Server reset to pre-update status? You've GOT to be kidding

[glitterdown]

Alright. I've been a long-suffering Utopian monarch for ages now. I started in age15 or so. I've been working my behind off to keep my kingdom rolling and maintaining interest throughout all the changes, ticks, slow servers, and general incompetency. I've been annoyed, disappointed and generally let down. I feel like the work/reward ratio is WAY down from the old code, but I've never felt particularly TARGETTED by anything until today.

My Kingdom is in war today. We take 12 hours to schedule a wave date. Make sure everyone's here and get people up and out of bed, wait for a critical mass and then ... oh, out of the blue there's an announcement: OMAC's going to do some "scheduled maintenance" <10 minutes after the tick of our scheduled wave date. Alright, no harm done. Everyone's here... let's move ahead. We'll do our ops now and trust OMAC to have their stuff together, and then we'll attack when the server comes back. Everyone busts hump. We fit everything in between the tick and the update. GREAT!

So we do. It's a thing of beauty. 27 Nightmares, 15 Tornadoes, countless NS's. We drop a 1500 acre province from 73k def. to 22.2k def.
Everyone's around, we're excited, happy and waiting for the server to come back. Things are good. The server comes back up, and it's even EARLY! Awesome. Everyone's still around. We organize people by NW, and lay into our choice target all guns blazing. He's a smoldering ruin.
He takes 12 hits from 7 provinces. everyone's double-tapping. he loses 930 acres. PERFECT! 2 hours worth of work from almost 12 different players is a resounding success. We get all our hits in before the next hour-change and his troops start coming back from the nightmares (7400 untrained, 900 per hour returning). He's going to overpop, it's going to be glorious. He has no land incoming. Everything is going perfectly.

Extended downtime follows. An hour or more while OMAC sorts itself out. That's fine, things are beautiful. Some people who were going to follow us up are sweating a bit, but they overslept or had armies out, or whatever and they're just the finishing touches anyway.

I come back just now, 10 minutes before the tick and find what? EVERYTHING since their "server update" has been undone. Well, our ops were before the update, so they went through, and apparently despite resetting ALL 13+ of my KD's attacks, the Nightmare target has now been getting troops BACK as ticks occur with the server down.

Really? This is the sort of gaming environment I'm now forced to accept? This is the best I can hope for from OMAC? You make me sad. You make my players sad too:

[14:06] <JackFarming> i duno abou u guys, but im very mad
[14:06] <HumbleBuyDinner> mad and speechless
[14:06] <Steal> yup
[14:06] <Landro> yeah, we had him down to 655 acres :(
[14:06] <HumbleBuyDinner> it was such a beautiful chain
[14:06] <HumbleBuyDinner> well plan
[14:06] <JackFarming> indeed
[14:07] <Steal> yeah everything went great
[14:07] <JackFarming> Omac just broke our hopes
[14:10] <JackFarming> i cant stop thinking this madness
[14:10] <JackFarming> didnt think Omac can be this bad

[Safri]

sounds annoying, and the fact that theres still been no communication that i can see, doesnt make thing any better

[watchman]

All most makes me glad we were in a cf and just pumping up. Got to say that had to really be a kck in the gut. Don't think management has a clue what "scheduled mainenance" they forgot to mention to the players means to those actually playing the game. For that matter not sure they really care what matters to us.

[pmyraje]

**** happens.

It isn't clear what the next update is going to bring anyway because I haven't had any ticks in my province for the last 3 hours so if/when everything settles back down maybe everything done in that time will update...or not.

If you didn't have fun actually executing all that stuff though then why bother? And if you did have fun doing it then there you go - it was better that having done nothing.

[dzarovit]

Dreaming of the fruits of your labor and reaping the fruits of your labor are two drastically different things, pmy. I'm sure that, even though you've only been a forum member for 3 months and posted 742 times, you understand that, and aren't just posting something out of your rear.

OMAC was one of the reasons I retired this past summer, the other was that I had achieved the goal I had set out for my kingdom - turning it from a ghetto to a successful, competetive, warring kingdom. We went from having 1 completely failed war per age to winning 6 of 8 per age...I hung up my crown after that. I'm bored now, and I miss the camaraderie of it all. But from what I've read about today's "Scheduled Updates", there's nothing scheduled about it, and there hasn't been any information about what's going on, either. OMAC is continuing to keep the players out of the loop.

Oh, what am I getting myself back into.

[Syntico]

/hands glitterdown a diet coke

[pmyraje]

Dreaming of the fruits of your labor and reaping the fruits of your labor are two drastically different things, pmy. I'm sure that, even though you've only been a forum member for 3 months and posted 742 times, you understand that, and aren't just posting something out of your rear.

