Let's discuss the problems we encountered with the release of Patch 0.4.11

Preamble

We recently released Patch 0.4.11, our final pre-alpha demo release. This came in two variants; a restricted download for those who backed us at the $35 Pathfinder tier or higher with early access to the Necromancer, and a public release containing all other improvements (floating health bars, command queuing, rebindable keys, etc).

 
Unfortunately we were beset by two related technical issues; one which prevented people from viewing support articles while logged in, and another which prevented the download links for the Necromancer client from being shown. Neither of these affected everyone, which complicated efforts to identify and correct them.

 
Affected players were asked to e-mail us at our support address so we could assist them. We would like to share some information pertaining to the waiting times they experienced.

 
Please be aware of the following;

  • Only related e-mails were included.
  • Only the initial e-mail and response were included.
  • The time span we are analysing begins at the moment we received the first e-mail about one of these problems, and ends exactly 36 hours later. This is one and a half days, and reflects the time during which we received a substantial volume of e-mails about these issues. This was from 05:06 June 29th to 17:06 June 30th (UTC +1). We chose this time zone as our support staff are located in the Republic of Ireland.
  • We are looking at the total number of minutes, rounding down. Partial minutes are discarded.
    • Three people each waiting 20 seconds would be viewed as 0 minutes x 3, not 60 seconds x 1.

 
Note: The first two bullet points were born out of a pragmatic desire to reduce the amount of work entailed in compiling this information. We do not currently prioritise some issues over others, neither do we prioritise e-mails based on whether it would be an initial or subsequent response. We thus feel the statistics would not be meaningfully altered by these omissions, and that doing so with a disclaimer was reasonable.

 

Statistics

  • Our best response time was 0 minutes.
  • Our worst response time was 5 hours & 24 minutes.

 

  • The most common response time was 1 minute.
  • The average response time was 16 minutes.

Note: In statistics there are multiple types of average. Here we refer to the mean.

 

  • 8.21% of affected players had received a response one minute after contacting us.
  • 52.05% of affected players had received a response 10 minutes after contacting us.
  • 90.41% of affected players had received a response 30 minutes after contacting us.
  • 94.52% of affected players had received a response one hour after contacting us.

 

  • 94.52% of affected players had their issue resolved after a single response.
  • 100% of affected players had their issue resolved after one or two responses.

Note: Messages consisting entirely of pleasantries (“thanks”, “you’re welcome”) were excluded.

 

Commentary

We can see that there was an outlier; the vast majority of our responses were quite timely, while one person was waiting for a disproportionately long period of time. This was due to their e-mail being about both a lack of access to the Necromancer client as well an account issue which warranted further investigation.

 
The first e-mail received a response after 29 minutes. This was due to the problems being unforeseen, and us consequently needing to investigate them to discover what was causing them and how we could offer assistance. We believe this taking half an hour was acceptable, if not ideal. This delay resulted in a backlog which adversely impacted our mean response time, however this was unavoidable due to the circumstances.

 
We’re sorry that these problems occurred. We have yet to apply a proper fix, but we have deployed a workaround for almost every account - and this should affect future accounts as they are created. If you experience one of these issues, please visit our support site and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.