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[qmech]

I loaded the page, and it remembered that I was logged in.  For Science I then logged out

Well, was it worth it?

For you, anything.

[Kirian]

Meanwhile, Prismata and Hearthstone servers both seem to be fine.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

And people on those sites are likely Having Fun.

[jamfamsam]

But there is a huge difference between Having Fun and Making Fun.

[Kirian]

Also online: Board Game Arena, Yucata.de, BSW.

Seriously... Goko is like a perfect microcosm of How Not To Do It.

[Breezin]

It would be nice if someone from Goko would at least get on and let everyone know what's going on and when they expect it to be fixed.

[Seprix]

I complained this morning. No email response yet. They'd better be working hard on this issue and not going fishing in Montana or something.

[jamfamsam]

My expectation is that nothing will get worked on until Monday. I don't believe for one second that they are hard at work on this on the weekend.

[jaketheyak]

I first encountered the problem on December 30th.
It's now January 11th.
I'm not confident that the only thing preventing a fix being immediately implemented is that it happens to be the weekend.

[Burning Skull]

I think the basic occupation of Goko developers is to shuffle our decks while we play. They don't have any code implemented, they just work manually, with phisical extentions: shuffle, draw, trash, discard, send the result back.
So that explains the lags at least.

[Joseph2302]

This appears to be the entirety of Goko responses to our problems:

Yes, unfortunately, these problems are ongoing. Fixes are underway, and today's attempt ran into some problems. The engineers have made this their top priority. I apologize for the problems. Hang in there, we'll get things back up and running!

My coins and VP also evaporated.

When this happens, it's a sign that server health is failing as the client (your PC) can't communicate with the server to get that data. Your information and data is intact, so it will be there for you.

[Joseph2302]

Also, I managed to login, did it work for anyone else?

[WanderingWinder]

Quite frankly, I don't expect them to work on the weekend, i.e. I don't feel like they should be. People get weekends off, time off is important.

Also, I am able to log in this morning as well.

[sc0UT]

I can log in, but

• VP counter doesn't work.
• Sidebar chat window doesn't work.
• Alternate buttons doesn't work.

Sidebar log still works and iso rankings also.

OK fixed it. Disabled the salvager options and enabled them after browser restart again.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

Quite frankly, I don't expect them to work on the weekend, i.e. I don't feel like they should be. People get weekends off, time off is important.

Interesting viewpoint. I agree that time off is important, and I'm not going to equate game developers with police and fire personnel, who find a way to structure their work schedules so someone is always on duty.  However, there are less essential services that we pay for so we can use them any time we need them, and the companies that provide those services have people working on the weekends so that if something goes wrong, we still get what we pay for.  I'm thinking internet service, cable TV, etc.  Perhaps on the border of "non-essential" would be electricity, but that could be argued both ways, particularly depending on climate.

Plus, I'm pretty sure there were some non-weekend days between Dec. 30 and today.  But I get it, this stuff is really hard, and nobody has ever done anything like this before, so there is nowhere to go for advice, precedent, or experienced talent.  They've only had a couple of years, in a couple of incarnations, so we need to be patient.  Maybe they are undercapitalized.  Maybe they are constantly being hacked.  Maybe they don't have enough people.  I mean, this can't be a one man job, right?

[Joseph2302]

Quite frankly, I don't expect them to work on the weekend, i.e. I don't feel like they should be. People get weekends off, time off is important.

I agree with this, however they're supposed to be running a 24/7 server, so should have a few staff in at weekends, in case there are problems. Especially as there were server overload problems last weekend as well, I'm guessing for the same reason (too many people, and no maintenance/updating at weekends)

[jamfamsam]

I apologize to them. They were working on the weekend.

[WanderingWinder]

Quite frankly, I don't expect them to work on the weekend, i.e. I don't feel like they should be. People get weekends off, time off is important.

Interesting viewpoint. I agree that time off is important, and I'm not going to equate game developers with police and fire personnel, who find a way to structure their work schedules so someone is always on duty.  However, there are less essential services that we pay for so we can use them any time we need them, and the companies that provide those services have people working on the weekends so that if something goes wrong, we still get what we pay for.  I'm thinking internet service, cable TV, etc.  Perhaps on the border of "non-essential" would be electricity, but that could be argued both ways, particularly depending on climate.

Plus, I'm pretty sure there were some non-weekend days between Dec. 30 and today.  But I get it, this stuff is really hard, and nobody has ever done anything like this before, so there is nowhere to go for advice, precedent, or experienced talent.  They've only had a couple of years, in a couple of incarnations, so we need to be patient.  Maybe they are undercapitalized.  Maybe they are constantly being hacked.  Maybe they don't have enough people.  I mean, this can't be a one man job, right?

Thanks for lampooning what I said. It's really nice of you.


Obviously I don't think it's a normal thing for nobody to work on this for 2 weeks, when there is a problem (though to be a little bit fair to them, it hasn't been down that whole time, but intermittently). Certainly all those things I tend to expect them to have service all the time. (Certainly the emergency/necessity things, but also something like cable). It's good for them as a company. But when you get hired to a position which requires that, you know what you're signing up for. I assume that isn't the case for the current developers. And while you could argue they should have people whose job it is, but you know that the company isn't big enough for that, and it's not economically viable. You can't pay someone to do that off the budget you're going to have from the money this game is bringing in. That's just the reality of the situation. And so yeah, I don't think they've really programmed well, especially if you want to lump everything in from the start of the project (which I don't think is fair to the current people at all, quite frankly), but at the same time, I don't feel so "you should be working on this right now because I can't play my game" to those programmers who do this as their day job.

