Downtime Compensation

[Bigbelly]

This is a post regarding the reimbursement of premium time to players after some server downtime.
I'm not talking about scheduled maintenance here, I'm talking about unannounced hotfixes that catch us all unaware.

What's the big deal you might say, they reimburse your time. Well actually it is a big deal. There is a lot more to consider here than just X hours.

1) Trade on the server diminishes significantly for the hour before maintenance for obvious reasons.
2) Trade will also be diminished significantly for at least an hour after it restarts, both because of reduced population and because adventure swaps take time to get rolling.
3) I have no idea on how long the server will be down for. It may only be 2 hours, but if I return after 5, as it is advertised, I will only get the 2 hours of my premium time back.
4) Extending my premium time by the X hours that the server was down means absolutely nothing unless I can actually use those X hours. For Example: If you give me 4 extra hours, but those extra hours happen to fall between 1am and 5am then they are useless to me as I will be asleep.
5) I planed and timed my token to get the maximum use from it. You didn't just take from me my token, you took from me my whole day I had set aside and planned.

Whilst I understand that these things are necessary, I don't feel that extending my time by X hours returns to me fairly what I have lost.

BB may have other thoughts but I would like to suggest that if an UNANNOUNCED hotfix is required then a better compensation to premium players would be to give them a 1 Day Token. Maybe even make it standard practice to give ALL PLAYERS a 1 day token to compensate them for this loss of service. It was your mistake after all.

Right now, I know that I wont be able to play my "extended time" and that my day I had set aside has been wasted. This was important to me because we are in the middle of an event and I had scheduled many things to be able to do this today. I am feeling kind of robbed so I hope you can see my point of view.

[Garth2079]

This is a post regarding the reimbursement of premium time to players after some server downtime.
I'm not talking about scheduled maintenance here, I'm talking about unannounced hotfixes that catch us all unaware.

What's the big deal you might say, they reimburse your time. Well actually it is a big deal. There is a lot more to consider here than just X hours.

1) Trade on the server diminishes significantly for the hour before maintenance for obvious reasons.
2) Trade will also be diminished significantly for at least an hour after it restarts, both because of reduced population and because adventure swaps take time to get rolling.
3) I have no idea on how long the server will be down for. It may only be 2 hours, but if I return after 5, as it is advertised, I will only get the 2 hours of my premium time back.
4) Extending my premium time by the X hours that the server was down means absolutely nothing unless I can actually use those X hours. For Example: If you give me 4 extra hours, but those extra hours happen to fall between 1am and 5am then they are useless to me as I will be asleep.
5) I planed and timed my token to get the maximum use from it. You didn't just take from me my token, you took from me my whole day I had set aside and planned.

Whilst I understand that these things are necessary, I don't feel that extending my time by X hours returns to me fairly what I have lost.

BB may have other thoughts but I would like to suggest that if an UNANNOUNCED hotfix is required then a better compensation to premium players would be to give them a 1 Day Token. Maybe even make it standard practice to give ALL PLAYERS a 1 day token to compensate them for this loss of service. It was your mistake after all.

Right now, I know that I wont be able to play my "extended time" and that my day I had set aside has been wasted. This was important to me because we are in the middle of an event and I had scheduled many things to be able to do this today. I am feeling kind of robbed so I hope you can see my point of view.

In general BB give back more premium time than the actual downtime, and the same for adventures. Anyone that has started an adventure shortly before maintenance will have noticed that, after maintenance, the remaining time is longer than the amount usually allowed (i.e. my Black Knights had 8d 4h after maintenance on Tuesday - that adventure has a time limit of 8d).

Also, BB have often given apology gifts when things go wrong. Usually those gifts are more generous than the losses.

Assuming you are talking about 1-day premium (based on your mention of time set aside), that isn't an item bought with real money, it's earned in-game. If you're talking about 7-day premium or longer, you'll find you are better off because you'll probably receive 6-8h extra even though maintenance is less.

I understand where you're coming from, and it's annoying that a bug was introduced. These things happen, I'm sure BB would have prevented it if they had realised beforehand. But let's see what they offer by way of compensation before jumping on them.

I live in Sydney so maintenance starts about 11am for me every Tuesday. I sympathise. But BB have to run maintenance at some point, and they choose the early hours of the morning in Europe to minimise the impact. You and I are just in the wrong part of the world :-)