Interesting times on PSU.
Tonight's maintenance hopefully finishes off a really nasty FUBAR in Phantasy Star Universe.
For some background ... for some reason, Sega of Europe controls the billing servers for Sega of America's NA PC/PS2 servers. I don't know why this was decided, but I can only guess that there were finanical reasons for this (seeing as Sega of America had to close all of the international PSO servers due to Phantasy Star Universe failing to gain enough international income to keep them alive).
Sega of Europe's control has proven to be problematic. Earlier this year (I forget when) the billing servers crashed due to overheating--it turned out the AC was out in the Sega of Europe offices. This caused major problems for people whose monthly payment plan rebilled during that time--or for anyone trying to purchase new subscriptions. Because the billing servers were down, people could not get into the game despite paying for it. Sega of America's staff were helpless to fix the problem, as Sega of Europe's employees were enjoying an extended break at the time. It was fixed eventually, with the SoA GMs apologizing and explaining the situation.
Something similar to this has happened since the start of Maximum Attack G, on a much more dire scale. It got so bad that, despite having anywhere from 1000~2000 people return to NA PC/PS2 to play it, people got quickly locked out of the game by more Sega of Europe bungling. This time, people who renew or pay for new subscriptions to PSU are recognized as paid by the billing server, but the billing server refuses to communicate with the game servers--and thus the affected people are unable to play the game. The PC/PS2 servers once more became a ghost town--many, many people have been cursing Sega and cynically referring to their membership in the 065 Club (the people locked out of the game recieve an Error 065).
Apparently, with tonight's maintenance, a new billing server will replace the older one and will hopefully end this issue once and for all. Until then, a number of people had their accounts restored to working status (but only if they had notified Sega ahead of time of their issue)--and victims of Error 065 will not be billed this month apparently. I have heard that the GMs are contemplating other forms of compensation but nothing is yet definite.
All I know is, whatever compensation they give, this two-week issue which had taken so many people out of the game is not going to be enough for those affected by it. As the 360 servers are under X-Box Live and therefore escaped this issue, their players are dominating the leaderboards for Maximum Attack G's top 500 scoring players (who will recieve a Spread Needle/G, a PSO weapon, as a prize).
I wasn't affected (my account runs out of time just after MAG ends), but many of my friends were--I'm really dissapointed that this has happened and that it HAD to happen during the one event so many were waiting for, and just after the NA PC/PS2 and 360 player base tried to drum up a grasroots campaign to bring people to PSU since it had gotten such a bad rap from its limited features upon release (not to mention the hackers ruining the game for NA PC/PS2 players a few months after launch) ...
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ils_trevmun) wrote,
cynical