[SCSN]

The one problem I'm actually sure the Goko staff isn't suffering from is working too much.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

I agree with everything you said in post 117, WW, and I apologize if I made you feel I was lampooning you.  I was not. Them?  Sure.

I also could have been clearer that I don't expect the developers to be there on the weekends, but I do expect a skeleton crew that can fix the fact that no one can log on, especially when the problem appears to keep repeating over multiple days or multiple weekends.  Having said that, I do feel that if the log on issues are related to something in the code from a patch or update, then the developers need to be there on the weekends fixing that, or someone that is there needs to have the authority/ability to revert to a previous snaphot of the software to remove that problem temporarily, until the developers get back in on Monday.

I acknowledge that I have once again forgotten that this is not Goko, this is another group of folks taking their shot at implementing Dominion.  So saddling MF with legacy angst over their predecessor's ineptitude is indeed unfair. I don't even know if MF chose to use any Goko code, or whether they started from scratch.  However, the facts are:

1) They've had a long time, and it is still not working
2) Other people had a long time, and apparently gave up

My inference from those two facts is that one of two things is true:  a) It really is so difficult that extraordinary resources are required, or b) the two groups of people attempting it have been incompetent in one or more of the many possible activities required (fiscal management, allocation of resources, hiring talent, accurate evaluation of the scope of the project, procurement of raw materials, writing actual code, etc.).  I guess a third option is that they just don't give a flip and aren't really trying, but I tend not to dwell on that.

Given that a single individual has done it, and done it well, we know it can be done, and done without extraordinary resources.  That would tend to invalidate inference "a". There are sites that reliably handle , day in and day out, an extremely large number of players logging on and playing games that are much more resource intensive than this attempted implementation of Dominion.  That alone leads me to believe that inference "b" is correct.  If so, the situation should be correctable, but someone has not figured that out, or can't or won't change anything. I fully expect that MF will eventually abandon their attempt as well.

Until that happens, then at least during intermittent server failures, I'll continue making fun of Making Fun.  It is something to do while I can't play Dominion online.

[SCSN]

Until that happens, then at least during intermittent server failures, I'll continue making fun of Making Fun.

Convincing myself this is all some sort of cosmic joke is the only way to preserve my sanity!

[AdamH]

In the software world, at least the software world I live in, the only distinction between "not working at all" and "only working part of the time" is one of helping me track down what the issue is. The product isn't working, and from the customers' perspective (or anyone in the world except the person trying to fix the issue) it might as well be dead all of the time.

You may say that Goko working some of the time is better than it working none of the time because hey, it's working some of the time, right? Well, the short answer to that is "No. Just no." For several reasons, the big ones include:

1. I paid them money. The promise they gave me is that I could use their game whenever I want. Some outages are allowable, but this one is multiple orders of magnitude beyond what is acceptable. They are not delivering on the promise that made me pay them money.

2. I've wasted a few hours of my time this week scheduling and/or attempting to play league and world cup matches that just didn't work out because Goko wasn't working. If Goko was just broken my time wouldn't have been wasted.

The whole thing about feeling sympathy towards their workers is also something I don't understand. It's not like they need to hire someone to sit there all night and all of the weekends, just sitting in front of the computer, playing Solitaire just in case something breaks. No, you can just have someone on call in case something happens.

And even if they needed to do that first thing, having someone just sit around and have no life; well, that's what they signed up for. If they didn't want to make a commitment to have their servers up and running 24/7/365, then they should have told us that their servers would only run during certain times before I paid them my money. There is no reason to relax this expectation, not even a little bit.

Things happen, stuff goes wrong. Hardware fails, or transient bugs come up that manifest in weird, unforeseen ways. Regardless, if it hasn't been fixed within a "reasonable amount of time"* then someone needs to make an official statement and say what's going on. That's a reasonable expectation to have.

The excuses we've been given -- the code was bad, we're doing our best, we're writing a new thing. They don't make this any more OK. I'm not even going to talk about how true these excuses may be (in this post**) but these things are not acceptable reasons to not provide the service they promised.

Seriously, if I performed like this at my job, I'd be fired. There's no reason not to hold them to these completely reasonable expectations.




*if I'm being as generous as I can possibly be, I'll give them 24 hours for this. It's been what, two weeks now? Completely unacceptable***.

**OK I lied, I can't resist. They're total crap.

***I tried so hard to get a clip of Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks' character in The Terminal****) saying "Unacceptable" for this, but I couldn't find one. Sad day.

****Best movie ever.

[LuciferousPeridot]

Until that happens, then at least during intermittent server failures, I'll continue making fun of Making Fun.

Convincing myself this is all some sort of cosmic joke is the only way to preserve my sanity!

They are called Making Fun and they don't appear to understand what the word 'ironic' means?

[SCSN]

[...]

This, lol. It's not like we're expecting more from them than what can be done by one guy in his spare time after a dayjob at Google.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

[...]

This, lol. It's not like we're expecting more from them than what can be done by one guy in his spare time after a dayjob at Google.

And that is why I keep making that precise point, over and over again.