Turning a mistake into a disaster.
A game maker’s servers crash and they pretend it hasn’t happened.
Years ago I started playing a role computer game. I didn’t normally like computer games, I’d played with one or two, but this was different. A role-playing game based loosely on Tolkien’s mythology. I was completely addicted. So I played it for over a year. Then I finished it. It had been great fun and a hard act to follow. Far more than a mere shoot ‘em up it had a real story line, something one could get immersed in it like you could a good book.
I didn’t play any more computer games more years, I had looked around and found a few worth looking at, but nothing grabbed. Until one day last December a someone I was working with mentioned Dragon Age. He said I had to have a look.
Dragon Age is described by its makers Electronic Arts and BioWare as the spiritual successor to my original role-playing game. And I love it. It has taken all that I liked about the previous game and added to it. More depth. more complexity, and retained the complex immersive story line.
Electronic Arts are fanatically concerned about people stealing their games, so each time I play it I have to connect to their servers to get it authenticated. This was fine, I log in to the EA site and off I’d go. Now, last week a problem arose, it would authenticate. No Dragon Age. OK wrong password, perhaps; nope that was fine, I could log in it was just not recognising me.
So I went off to the forums to see I was the only one. And I was not the only one. Hundreds of thousands of players around the world are also unhappy.
Electronic Art’s servers seem unable to cope with the demand of all these people playing their game. So now we have paid for our games and cannot play them. Dragon Age: Fail!
Three days later, and the forums are ablaze. People have posted fixes, that then don’t work. People have called Electronic Arts and BioWare help lines; yes there is a problem, the engineers are working on it but hte help desk staff have not been told what has gone wrong. Moreover Electronic Arts and BioWare are remaining silent on the issue. They are still advertising their games and posting news articles on them and how good they are – knowing that they do not currently work. Officially there has been no word at all on what if anythnig has happened. No word on what we should be doing or not doing. No word on when the – unacknowledged – problem will be fixed.
No communication at all – Dragon Age: Epic Fail!
