Month: December 2006

I sent a complaint to Hypernia. At first they argued with me that they didn’t do anything wrong. So I sent this email:

[NameRemoved],

Suppose you decide to strike out on your own and start your own MMOG hosting company. Blizzard hired you as a trial to run one of their World of Warcraft servers. You hire an admin, who sees the server has a problem, so he puts a new computer in its place, but doesn’t copy over or install the old harddrive or install anything except a couple of games. Obviously your customers cannot play and you are flooded with support requests, cancellations, refunds, etc. Of course you cannot give them refunds, since you don’t even know who your customers are without your customer list. You get complaints with the BBB, chargebacks, etc.

So you send an email marked “Critical” to your system admin to put the old harddrive back in, but he takes two days to do it, during which time your business is going down the tubes. At last, when you get your system back up, it doesn’t work, as it is misconfigured such that you cannot install any of your old applications on it.

Would Blizzard hire you again? Would you hire this admin again?

This is what happened to me, except for Blizzard it’s my own company and my own MMOG.

So please in the future, ask support to not take any action on the server without prior notification and authorization. The proper way to handle the situation would have been to call me and say “Hey your server is locked up, what would you like to do?”

Right now since this is just a development server I only really lost one day of work, my bug database, about $500, and 3 days of access, rather than my whole business. But to trust my MMOG with Hypernia, as I was planning to do, I really hope this does not happen again.

And the response to this

Hi,

I didn’t think of it that way… you have a very good point.

Just do me a favor and always have backups because machines are machines and they either run well or break.

I’ve credited your account.

So at least this has been resolved. Still no working server though.

I am very displeased with my MMOG host Hypernia.net right now. One day out of the blue I get an email saying my server was locking up, so they replaced it. The server with all my development tools and code, which took me a day to install, to say nothing of the valuable information that was on it. Nobody asked me what was on the server, or gave me a chance to copy off my data, what the correct solution was.

After two days of frantic support requests they finally put the old harddrive back, on a different mount. Because it’s an emergency request, and they claim it’s a software problem, they charge me an undisclosed fee on top of that. To say that pisses me off is an understatement. Two days time is hardly an emergency response time. How do they know it was a software problem? Nobody did any investigation that I am aware of. And I’m paying $150 a month for this thing. Why should I pay more, when I never asked that my server be replaced. Unless it was frozen for good, just reboot the damn thing, tell me that it’s locked up, and let me copy off my data or fix the problem.

Not only have I now lost two days of development access, I’ve already lost half a day of work trying to unsuccessfully reinstall everything. My apps won’t install on the new server for some reason. I think they restricted my access rights so I can’t install new applications. Without asking me, they installed two games under the Hypernia admin account, which run in the background. They waste memory, slow down the server, waste harddrive space, and are a security hole. I can’t uninstall them either.

I’m going to call and bitch about this. I expect to be credited for two days of hosting, plus no charge for putting the harddrive back, or else I’m changing providers.

It’s now been about a month since I’ve hired people for my own game company and have been working on it truly full-time.

A few things I’ve discovered:

1. My initial time estimates were way off – not for myself so much as for others. I look back now at tasks I scheduled for 1 hour, and took a contractor 3 days. My time estimates were based on my own ability and knowledge, rather than that of those of the people I hired. This is not their fault though – there is always a loss of productivity with more junior programmers, as well as them not being able to read my mind as to what I want, and the master plan of the whole architecture.

2. I can’t really assign tasks according to their usefulness because of interdependencies. So some of what I assign, while not being busywork, is far less of a priority than other things that need to be done but can’t be done independently.

3. I didn’t account for dead-time, which is time lost because I spent a day setting up the server, or figuring out how to edit .mel scripts, or trying to figure out which physics engine to use and what tools I need to do so.

4. People tend to work better after they get used to your company and management style. It’s usually necessary to reinforce several times certain things, such as work hours, or no Hungarian notation, etc. After the initial period there’s no more problems.

5. You never really know how good someone is until you work with them because ‘good’ isn’t just a matter of being experienced. It’s also a matter of attitude, work ethic, attention to detail, and willingness to learn. Given the choice, I’d rather hire someone inexperienced but who will go out of their way to try to do a good job than someone experienced but who only does the bare minimum.

6. You really need to work with someone throughout the day to get the top quality results. Simply assigning a task and coming back 3 days later when it is checked in is a guaranteed way to just waste 3 days of paying someone and getting yourself annoyed. On the other end, talking to someone as they do something will not only give you both good ideas but builds up loyalty and ensures no time is wasted and problems are resolved quickly.

7. As a technical director, you really have to know pretty much how to do everything, even if you hire a specialist to do it for you. Otherwise there is no way to tell if something is done correctly or not.

8. Every day spent is more money spent. That causes a lot of stress.

9. It’s nice to think that if I do a great job on the game it will make a lot of money. I have no way to know if that is actually true, and if I’m just wasting a lot of time and money.

10. It’s very important to preemptively avoid distractions. Don’t buy / download games, keep your webbrowser closed, etc, or you won’t get any work done working from home.

I know how to use Maya now, on a very rudimentary level

I can’t find a VS 2005 to 2003 project converter. This is very annoying. I’m going to have to reinstall 2003 and redo all my project changes now.