When I logged into my Facebook account this evening, I was not happy. Nobody wants to see the words "Account Unavailable" splashed in a pink box. I thought I was going to die. I stayed calm and read the fine print that stated "Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience."
I still didn't feel good and immediately went to my energy account to check it out. I clicked on my profile and got the message "Profile Unavailable" with the fine print stating "Sorry, this profile is not available at the moment. Please try again shortly.
Now what? Everyone always says to go to
http://mafiawars.com/ whenever your game won't load so I figured it was worth a try. I wasn't thinking logically and was desperate to play Mafia Wars because I had full stamina. I didn't like seeing anything Facebook on this page but clicked the "Connect with Facebook" button anyways.
Darn, but I still had to keep trying. I logged in but got the same message.
I couldn't possibly let this be for the night so I logged back into my energy account and went to the
Facebook Help Center and typed in "Account Unavailable" in the search box.
I found a Facebook FAQ that informed me Facebook was making an improvement to the database that my account is stored on and to proceed if my account is not back in 24 hours.
I didn't want to wait so I clicked on "these instructions" and was told to clear my cache and cookies. Wow, that is the same line used by Zynga.
I next clicked on the "click here" line and got this. Since it had only been about 5 minutes, I didn't proceed but bookmarked the page.
I then went back to the first page that the search box brought me to so I could read the Help Discussions and see what other Facebook users had to say. This didn't make me feel any better, in fact, I felt worse. There were a lot of horror stories and I worried I would be the next victim and never get my account back. A lot of people have lost their accounts for no apparent reason and are so frustrated that nobody from Facebook will help them.
I was lucky and there is a happy ending to my story, my account became available and all the stress I was going through was gone. My account was only down for about thirty minutes but it wasn't a fun experience.
Bossy Don from
Top Mafia.Info knows a few things about Facebook and account issues. She explained to me that periodically Facebook does an automated review of my account and will archive things that I no longer access. Why is it that with Facebook, we worry so much? It shouldn't be this way. I've never played an on-line game where I was in constant fear of losing my account. I made a big deal out of this when I really didn't need to. Thanks Facebook!
Loot Lady! I am glad that you made this post, because it did a good job describing some of the reasons that 2 weeks ago, as an active clan player, I backed off, and then just quit playing. The game was causing me stress. I had stress about the stuff you just mentioned, stress about trying to chuck some NY consumables to a very needy small mafia player (is it OK, or not?), stress about trying to figure out how to play the new content, bugs which would not count my tournament wins, etc. I looked at my wife and said, "Why am I going to let them change this in a way that stresses me and keep playing?" She, another extremely active clan member quit also about a week ago.
ReplyDeleteWe spent money. I have 400 RP still on my account. I am reading instead. Last weekend, instead of deciding whether to play or not, I just took my son fishing for bass. I feel much better. I do miss the clan interaction. I check in every now and then on Skype and chat with them.
I vote with my wallet. I know that they took it too far. Corporate leadership almost always does. You know you went too far when you lose business. I am really curious about how many of us there are, i.e, experienced, serious, money spending players who quit.
Don M.
This happened to me last week. Only I was down for 18 hrs.
ReplyDelete