This community has become so much meaner...it's pointless and petty.
Someone stating that they'd rather not return unless there's a wipe isn't "demanding" anything. It's stating their opinion, which they have every right to.
This sort of rhetoric is really not helpful -- twisting a simple and commonly expressed opinion into a "demand" so that you can frame someone you don't know as "selfish" is not productive communication.
TL;DR
Staff on call/duty did well, process management seems to be lacking
Short overview of events:
This weekend we saw an issue where Asteroids did not spawn for the better part of 24 hours after they should have. About 2 hours after the expected respawn most old asteroids de-spawned and less than a handful new ones appeared.
While tickets were logged, by I presume several players, no communication or observable action from NQ happened for almost 24 hours.
On Sunday I received a response from support which was very informative and helpful, from it, it seemed that a (known) issue was causing new asteroids to not respawn as the previous ones could not de-spawn. When asked, support clarified no communication on this had happened as that was for the CM to handle who were not available outside of office hours to do so.
Then more information arrived, indicating at least one server dev was looking into the issue and a bit later a response on the forums in a thread on the matter from a dev indicated the issue was manually resolved, a fix would be pushed in a coming patch and asteroids were back in play.
This was confirmed and players could go about their business in game.
Takeaways from this incident:
Support staff and the relevant dev (team) did what they could, and the issue was resolved.
What was missed and would be an opportunity for improvement for NQ here would be:
1 - Communication:
If support staff if not allowed or able to make a public statement on an issue like this while no CM staff is available, this should be reviewed. While it is fair to say that such communication would need to be generic as there is much unknown and possibly not within support staff abilities to either know or confirm at the time, If a general notice of the issue being known and worked on this would have prevented the community and active players from not having any understanding of what was happening while they were (severely) impacted by the incident.
Especially due to the limited timeframe of this loop, many set aside time to participate and make sure they are ready for it. By not communicating, NQ is principally ignoring their responsibilities towards their player base in this regard.
2 - Timely action taken:
For a crucial game loop like this, a live ops game should not have 24 hours without any perceived action, whether (financial) resources limit NQ’s abilities or not. This could be considered a major incident and should see a response time of far less than 24 hours, more like 4 hours at most, especially since we could see that, once a dev got involved, this was resolved fairly quickly and so it is a valid question to ask why this could not have been done the day prior.
In closing, I would thank the support staff and dev(s) involved. There is really not much, if anything that can be put on them here it seems, this is a process management issue that is for team leads/management to adjust and resolve.
I’d be more than willing to support/assist if needed, as this is part of my expertise and I invite NQ to contact me in DM if so desired to discuss.
The asteroid spawning is entirely automated. It got interrupted by a situation which was supposedly impossible but is not. We will sneak in a patch at next minor release to prevent this from happening again. Meanwhile this was manually fixed and asteroids are spawning again, yay.
