Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

[CHFIII]

Lots of angry posts about the intermittent lags and the event not working and getting pulled so I’d like this one to be solution focused and not a gripe.

1. When you are troubleshooting a problem it’s frustrating when people are demanding to know when it will be fixed. If it’s the first thing you try then it’s fast, if it’s the 73rd thing you try it is not. You don’t control that. You do control and can promise a time for the next update. People don’t want to miss token regen so they keep checking. You could say “the next status update will be st X:00 pm, pst”. That way we don’t keep checking needlessly.

2. It sure looks like you don’t have a qa environment where you can test before promoting changes to prod. If players were not blanked out in qa but were in prod maybe you should consider putting together a beta test group - what banners we see can be set differently based on level and progress so surely you could give your beta test people a link to sanity check things before releasing. Lag can be 100 things but the event not working looks like poor qa to the customers.


You’ve been giving us tons of new content and it’s appreciated and the faster you push stuff out the less time there is for qa those who understand how that works understand that it can be hard to balance but thanks for the effort. If you could get into the habit of closing out posts about problems by saying “the next update will be...” it saves a lot of unnecessary customer frustration.

Thanks for considering these suggestions.

[Mobile Mob]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

I agree!
3 words!
Communication, communication and communication.
There will always be positive and negative comments.
Developers and designers must not take it personally.

Question: What does qa mean?

[p@go]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Question: What does qa mean?

Quality Assurence...

[Faustus]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Assurance, with an A. I work in it.

[p@go]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Assurance, with an A. I work in it.

Sorry for the typo 😎

[Dr death]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Communication is key. Things go wrong. Equipment breaks down and needs replacement, which is what I suspect has happened with the most recent lag on top of the security enhancements that were made.

The worst thing you can lose is trust. Tell us the truth, good or bad and get it out there quickly. When there is a problem, update us frequently, even if you do not have much to say, it at least let’s the community know you are there.

Discord is a good for some quick back and forth also. Just 2-3 minutes every few hours when there is a major problem.

We spread your words like a wildfire to our empires and others so your message does get out. A message also gets out when you do not communicate, it just may not be the one you want it to be.

When you first took over, some of us told you that communication was key. For a time, you listened. Go back to that time. I know it is time away from your other work, but consider this part as important if not more so than the actual work on the game.

[CHFIII]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Been a day and a half with no updates and that’s just hard to excuse when people already spent money. If you do t have an eta yet then give us an eta I. The eta. Set expectations and keep us in the loop please, this is annoying

[Xcali1985]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Been a day and a half with no updates and that’s just hard to excuse when people already spent money. If you do t have an eta yet then give us an eta I. The eta. Set expectations and keep us in the loop please, this is annoying

Someone has to be held accountable for this.

[Warplay]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

An educated guess would be that the devs stabalised the servers in time for the weekend (when theyre generally less active/not about) due to the eve lag issues to then follow up with the event next week.

The communication could of been a bit clearer from a player point of view, however most seasoned players would probably take a stab in the dark and assume that this would be the most likely scenario.

[Kilolbs]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

An educated guess would be that the devs stabalised the servers in time for the weekend (when theyre generally less active/not about) due to the eve lag issues to then follow up with the event next week.

The communication could of been a bit clearer from a player point of view, however most seasoned players would probably take a stab in the dark and assume that this would be the most likely scenario.

I'm not even concern about when will it be back up and running. Leaving negative comments not going to make it any faster. Just enjoy the game and it will be up when it's up. Even if they did give you an ETA. And they found another problem where they couldn't meet that ETA. Then all the none understanding players will leave more negative comments then be asking for freebies

[Aprilwine]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

I'm not even concern about when will it be back up and running. Leaving negative comments not going to make it any faster. Just enjoy the game and it will be up when it's up. Even if they did give you an ETA. And they found another problem where they couldn't meet that ETA. Then all the none understanding players will leave more negative comments then be asking for freebies

This! The intentions are not to rob anybody of anything but more to resolve the issue causing the lag. Its obvious they have not figured it out and patience is key here. I personally dont want them rushing the issue only to find out it made something else geek out. Please be patient, untill they figure out the source of the issue and determine how long it will take to fix is the only time I want to see a post from a Dev. I do not want to see posts from Devs pandering to impatient players only to make the situation worse.

[CHFIII]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

It isn’t pandering to provide periodic updates to people who may have a genuine concern after spending significantly on the interrupted event.

The last update was that they were working on the display issue non stop. That seems demonstrably false given the time it takes to roll back code and return to the previous state - this isn’t new functionality and it worked earlier.

It happens that I have multiple teams across multiple industries performing production support activities and it isn’t a matter of impatienc on the part of impacted users, it is a standard beat practice to clearly communicate and set expectations when things break.

It is not my intention to do harm, rather as someone with 10s of thousands invested in this game I have a vested interest in seeing it prosper and grow.

There are issues you can’t avoid when pushing frequent updates and sometimes you need to roll back and test before you push a change back to prod, that’s expected and realistically it is simply an inevitability. The key to managing incidents is to manage expectations and communicate what to expect. For players who have come in top 10 in this particular event format it takes a significant amount of time as well as the thousand bucks to do that. It isn’t unreasonable to expect the vendor to provide basic updates and anyone who’s ever worked in the industry knows full well that when you can’t give an eta you still give status and let people know when the next status update will be.

If they really have no idea on day 4 of an outage that would be really BAD and I doubt that is the case. It’s self inflicted damage to perception to remain silent. Am I confident that the couple hundred I already put into the event will be credited? Sure - but that should not require faith it should only require reading an update that clearly sets expectations.

This isn’t my opinion, best practices for hosted solutions providers are fairly standard and well understood and I’d like to see the game prosper so it irks me when the game’s future is unnecessarily jeopardized by easily avoidable and absolutely controllable gaffs in incident handling.

[Guest]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

Purpose of thread (i think) was not meant to bash/attack devs but rather to raise suggestions on how to aid devs manage customer expectations.

Anywho, we will always have various and differing thoughts and i personally welcome all (within FORUM TOS reasoning).

Agreed.

I'm not even concern about when will it be back up and running. Leaving negative comments not going to make it any faster. Just enjoy the game and it will be up when it's up. Even if they did give you an ETA. And they found another problem where they couldn't meet that ETA. Then all the none understanding players will leave more negative comments then be asking for freebies

I concur.

This! The intentions are not to rob anybody of anything but more to resolve the issue causing the lag. Its obvious they have not figured it out and patience is key here. I personally dont want them rushing the issue only to find out it made something else geek out. Please be patient, untill they figure out the source of the issue and determine how long it will take to fix is the only time I want to see a post from a Dev. I do not want to see posts from Devs pandering to impatient players only to make the situation worse.

Cheers.

[CHFIII]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

And still no acknowledgement.

[Stif]

Re: Respectful Suggestions on how to manage customer expectations

nope no acknowledgement but dont worry, the new promo is there to make it all go away. make sure to buy it otherwise the event wont come back nor will empire drops ever be found