David
Unhappy new customer MH417648
Signed up for a new Factorio server around 11pm New York time on a Thursday. Clunky interface, nothing explained or tutorial'd up front, not even a link to a startup guide or a FAQ or an introductory YouTube video for new users like me. My first server rental in any form for any game ever. Was lucky enough to *stumble* into your support ticket system, while searching for another piece of information. Let me be exceedingly clear -- you folks did an absolutely superb job of hiding your contact info behind a seemingly Romulan cloaking device. Sweet. But for my having stumbled into it when looking for info on *when my renewal is figured* with respect to time zone and options to change the payment method on my account, I'm confident that I'd have gotten very frustrated with the technical issues of getting my server rental up and running when it became time to worry about that. Five minutes after signing up, a message on the portal dashboard informed me that no server was "available" at the location I'd picked. I *picked* the location based on indicated server availability less than five minutes prior! Nice bait and switch. Thumbs up. Attempted to upload an existing savefile. Took several minutes, because you folks apparently devote essentially all your bandwidth to gameplay access and not to portal access (applies to downloading backups too, I've learned in the days since) but while this is unpleasant to experience at the time, I'm actually not mad about this. Gametime access *is* the more important usage of bandwidth instead of infrequent and isolated pockets of needing to transact configs and savefiles. Still, I was unpleasantly forced to *learn* this *after* beginning the process with NO descriptions of what to anticipate beforehand. For example -- for a while, I was beginning to troubleshoot my *own* connection. If an FAQ had actually told me, "we restrict file downloads and uploads to ~85kbps so that most of our bandwidth is devoted to live gameplay connections, please bear with us on this blah blah" then fine. Nope. Didn't do that. Received a file upload *verification* notice, but discovered that the file never uploaded. Addressed this with a support ticket. Your superstar, Zak Feneck, was superb. Transacted at least two dozen messages back and forth with me, answering all of my little questions that could've been at least mostly answered by some page devoted to the idea of, "New Users click here! ... So you're a new user of our service? Welcome to the Multiplay family. Whether your a gaming veteran trying us out because your needs aren't being met elsewhere, or if you're new to game hosting in general, we'd like to show you a few things about how to work with your account. This info would be especially important if this is your first foray into hosting your own multiplayer servers without the use of an in-house LAN connection." Or somesuch. Zak was not only great, he explained to me that your savefile upload system is being worked on, the devs knew about it and a fix was being chased down. But, even now, several days afterward, there are no user-visible indications that the savefiles have to be manually applied with a support ticket. I can read about scheduled maintenance outages in places like Chicago and London, outages that have since been resolved *months* before I became a customer, but nope, nowhere does it say that I need to manually submit a new savefile with a support ticket and I've had the account for a few days now. Also, your game addon and modding interface. Instead of plugging into whatever modding api might be available from the mods.factorio.com modhosting portal, you need me to select from your own internally curated index of mods. If the mod title (or specific mod version) is not one of the *only two* that Multiplay has indexed, I need to submit a copy of the mod files that I want to use in a support ticket. I need to include the files for the mod, and a link to the meta info, so that you can have someone read my support ticket and ADD my submission to your own internal modding / addon index. Only once it's in the index can I then thereby *select* the mod for use on my server profile. Again, nowhere is this explained as to WHY this must be done this way, or even an effort to tell me to expect it to happen at all. "Be sure to download all of the mods you want to use and obtain links to the following information on them so that they can be manually indexed in our system. That way, other future customers might be able to use them, too. Otherwise, please enjoy selecting from our already outdated and version-deprecated index for one-click activation of a mod that may or may not be version-appropriate for the base version of the game that your server comes preloaded with!" Ended up playing for a while, me and ONE other player, savefile approximately 60MB (in Factorio, savefile complexity and in-game progress is approximately reflected in savefile size -- the more advancement you achieve, the larger the file becomes.) On Friday, gameplay was chugging along with an FPS/UPS of roughly 60 each. Factorio is a CPU-heavy game, as CPU bottlenecks are MUCH more common than graphics bottlenecks. FPS (frames per second) and UPS (updates per second) should remain roughly equal. Different gameplay or hardware mismatches or issues reflect in one statistic diverging