Jul 30, 2011

Bitter In Bangkok

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By now most of us have probably fallen victim to the Zynga slow roll. It's even more traumatizing when there is a timer involved. Just about every Customer Support FAQ addresses the slow roll but it's inconspicuously left out of the Betrayal In Bangkok FAQ. I have seen several players state that they don't have the Mission. A few days ago one of my mafia members sent me an image of his Missions Bar. You can see it is blank and the drop down Mission Log only shows the last limited time Mission.
He could still view the timer but there was no Mission to perform.
To make the situation even worse, he was also the victim of Mission Tease. Clicking on the yellow help mark produced the Mission popup and made our player feel hopeful and excited. Unfortunately, clicking on the "Get Started!" button produced nothing.
He took it up with Customer Support and was told that the system showed the Mission was active and he was currently working on the first part.
(click image to enlarge)
Once he responded to the contrary with evidence in the form of screen shots, he was informed that he was a victim of the slow roll and would be taken care of if he didn't get the opportunity to finish it in time.
(click image to enlarge)
Meanwhile, the timer is ticking and our Missionless player waits and stares at some jacked up code above his timer.

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Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast.
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Posted by at 10:44 PM

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousJuly 31, 2011 at 5:20 PM

    My point of view, as developer of a massively multi-user web application:

    The slow roll policy is a big BS and (kinda) stupid decision, I think any event MUST be able to be rolled out globally within a few hours (at most 8-24 hours) after the start given the experience level of Zynga engineers in handling large-scale systems.

    It's just a simple database field update to roll them out globally once you've proven the system stability after event roll-out, if you're worried about the servers flooding and/or potential instabilities coming then you can spread the roll-out time of different users up to 8-24 hours (depending on the load caused by the feature) but NOT any more than that (especially if the features has an ending timer)

    If any problems happens to prevent complete roll-out of a time-limited event within the first 24 hours, I will generally extend the time limit for the event in order to increase user engagement and prevent disappointment of my customers in a global scale.

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