OMAC was one of the reasons I retired this past summer, the other was that I had achieved the goal I had set out for my kingdom - turning it from a ghetto to a successful, competetive, warring kingdom. We went from having 1 completely failed war per age to winning 6 of 8 per age...I hung up my crown after that. I'm bored now, and I miss the camaraderie of it all. But from what I've read about today's "Scheduled Updates", there's nothing scheduled about it, and there hasn't been any information about what's going on, either. OMAC is continuing to keep the players out of the loop.

Oh, what am I getting myself back into.

I'm not saying it is perfect, I'd be pissed off too if it happened in the middle of my war, but even I have been playing the "new Utopia" long enough to not be surprised when something like this happens. So my point is - if you don't enjoy the actual "doing" of these kind of activities then there really isn't much point because relying on the results always being as expected is risky.

I have exactly the same feeling when I leave a long-running offline game open on my laptop overnight without having saved it for a few hours beforehand and them my freakin' laptop decides to reboot itself despite being in hibernation mode so that I lose a few hours (or half a day) of play.

[DHaran]

Brian and Sean don't have a ****ing clue how their stupidity affects the actual game. This is why they need to go.

pmyraje you are just an idiot for continuing to give ppl **** for raging against this incompetence. It takes a lot of WORK to organize something like that wave, the result is fun, but the work setting it up is not. Please just get the **** out with your condescending comments, they are misplaced.

[Bete Noire]

That is truly a tragic tale. Your victim must be ecstatic.

Utopia was meant in some way to mirror RL. Is not like a game of ping pong or chess that you start over again if someone knocks over the board. Is rpg. Role playing game. Not light. Not frivolous. People take it seriously. As they should. There's a lot at stake.

Downtime has always been regarded as an Act of God. There is no reset. That is classified as outside interference in the game.

Petition B & S & Creeper.

This is not right at all.

By doing this, they are trivializing Utopia & demonstrating a total lack of understanding of the game and the mindset of it's players.

[peppie]

I support glitterdown in this. While nothing of this magnitude has been happening to my KD, we are struggling. Mehul was able to keep three servers running with at one point 90,000 provinces, and OMAC is unable and probably unwilling to run things smoothly for a tenth of that number. Between the ridiculously annoying ticks, the excruciating sluggishness of the game, the horrible navigation and the erratic bugs and downtimes I find it harder and harder to keep my own kingdom, now 29 ages old, up and running. Utopia's "civil society" is disappearing, with essential third party apps running less and less well. uTimes is now the only news source and it can barely find any players with enough love for the game to invest time and effort into providing good coverage. Codingforcharity pimp is now probably the main intel organizer out there, with the old pimp, utopia classics and such all gone out of service, and it's run by one guy who can barely manage to keep it all together. Where once we had a thriving community where a variety of people provided a variety of apps and platforms to enrich this once grand game, we now have left only Brother Green, celien, SpoiledTechie, and Versace and Stella to make an effort to keep this game playable and meaningful. There need to be more names added to that list, and that is only possible in an enjoyable environment, where great feats of coordination and cooperation like Glitterdown described are facilitated and rewarded.


There will always be people saying "tough ****" or "its a free game, love it or leave it" but those people can kiss my ass. Time, effort, emotions have been invested into this game and it is a great disservice to all loyal players to silence laments and criticisms like that. The fact is that Utopia today feels like the beta version of Mehul's Utopia, while it should have been the other way around. I dont think theres any other computer game out there that did a better job at group vs group action than Utopia, so there is definitely a market niche to be exploited. The game doesn't have to fail. But it needs the right considerations, the right investments, the right decisions, but OMAC has shown precious little initiative there, and I fear the worst.

[watchman]

thought their maintenance was over and managed to log in for a few minutes arter quite a lag to do some training and check my active spells. Not sure exactly what -2 hours duration on a nature blessing spell might be about. Somone on IRC said it happened to them once before but guess that was while I was away from the game. Oh well, one more mystery in life. A little less amused to see my inspire army i cast a few hours earlier seems to be missing as that one might cost me some gc. Guess I will take a nap and see what a couple hours will bring

[DHaran]

Q F f'ing T... damn straight Pep.

[Magn]

glitterdown, I commend your civility and self-control.

You didn't even use the triple exclamation mark...

I would not have been as calm and composed as you are if something like that had happened to me.

[ewlo]

Screw you Jolt, Brian, Sean, spiritcreeper or whoever are in charge. 3 ticks in one?
- Attacks that were spread out over three (or two or four) hours was counted as done in one? resulting in insane military losses for 3 hours with no chance to fix between ticks.
- Just finished a AW, NM and NS run and when we are to attack the server is forced 3 ticks forward giving the target back troops for 3 hours + troops coming in from normal training.

morons!

[VT2]

I'd have exploded if this had happened during a war, and raised so much hell on these boards OMAC would have no choice but to publically apologize for being so incompetent.