Sorry, but I am going to bring up an unpleasant subject.

When Vendetta is "Rolled Out" as an actual "pay for play" game, how are people
going to be compensated for various failures of the systems or software? After
a recent problem (see "Unable to Jump" thread under "Bugs" filed a few moments ago) I was charged with a "death" and also found that my ship and cargo was gone when I logged back in. OK, no big deal, I have plenty of money
and I'm playing for free, so who cares? Well, when I'm paying (sometime "Soon"), I will. I lost a ship worth Crxxxx and weapons worth Crxxxx and cargo
worth Crxxxx and possibly lost faction/standing worth......who knows what.
How will I be compensated? It's not my fault. Vendetta messed-up, and I lose.
What will be done to compensate for that, should it happen under "pay for play?" If my phone goes out, I am credited for the time it was not working.
Same for cable TV, water, power, broadband service and all the rest. What happens when Vendetta takes a dump for whatever reason?

I am curious....

On one MMORPG when the server went out for no planned reason, all accounts would receive a free day to make up for the outage time.

Nice, I suppose. But what about the specific case that I cited above?

Well, most of those could be verified, it would just take time. There would need to be an automated system to recover a pilot if it seems to of hit a bug.

One would assume if you complained about it, you'd probably get given a new ship/weapons/cargo... but such things will be far less common after the bug testing stage.

yes and the problems that you stated are our responsiblity as testers to find and report so that when people do pay they will not have such problems

We all hope that whatever contrbutions we testers make will result in a stable and
reliable Vendetta. But no matter how "robust" any system is there WILL be probs.
I just wonder how they will be resolved....

No amount of testing and bugfixing will make the internet 100% stable. When some random router in Colorado goes haywire and starts routing packets through Uzbekistan, it's suddenly our fault that you are killed by a bot because you cannot control your client.

Yes, we'll have customer support people who can check your account out and compensate you what you lost.

In order for this to work, we need to be logging everything you had to begin with and your connection history; the last thing we need is people whining to phone support people trying to get free stuff.

a1, a while ago you mentioned plans to auto pilot logging out/disconnected ships to the nearest dock instead of just disappearing on the spot. Is this still going to happen before release? You don't really want people calling complaining about loosing a ship when they pulled the plug on their network in a situation where they were going to inevitably lose the ship.

Right, right. Well, this feature is not on our list right now, so I don't think it'll happen before release.

Tech support? Whoa...

a1k0n, thanks for the reply. As someone who has been in the telecommunications industry for over 30 years, I understand what can happen in
large networks. I have also been dealing with users/customers for most of those
years and KNOW that most customers don't know squat about the systems they
use and don't want to. They will blame the person/company they are paying for
any problem they have. There are also some who will attempt to "game" the
system. I was merely curious as to how these things will be dealt with....

Thanks Again

"When some random router in Colorado goes haywire and starts routing packets through Uzbekistan"

Sounds sort of like node hijacking, lol :P.

See what happend is that Uzbekistan was telling colorado that it was on the shortest path. The guy at uzbekistan fowards the packets, but with modifications.:p