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.
I don't disagree. The reason I pointed out what I pointed out was because a)it might not actually be the same problem. b)more importantly, I would guess that they THOUGHT it was fixed. Is that stupid of them? Sure, probably. Are they incompetent? I can't really argue against that. But I also would argue that you really shouldn't be mad at someone because they're incompetent or stupid.
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.
1. What promise? When did they make you that promise? They never made me that promise. Seriously, they didn't actually promise you anything. You assumed that. All of that, you assumed that. Quite frankly, it wasn't a great assumption to make. You had no reason to expect this from them. Should you be able to expect that kind of service? That's a question we can ask. But based on what we had seen, it was naive of you to think it would magically get to that point. It was never there.
2. Again, this isn't Goko. It's Making Fun. But more to the point, that you had made plans is not their problem. Just like your point at the top, that it's out is a problem whether sometimes or all the time, the same thing here. It's out is not more of a problem because you had special plans. And I had the same special plans, and I sat around all day waiting yesterday, too, but their problem is that their service isn't working, not that it isn't working when we wanted to do this stuff. It's not like they set the league up or promote it or anything like that.
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.
I'm not necessarily imagining them sitting there playing solitaire or what have you. I get on call. But that doesn't change my point. My point is, that's NOT what they (the workers) signed up for. Or at least, I assume it isn't. I know that I certainly wouldn't take a job working there if I had to be on call. If any job I worked at was going to have me work outside my working hours, I'd say forget it. Why in the world should I do that? It's waaaaaaay more important for me to have the time alone with my loved ones - and that is something I think is true for everyone.
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.
But the issue is, there's no way to actually hold them to these expectations. You payed them money for access to those cards. They can completely go out of business, permanently take the site down tomorrow, they'd be fine. So long as they aren't running the service whilst denying you access, they're fine. You can complain until the cows come home, but that is all you can do. You can give them a bad name, I suppose, so that other people don't start using their service. I'm not sure that this really helps you, but feel free. Just don't be surprised if this doesn't help anything - why would it? You don't think they know this is an arrangement people are going to be unhappy with? The issue is, no matter how easy it supposedly is to do this - and while I don't think it's as "absolutely anyone can do it, piece of cake" easy as some would make it sound, I don't doubt that it is indeed very doable - the people who are running these companies clearly have not been able to get the site working on anything which would resemble good quality, and I think it's quite, how do I say, foolhardy, to expect otherwise, at the very least until they have demonstrated otherwise.
tl;dr it's your own fault for assuming they'd be good when every sign has shown us otherwise.
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Topic: Goko Is Games That No One Can Play (Read 55460 times)