Kabam MCOC Team

To whom it may concern

Please note, I don’t generally complain or go out of my way to say bad things. I do like the MCOC game, that my alliance, friends and myself have been playing for a long time. I do understand that you as Kabam have a difficult job and worked hard to give us all a game we chose to spend money on and of course our time. However, it does not matter how hard you work, if you get it wrong in the end you nonetheless failed.

I feel disappointed that KABAM can´t sort out these new releases, that often end up with emergency maintenance the hole time. (don't you check what you release before you do so?)

As a professional company that ask us, your customers to spend our money on you and our time, I frankly can’t see that you have done any effort of putting in place contingencies, (back up plans), if something goes wrong. This is unprofessional and it’s what will make this game more unpopular each time this happens. because let’s be honest, who really wants to fight past bugs and disasters like last night, when you have to complete a fight 6 times or even worse you could not finish you AQ because the server was down to do emergency maintenance...

I think management needs to sit down and think, because to me (form the outside) it looks like a fu#king circus.
Compensation discussion or negotiation…. I think you sit there and try and think of ways to get away with mistakes like this. Personally, I think you should really take responsibility and make this a opportunity to win back confidence in you as kablam and MCOC. And send out the same gift that is not a crystal that gives you a 2* or 3* or 4* but something better.

This is just my humble opinion and I know you will not listen or take me seriously.

BryanLXXIX

Comments

FreeToPlay_21

I really don't see the outage being a testing issue, I'm not sure what it was but judging from how long it took to fix the bugs, it was definitely something unexpected and out of the blue.

I've been on the forums for a decent amount of time now, and I take every opportunity there is to blame Kabam, but not on this one. They could not have handled the situation any better than they did yesterday.

battleone

I have to say, my assessment of yesterday, was this..... sometime... sh!t happens. However, I feel like they did what they DIDNT DO in the past.

They were transparent.
They kept us updated.
If you were paying attention, you felt like they were working hard to resolve the problem.
Miike and a couple other mods were on the front lines in the forum talking to us pretty openly.

Now to the issue of compensation, yeah its gotta be kinda big and then they will have hit the mark in my opinion.

Here are some of things that could've possible happened to you:

Wars were not closed out from w7 of the season
Wars magically didnt start for w8
People weren't able to get into new alliances by 5 war season deadline to qualify for season rewards.
AQ day 1 wasnt finished.
AQ day 2 wasn't started on time, messed up the whole series. A lot of alliances can recover, some can't
22 hour solo event Arena, couldn't run it to hit milestones.
20-33% of people's arena time went up in smoke depending on timezone.
items expired from stashes.
people used boosts/refills before maintenance
energy wasnt consumed

I am sure there is more, but that is a picture of just how many things got screwed.

In addition to the immediate result of things listed above there is AQ series rewards that are impacted and AW season rewards that are impacted. Lastly, a simple, we were inconvenienced af pain and suffering gift.

Kabam, All in all if you add all this up, you have yourself some serious compensation package to put together.

OhGodYes

I really don't see the outage being a testing issue, I'm not sure what it was but judging from how long it took to fix the bugs, it was definitely something unexpected and out of the blue.

I've been on the forums for a decent amount of time now, and I take every opportunity there is to blame Kabam, but not on this one. They could not have handled the situation any better than they did yesterday.

Maybe for you, but I can’t even log into the game. I have received No response from forums, email from support or anything. Not if an acknowledgement in known issues that there are a small group of people that can’t even join the game.

Tehsigzorz

Gonna disagree with you, I actually have some respect for kabam for how they solved this issue. Things happen, errors in codes out of everyones control happens, unfortunate events happen. Kabam were quick to respond and close the game quickly to look at the issue. Also remember it was a Friday, the players as well as the staff just want to go home and relax so the fact that a lot of them stayed up extremely late monitoring and updating us is reassuring. I am very critical of kabam when it comes to game design, rewards and bugs but this aint it chief.

That being said we need a tiered list for compensation and I am hopeful that we get some good compensation. Kabam is aware of how bad this outage was and it may be hard so I am just wishing they take their time and make it right.

BRYAN_LXX1X

To whom it may concern

Please note, I don’t generally complain or go out of my way to say bad things. I do like the MCOC game, that my alliance, friends and myself have been playing for a long time. I do understand that you as Kabam have a difficult job and worked hard to give us all a game we chose to spend money on and of course our time. However, it does not matter how hard you work, if you get it wrong in the end you nonetheless failed.

I feel disappointed that KABAM can´t sort out these new releases, that often end up with emergency maintenance the hole time. (don't you check what you release before you do so?)

As a professional company that ask us, your customers to spend our money on you and our time, I frankly can’t see that you have done any effort of putting in place contingencies, (back up plans), if something goes wrong. This is unprofessional and it’s what will make this game more unpopular each time this happens. because let’s be honest, who really wants to fight past bugs and disasters like last night, when you have to complete a fight 6 times or even worse you could not finish you AQ because the server was down to do emergency maintenance...

I think management needs to sit down and think, because to me (form the outside) it looks like a fu#king circus.
Compensation discussion or negotiation…. I think you sit there and try and think of ways to get away with mistakes like this. Personally, I think you should really take responsibility and make this a opportunity to win back confidence in you as kablam and MCOC. And send out the same gift that is not a crystal that gives you a 2* or 3* or 4* but something better.

This is just my humble opinion and I know you will not listen or take me seriously.

BryanLXXIX

@Kabam Miike

JadedE

Gonna disagree with you, I actually have some respect for kabam for how they solved this issue. Things happen, errors in codes out of everyones control happens, unfortunate events happen. Kabam were quick to respond and close the game quickly to look at the issue. Also remember it was a Friday, the players as well as the staff just want to go home and relax so the fact that a lot of them stayed up extremely late monitoring and updating us is reassuring. I am very critical of kabam when it comes to game design, rewards and bugs but this aint it chief.

