From a purely public relations / marketing standpoint, being upfront and telling people things lets the consumer (us) see the company as more than a faceless corporation.

This is not a whine thread - the game is awesome, and the game developers have nothing to do with keeping ths servers online, or public relations. Those are different departments. This is an honest suggestion for the company. Communicate with your loyal fans (and loyal haters/whiners) to increase the value of your brand / product / whatever. If something got f***ed up, just admit it / explain what's going on. Listen to some Gary Vaynerchuk!

I bet there's someone at Cryptic just wating to say "whoops, our bad, here's the low down.." but the marketing and/or public relations guys probably have communication rules, because they're operating under the (false) assumption that talking about problems makes them worse. It doesn't. Although you can't make problems go away by being open about any screw ups, you can make people care less about them / increase brand loyalty.

Look at all the complaint threads flooding the forum and ask yourself if they'd still be there if there was some open, honest communication.

..and I'd like to reiterate that server problems have nothing to do with the game developers or the game itself, so please stop complaining that the game sucks because you can't play it. That's like saying my car sucks because there's no key to start the engine.

hahahahahahahhaha.

oh, you weren't joking?

that's even funnier...

"Server is not up"

Would you prefer them to say that a memory leak is occuring within the server and all they can do right now is reboot it until they can figure out what is wrong and then patch all the clients to fix the memory leak?

Because I'm betting thats whats going on.

Many people are openly complaining about not just the servers being down, but the lack of communication about it. They're not just complaining, but asking what's going on. Do you really think people would be demanding communication, or asking what's going on, if they HAD communication, or KNEW what's going on? Seriously?

Are you kidding? It SURE IS Cryptics problem! This is a Cryptic Engine and it cannot handle the load. This means running more instances per server hardware, more memory, etc. etc. It is a game design issue and this is why it goes down. It has nothing to do with the hardware itself. You just need more of it and you need to implement better load-balancing management to handle the load of which Cryptic did not plan for.

Sir, you are way off base on this one.

Outside of that, I agree 100% that they need to be more up front in communication. They don't need to say "We don't know what the problem is" because they don't, but they do need to say what they are trying to do and how long the server will be down and such things of that nature.

it never hurts to improve consumer/provider relations.

You darn right! Many, MANY game had this problem. Vanguard, ***, WoW and others. It takes weeks to find them because they never did the load testing to uncover them in the first place. I only wish it was a client-side memory leak. At least that way I could reboot and get back in the game. But when it is a server side issue (still may just be overload issues) then you have a whole other problem altogether.

Yes.

10yessses

I could swear it said "servers are down for maintenance" or something to that effect, but they're up now so I can't check. Not that I'm complaining that they're up.