WoW Europe extended downtime

When one day I retire from my day job and become consultant for the MMORPG industry instead, I am going to make a PowerPoint presentation of 50 pages, all with the same text: "Do no keep your customers from playing!". There is absolutely nothing which is more frustrating for a player than to be unable to play. And Blizzard hasn't understood that any better than the competition.

Today there was a scheduled downtime from 5 am to 11 am, so that they could patch the European version to 1.3. That was already a bad idea, because it is Good Friday, a public holiday for most of Europe. But now it is already 2:30 pm and the servers *still* aren't back up.

The Realm Status page from Blizzard is completely useless. It often shows all servers as up, even when they are down. The Realm Status Forum is not much better, because it only has a post saying that the server maintenance is "extended", without giving any hint for how long.

Even SOE does a better customer service when their servers are down, giving more information, even if it is just an hourly update saying that they still don't have an ETA. It isn't surprising that SOE is now making advertising claiming "SOE Subscribers Can Play the Game They're Paying to Play, When They Want To" and "Unmatched Customer Service". Veterans will laugh about the idea that SOE could have good customer service, but they *did* learn a little bit in the last 6 years, and they are now beating Blizzard in that field. You wished SOE would learn how to program a fun game. Or that Blizzard would learn the basics of customer service, communication, and how not to mess up on patch day.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:31 PM Permanent Link