Gimme Your Hair,
Over the past few weeks I have generally found myself agreeing with most of gamers statement about the state of the gameplaying experience - including most of your post above. Most of the above I agree with in the main. However, I would say that my connection stability did improve significantly after last Wednesday's update (or undo as the case may have been). I do genuinely feel for everyone who is affected as my concern is now that the connection may drop at any time - "Once bitten... and all that".. Fortunately, I can't manage the Nightfall on my own and so when it dropped three times (the few times it has dropped over the past week) I didn't lose everything as I could respawn at my friend's position....
You point out that Bungie knew the servers were broken due to the variety of error codes.
I have to defend Bungie here. I used to work in electronics testing and found there were often bewildering arrays of error codes/numbers/names etc that appeared to have either no rhyme or reason, or seemed just plain daft. There's no accounting it seems for engineers' minds. I didn't understand what the errors meant, being just a monkey on the shopfloor, but the engineers seemed to know. If Bungie has created a seemingly bewildering array of error codes, it's not necessarily because they know they will happen, only that they MAY happen, and more importantly, what component of the system may have caused it. Again, I feel everyone's pain insofar it's downright annoying when it happens and I still want to throw my controller at the screen, but I understand why the errors appear. By the way, if they had more technical errors (like Microsoft's 0x000xxxxx errors), it makes it easier for people to mix them up, and is shown to be more frustrating for people. What Bungie could do is tell us what the errors may relate to (without detailing proprietary information)....? It may help us diagnose the potential problems at our end if necessary.
In a similar vein, the servers may or may not be capable of handling the load. I expect Bungie employs load-balancing on their servers (or at least something similar) and it may be that one or more of the servers are more picky about how well they run (spoiling then fun for everyone). There may be no obvious reason as to why either. I have seen this happen in the company I work for now and it is very frustrating. I doubt the servers were not up to the job, unless the company seriously underestimated just how popular the game would be.
What I do completely agree with is the lack of information Bungie have given us. The post you received from Bungie is the most comprehensive answer I've seen, which is a little worrying for a company which prides itself on being part of the gaming community. I don't expect to see any proprietary data at all. But I do expect Bungie to be more open with their details and help. There is a plethora of cures on the forum from people which, while I appreciate worked for them, makes it very hard for the "Joe Bloggs" gamer to work their way through and figure out what may help them. I do not expect people to start playing around with Static or Dynamic (DHCP) IP addressing, and in fact this could cause problems with their home network if they don't understand the potential ramifications. Bungie should either collate the helpful advice, test it and advise us accordingly, or remove it so people aren't being fed potentially useless or problematic instructions. They should be sending out a message to people stating,
"This is what you can try.... and let us know if it doesn't help." or if they know the issue is at their end, "Please don't play with your system settings, we know there's an issue, it's at our end and this is what we're doing."
Just my twopennithworth.
English
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This whole situation is just very frustrating.
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Yep, truly I do feel people's pain. I have been very vocal about this as I deal with technical issues for people everyday in my job and I would expect to be strung up if I tried people like this. I simply don't understand the lack of communication (which, let's face it, is often key to success) from Bungie. They should not be appearing to hide; they should be out there talking with people. On the other hand, I am tempered by the fact my connection has generally improved for me over the last week. Ironically, the only times it's dropped was when I was in a group of people and so was able to reconnect into the game.
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I got to play three straight crucible matches without a disconnect this morning. That was rad.
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A good start......!