from the other. Which one diverges, by how wide a margin, how quickly or often it diverges (if it's intermittent) and in which *direction* can often illuminate underlying issues for troubleshooting -- sometimes that troubleshooting is traceable to the end user, sometimes to the game itself, sometimes to a mod, sometimes to the server, and even sometimes to something you're attempting to accomplish within the game instance itself (the game is still in early access.) However, after two days, FPS / UPS dropped precipitously. One way to mitigate this is to use in-game console commands to reduce the flow of time in the game. Note that ANY console command usage in the game disables the ability to earn achievements for the rest of the savefile's playthrough. I'm not an achievement whare, but I still don't like disabling them when I'm forced to "cheat" only to make the game playable. The game is now borderline unplayable, with fewer than 20 frames per second, by slowing the game down to 0.35x timeflow -- literally, solving the lagspike problem by artificially and intentionally causing permanent consistent lag by slowing the game's speed down. I asked about this today. Waited almost three hours for my first response from Ryan Assis. I was informed that the server I was assigned was simply on a populated CPU and I wasn't getting the best experience. They recommended I change server assignments, at the expense of needing a new IP:port assignment (I'd have to notify my friend of the change.) I replied after about 5-10 minutes, saying yes please, do that, by the way, what's involved? No reply for more than an hour. Mr. Assis answered my question, *then asked me a second time if I wanted to receive a new server.* I repeated my answer, literally typed the word "yes" multiple times along with a request to be notified of the time estimate. Nothing. More than 90 minutes later, told my new server is up and running, all set. Logged in with the game, yes it is running. On a newly generated map, with default in-game map selection settings (still no idea how to manipulate map settings, I fear it'll be necessary to create a map offline and upload it as a new savefile to work from.) I then replied to the same support ticket, with a dropbox link to my offline copy of the savefile we'd been working from. Note that it was sheer happenstance that I'd decided to download a backup copy today before this went down, and but for that good fortune on my own part, I suspect that my old server was summarily deleted and made available for new customer orders, thereby deleting any Multiplay-held copies of my savefiles. The mods were indeed ported properly, thanks goodness. Oh, and my savefile size of 61.5MB? Larger than is allowed for file attachments in the support ticket interface. Hence the dropbox link. Good thing I happened to already have Dropbox, right? Boy, would that be a pain for me to contend with the UNANNOUNCED savefile upload shenanigans if I were entirely reliant on, you know, Multiplay delivering tools and methods necessary to use what I'm paying for. Like savefile uploads. This dropbox link was submitted by me two hours and fifty three minutes ago. The original underlying ticket was opened more than eight hours ago. The last three hours are caused by waiting to upload a file that was already there, and either should have been moved with no need to re-upload, OR I should have been asked to download and backup my own savefile prior to the relocation because I'd need to reupload it afterward. That way I could preemptively provide the Dropbox link and I'd have been up and playing three hours ago. And more than an hour before THAT was waiting for someone to ask me to repeat the authorization to do what I'd already authorized them to do. I have no issue with someone being sure on a server move -- especially if there were risk of losing savefile progress (good thing that I happened to have my own fresh download for literally no reason at all beyond my own exploration of the controls on the dashboard, because I was never told of that risk losing savefile in a server move.) My issue is that I've had this account for 72 hours, and almost 18 of those hours have been awaiting timely responses from 24/7 support through support ticket communication when a LOT of my info could already have been told to me with some form of introduction packet or a new-user-tour type of disclosure with a link in my receipt and confirmation email. No explanation of what the different user levels are for my friend. (2 b contd)
Response from Multiplay GameserversJul 30, 2017
Hello David, I would like to thank you for such a detailed review. While we aren't always able to do everything perfect, we do appreciate being told what went wrong and why. Your review was discussed quite a bit internally over the past week, as it has highlighted quite a few issues. I can tell you now that thanks to your review we are going to go forward with a number of changes to clanforge and how we offer support, in the hopes that no one else has to go through these problems. We have a lot of things to change or fix, but I can assure you that we'll do everything we can to get this sorted. It may take weeks or even months, but in the end we aim to have a service we are proud of and more importantly, that all our customers are happy to use. Thanks again, Mike Assis Technical Operations Lead