That being said we need a tiered list for compensation and I am hopeful that we get some good compensation. Kabam is aware of how bad this outage was and it may be hard so I am just wishing they take their time and make it right.

@Tehsigzorz I completely disagree with you.

In software development, especially in a high-stakes business like this, I'm 100% confident they sell themselves as an Agile (or to a degree) business, and leverage of methodologies like DevOps.

In DevOps, there are 3 main corners (pillars, quadrants) to follow through in the delivery of features or products. During the development phase, both developers working on the code as well as the testing team must be aware of what areas of an existing application will be touched. A development team releases a small subset of a given feature (let's use the new * Invasions event) in vertical slices to ensure that the testing team has enough time to test a slice of the pie.

During this phase, SHOULD both development and operations have full insight into areas in the game things might go wrong, or have gone wrong during testing, and then fix it as part of the sprint.

Once a feature has been tested, code has been build and some for of automation has been run on the feature (don't tell me a company like Kabam has not developed their on automation testing for this game), it is released into the deployment phase, where, usually, regression on the game is completed.

I personally believe that Kabam does not do regression testing, meaning they don't create new accounts and start the game from scratch to determine if there is a stable entry point for new players as well, because things like what happened at the begging of this weekend would have been caught.

After testing, we go into the continuous monitoring phase, where this bug has been picked up after the community started complaining on the forums. Reactive monitoring is the down fall of many a so-called DevOps organization, you should be re-actively monitoring your software (which I do not see Kabam does, or I'm just blind).

Considering that bugs like these are common place, every month with the release of a new version, I highly doubt that you can assume they have this in place. If they have some form of DevOps in place, should they fire their SREs, because they are doing a very poor job.

Kudos definitely goes out to the way it was handled, but this should not have happened in the first place. This was introduced into the versions deployed to the stores or it was injected as part of a smaller update between release into the store earlier the week and the start of the new events on Wednesday. Either way, this, and every single bug we have had to face as part of new version releases for nearly a year, boils down to the same thing. Poor DevOps. Poor testing. Poor regression.

I'm with @BRYAN_LXX1X on this one. This is bigger than a 20k gold and a 2.5k 5* shard drop. This affected, in part, a larger portion of the game than any other bug we've seen released by Kabam, and will require the company to step out of their Vaults and open then wallets in support of the players they make millions off.

Tehsigzorz

Gonna disagree with you, I actually have some respect for kabam for how they solved this issue. Things happen, errors in codes out of everyones control happens, unfortunate events happen. Kabam were quick to respond and close the game quickly to look at the issue. Also remember it was a Friday, the players as well as the staff just want to go home and relax so the fact that a lot of them stayed up extremely late monitoring and updating us is reassuring. I am very critical of kabam when it comes to game design, rewards and bugs but this aint it chief.

That being said we need a tiered list for compensation and I am hopeful that we get some good compensation. Kabam is aware of how bad this outage was and it may be hard so I am just wishing they take their time and make it right.
@Tehsigzorz I completely disagree with you.

In software development, especially in a high-stakes business like this, I'm 100% confident they sell themselves as an Agile (or to a degree) business, and leverage of methodologies like DevOps.

In DevOps, there are 3 main corners (pillars, quadrants) to follow through in the delivery of features or products. During the development phase, both developers working on the code as well as the testing team must be aware of what areas of an existing application will be touched. A development team releases a small subset of a given feature (let's use the new * Invasions event) in vertical slices to ensure that the testing team has enough time to test a slice of the pie.

During this phase, SHOULD both development and operations have full insight into areas in the game things might go wrong, or have gone wrong during testing, and then fix it as part of the sprint.

Once a feature has been tested, code has been build and some for of automation has been run on the feature (don't tell me a company like Kabam has not developed their on automation testing for this game), it is released into the deployment phase, where, usually, regression on the game is completed.

I personally believe that Kabam does not do regression testing, meaning they don't create new accounts and start the game from scratch to determine if there is a stable entry point for new players as well, because things like what happened at the begging of this weekend would have been caught.

After testing, we go into the continuous monitoring phase, where this bug has been picked up after the community started complaining on the forums. Reactive monitoring is the down fall of many a so-called DevOps organization, you should be re-actively monitoring your software (which I do not see Kabam does, or I'm just blind).

Considering that bugs like these are common place, every month with the release of a new version, I highly doubt that you can assume they have this in place. If they have some form of DevOps in place, should they fire their SREs, because they are doing a very poor job.

Kudos definitely goes out to the way it was handled, but this should not have happened in the first place. This was introduced into the versions deployed to the stores or it was injected as part of a smaller update between release into the store earlier the week and the start of the new events on Wednesday. Either way, this, and every single bug we have had to face as part of new version releases for nearly a year, boils down to the same thing. Poor DevOps. Poor testing. Poor regression.

I'm with @BRYAN_LXX1X on this one. This is bigger than a 20k gold and a 2.5k 5* shard drop. This affected, in part, a larger portion of the game than any other bug we've seen released by Kabam, and will require the company to step out of their Vaults and open then wallets in support of the players they make millions off.

I dont know the specifics and nor do I care frankly. Bottom line is that stuff happens as ell as mistakes and they have acknowledged it. They also know this is a huge issue and they didnt hide that so not sure what your last paragraph means at all. They have given much bigger compensation for stuff that is 10% of the current issue so not sure where you are coming off with that number and seems like exaggeration for the sake of more outrage. Also OP says not ti give us compensation such as 2 or 3 or 4 stars...except that hasnt happened in the vast majority of the time I have played so again exaggeration to fit your agenda and cause more outrage.