be at home, relaxing, maybe sleeping, maybe out drinking. In short, they were doing what they are entitled to: Enjoying their free time.
Well, CCP even scrambles some technicians during off-duty hours to make it possible that some other people can have their personal brand of free time enjoyment. Those technicians, or someone who was instructing them, made a mistake and a fleet battle was cut short.
What results is the most uncalled for nerdrage imaginable. People are calling CCP everything under the sun. An individual calling himself Sion Kumitomo writes an open letter to CCP where he states that "incompetence is worse than malice."
Does this guy even know what he is saying there?
Riverini of EN24 goes ahead and quotes someone who he considers to "sum up pretty much what’s the word around the players [he (Riverini) has] talked to.
That mastermind of analytical thinking concludes that " CCP got greedy. It’s no coincidence that they decided to re-map the node as twitch.tv figures were peaking. They saw all those juicy potential subs." and that "they did it for themselves, not for the players."
Really?
Where does all that paranoia come from?
Of course CCP is a company that wants to have good publicity and make money, but they are also a rather small company and they operate with tight human resources. As someone who knows what that is like and what a complex system they are running there, I can see all the signs of a company who are prepared to go the extra mile to keep their customers happy and to make impressive events like massive fleet battles possible.
Is it really so difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt? What has CCP ever done to make all those people so incredibly angry at them?
My personal answer - despite all Incarna debacles, glitched expansion deployments and other slipups: Nothing!
What I see is exactly what I have come to hate with a vengeance throughout my years in the IT industry: Users behaving like spoilt little children who think that mommy only exists to fulfil their every wish and who throw a temper tantrum if mommy doesn't.
The sense of entitlement those people have honestly makes me sick, and my heartfelt support goes out to all the CCP people who run from their homes, their friends, their children, their loved ones to make it possible that some raging nerds with their bloated fleets can keep pressing F1 for the rest of the night.
Get real people. It's not some mission critical application that lives or resources depend on. It's a game which you pay as much for in a month as it would cost to go to a movie and have some popcorn and drinks with it. It's not the world.
Try to behave like adults.
I have to give credit to Poetic Stanziel here for remaining level headed.
People should take him as an example and not behave like the frothing-at-the-mouth CFC people in this thread.
Yours may be a more emotionally laced post, but I LOVE your use of the nerd rage poster! That sums it up in ways I can't even put in words. About all they can do is nerd rage. They just need to get past it.
ReplyDelete'a fleet battle was cut short'. Just asking but how many man hours of players went into that fleet battle?
ReplyDeleteI wasn't there myself, but fromwhat I read it went on for a few hours with TiDi and all and there were over 2200 players. Then of course there's the preparation and forming up of fleets.
DeleteI reckon a lot.