+1Originally Posted by Benedicter
+1
Hi all,
Lots of DE worlds suffered a huge amount of outage for a long time, far more comparatively to our instance's worlds' log-in issues the other week. As their worlds are much older than ours, some scripts we had to run took twice as long as they did on our servers, among other reasons. This is why they received compensation.
Reunification is a national holiday. As for other national holidays that apply to UK, if you suggest some you would like to celebrate in the game, I can see what I can do for everyone.
Re: Gamescom, yes, it's one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world, but the event was almost entirely in German and foreigners understood little of it (myself included, because my German is terrible). Obviously the largest majority of people we were visited by were German, so something was prepared for them, and we also had codes for international players too. For instance, if TSO were to come to the Eurogamer Expo, say, I doubt there would be a DE code.
Either way, please think about national holidays you would like to celebrate (for instance, perhaps Queen's Birthday).
Best,
BB_Alpaca
Nogbad I am agreeing with you, just not with your earlier approach.
While it's clear .de have advantages other language versions don't simply posting what the German servers had on a day other servers had nothing, as you did with their gifts of the 3rd, doesn't make a very solid point, it looks rather like if .gr (Greece) were upset because .net (US) had something for America's Independence Day. On the other hand, if these hypothetical .gr players posted both what .net had and what they had for a similar day to show there was a difference it would make a point that is much harder to brush off.
If you have "Aunt Wilhelmina's" holiday announcement that's grand, I haven't seen it and Pandur's posts, mangled by Google though they are, are what I have found. They are linked to the originals for both context and so that people may do their own translations.
Cheers Alpaca, this multi-tier "system" has been a thorn for a very long time, that non-.de worlds had to raise an unholy fuss just to get the chance to spend money on Nords 2 is mystifying, that information readily available on .de never makes it out to the rest of the world is terribly frustrating and the last time the Holiday aspect came up in this forum near the end of this thread it didn't get very far at all. It would also be lovely if something could be posted globally about the Euro-wide mass crash, this tendency to silence BB often adopts is so very rarely reassuring.
Last edited by Iolanthe; 07.10.13 at 10:58.
This all makes for very sad reading and answers seems to be evading the actual issues, as we've grown to expect here. Now you want suggestions of national holidays? National holidays are a matter of public record in any country. If there was any real desire for a level playing field, an equal sense of care for all nationalities that play the game, the developers would look up an equal number of holidays or events for themselves in each location and celebrate each with equal gusto, not because one country complains about unfair treatment, but because treating each country fairly is the right thing to do, and a great way to encourage people to invest time and money in the game. When unsure of how highly valued a holiday or event is to people, it's so very easy to just ask people in that country and use that information to decide which events might merit a celebration. Where nationalities are not well represented in the game, and lets face it, you can't realistically have a national holiday celebration for every country on the planet, these players should have the opportunity to earn or receive an equal reward for a less specific reason. Time for the team to be a bit more proactive in an international sense instead of waiting to be accused of unfairness. If the thinking was always "we've done this in xyz country, now we must equal it exactly in every other location by the end of the year", there would not be an issue. Anything less than that is a failure. That would be the sort of equality that seems to be missing. There is a degree of separation that seems to keep this kind of information in the shadows, but it seems to be a pervasive problem that remains fairly well hidden and relatively easy to gloss over. The lack of transparency also fuels accusations of unfairness, not all of which are always true, and that in itself is counterproductive.
As for outage rewards, instead of risking favoring one server over another, design and publish a structured compensation level based on unplanned or additional downtime that will reward any server equally based on the number of hours that it was unavailable. Then there is no chance that one nation is favored over another, and, importantly, no chance that accusations of unfair treatment can be made, whether or not that is actually the case. It is just disappointing that such simple safeguards are not already in place to ensure and demonstrate fairness and transparency.
So much is hidden from the players here. So many questions never get a straight answer. We are forever getting little nuggets of information via google translate. Why? It just makes us think that there really is something to hide. Personally, I decided to stop spending money when I started to see how unfair international events were, despite ridiculous claims that the playing field had actually been leveled or that anyone could win, and started to notice accusations of certain servers being given more than their fair share of rewards, but that's another rant altogether.
Alpaca, you have my sympathies. You are tasked here with defending the indefensible actions of others, and that is never easy. I appreciate that you are asking for holiday suggestions now, but consider also how to ensure that you guys don't have to be in this position again in a few weeks or months. I don't know how much you can or can't do to make real changes, but this is a sticking plaster solution to placate people for a moment. If you can sow the seeds of change regarding how the developers think about these issues on an international level, that would be a much greater accomplishment than getting us a Queen's birthday gift.
Alpaca, as BiteMe said above, we understand that you are in between a rock and a hard place, and your predecessors were also put in the same unenviable position.
News is not being filtered your way as much as it should be.
It's not just a case of "National Holidays", in fact I've tried to exclude them from the examples. This particular one stated quite clearly on DSO's News page (still readable if anyone cares to click the + sign a few entries down), that it was NOT a holiday everywhere in that region.
The alleged "compensation" mails bore no mention of why they were given, it's taken digging through questions on their forum to unearth this particular nugget. Particularly galling since each affected server was given at least 3 days notice in advance, complete with times of these extra outages for database maintenance, yet we are supposed to 'grin and bear it' every time ours get taken down unexpectedly.
Most of these gifts are completely spurious, "end of summer", beginning of spring etc... , and the extra 5 days of Premium didn't even have a back story, it was just for the heck of it.
I'd certainly have no qualms if these just got given to all servers simultaneously rather than try to work out moveable feasts for each language version, I'll pretty much join in the fun with almost any German celebration (although obviously not the 20th of April), it would certainly make administering these things much simpler all round. The only date I would single out would be "server birthday", maybe not for each and every one, but at least the 1st for each language version. So in our case, it would be November to commemorate the heady days when Newfoundland opened in closed beta.
Back then, even we got 'compensation gifts' when the servers used to take the weekend off.
Sharing these across the entire Settlers 'family' will also negate another piece of nastiness, when during server vs server events, one version gets huge advantages over the others.
I'd still like to see the Premium Packs available, even as a download version it's better than nothing.
Please, can we just be treated equally for a change? I'd like to feel that we are all playing the same game, with the same advantages and content, and that the money we spend here is worth just as much as spending it elsewhere. At the moment, it's really counter-productive, because investment in another language version is clearly more rewarding. We get all of the problems no other version is expected to shoulder, (perhaps .de would like to take a couple of language channels on to ease our lag a bit, I could suggest a couple), yet seem to be expected to put up with being a 2nd class version.
As for your comments about Gamescom, I refer you again to your announcement here:
http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/t...SO-at-Gamescom!
And especially, your answer on the 16th August here, when players voiced these very concerns:
http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/threads/25197
Last edited by Nogbad; 07.10.13 at 22:46.
We love our new CM.
Newfoundland: 20th November 2011 to 25th November 2014. RIP
It was good while it lasted.
One question.... where do i write the game codes?
On the settlers homepage, or by clicking 'gem+' while playing, look for 'voucher' button 2 buttons above the blue 'play now' circle button.
Playing Devil's advocate here, I do remember getting a recycler for Christmas, or was it New Year? I'm sure there was something for Easter too.
thank you
Those are the holidays recognised on all servers.
What we are highlighting here is the number of 'extras' that only one language server enjoys.
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