March 26, 2012 Server Down?

[SaintMatthew]

Has anyone else had no luck logging in? I have not been able to log in. First try at 10:30 Central Daylight Time (-6 greenich).

[PrincessNoob]

It won't let me log in either. Keeps saying there is an error.

[Fortoom]

I had issues all day. Tried logging in 6 different times today starting at 10:30 EST on multiple computers in 2 different cities. The site was essentially down, including the forums. Finally got on about 30 minutes ago.

[Bishop21]

seems like this happens every2 weeks. CE got any answers or compensation? alot of people in my guild lost level 5 mines

[SirDet]

Seems like this happens every 2 weeks? I am not sure about that, I have logged in almost every day for the last couple months and I do not recall a single outage that was a bad as this one today. Or one that was even close.

[USillyRabbit]

All of the times games have gone down on me has been free or browser games of courses as most sub games have redundant servers and are back up in under 15 minutes. The only time a game has been down for longer then 15 minutes, unless doing an update was WoW once. Sub games for me have only been down a few times total (mostly EQ in the early days) ... anyhoowwww

That said EVERY time a free game has gone down it has not only sent an in game mail to people, it has provided some sort of compensation to the player base. Free games have a very fickle player base and you are damned if you do (free players) and damned if you don't (players that pay) the drastic difference between these two extremes of players means you have to make an effort to satisfy them. Sending out nothing besides a few words in a Facebook post is not a good sign. It means the developers of this game are over their heads, do not understand gaming dynamics, do not have the staff, have no clue what to do, or do not care. All of these options are bad signs for the future development of this game.

I was concerned when the Easter Event was basically the Christmas Event all over (some new adventures coming maybe). Designing this content is easy, very easy. Adding new maps with a new name to it for adventures is very easy (the template is already created), where are game improvements and other things that happen in BETA? Sorry for the long post I just hope this gets to BlueByte somehow, someway. ...

Why? Because you have a great thing started with the home island and I wish you success with this game. To have success though you must respond to issues and improve the game. The cost of one more programmer (or in this case Flash Designer) would be returned to you 10x if you put out improvements and updates faster then every 4 months (Dec to March) and then have it just be basically the same thing and some graphics added to buildings.

Anyway sad signs indeed too bad I thought this was going to be a fun game and was looking forward to PvP, now I know the chances of PvP being good and even seeing it this year are very low chances, about as low as the chance BlueByte will even send out an apology to those of us that lost adventures, gold mines, etc with the game down for 10+ hours ... So I will move on with a sad frown and remember what could have been.

[mawihtec4]

this IS a FTP game so if it is down you are NOT LOSING anything not in real world material terms OH and before anyone says but i bought gems and built a gold mine etc
1) did you actually have any gems taken away from you while the game was down :- i think not
2) the adventure timed out :- ok this one sucks a bit especially if you were close to finishing and it was a gem bought one with gems you paid money for
3) oh no my gold mine :-err no you got exactly what was in the gold mine originally you only missed out on the bonus's from buffing it

YES the game was down for a considerable amount of time over the course of the day
YES it was a pain

just WHAT should they give us if anything 1000 bronze swords or maybe 1000 coal maybe a recycler or even 100 gems ? whatever they were to offer there would be some ppl that would be very happy and there would always be some that would moan it was not enough etc


do BB actually owe us anything NO if they or UBI decided to give us some in-game res or buffs or some other type of freebie that would be both very nice and very appreciated
(it would be differant if we paid a monthly subscription)
if they did decide to give us something i for one would be very happy with it but i enjoy the game and not getting something will not make me stop playing BUT let us just let them concentrate on getting things fixed for now we are supposed to be getting the easter update up and running from tomorrow (thurs) and having played it in testing i can tell you there are some nice things in it and there have been issues with getting it working properly on the DE servers so they have their hands full atm
once the dust settles i would not be surprised if we did get something but i am not expecting it as a right
(oh and before you say hey what do you know your only a lev 18 id ont just play on ZEUS i also play on both UK servers newfoundland lev 34, northisle lev 32, welt 8 of the german server lev 32 and the testing stage currently lev 32ish.)

[Lucidvein]

I'm glad you feel obligated to defend what most would consider poor customer service.

Your third point about getting what was in the gold mine originally being okay is mute. You can simply buy gold ore on the trade channel. Spending real money on parrots allows you to gain more ore via buffing. After using parrots, being locked out of the game through the fault of the provider, is a 50%+ loss of the parrot value. (What you end up with would have been cheaper to obtain over trade due to the relationship between gold and gems.) So if you have 6 Gold mines running and the game goes down for 18 hours right when you were ready to rebuff. That's 100%+ loss of 3 parrots or 225 gems or ~$2. Not counting any adventure losses, level 5 gold mine collapses, etc.

We all understand s@$t happens. Even though they are not obligated to reimburse, if they want paying customers to continue to support them; simply addressing the issue is a first step; then reimbursal would be a good second step. I have a fun guild to play with and that keeps me going. But the customer service and the lack of revealed beta development is troubling. Heaven forbid we get to use the virtual currency we pay for.

[Jainoo]

just as a follow up BB response and steps to regain losses can be found here

http://forum.castleempireonline.com/...p-Easter-Delay