Server Maintenance January 4 2022 10:00 am UTC 0

So get the rest of your holiday gear now!

 

Would be awesome, if the game's entry announcement said the same. But according to the game the server will be down Wednesday, December 15 at 9am. There is nothing matching with what you list here (0 out of 4). Probably just copied (one of) the last announcement(s). But still, given that the announcement only is there hours before the downtime takes place it would be rather important to have the facts right. If you started to announce such things a week in advance, the players had enough time to double-check details on their own.

 

So, the update is finished and not even a comment on this? I mean, I get it, there is more important stuff to care for than announcements that are outdated within (roughly) a day. And yes, this is more of a general rant and not a specific problem with Card Hunter. But for the sake of the players, is it that hard to plan a week ahead if you claim that the announced maintenance wasn't a quick bug fix that needed immediate attention? And I'm for the most parts not talking about the wrong information in-game, but this trend in almost all the games I play that planned down-times and planned updates seem to happen too sudden to sufficiently and ahead of time inform the players. Again, the wrong information in-game is bad (and bad pr) but probably just a side effect of you not communicating properly when there is something going on. I had a feeling that there was some information somewhere about when the Winter event will end being already present by the time the Winter event started, but I can't find it anymore, so perhaps that was pure imagination and wishful thinking.

I can't (or don't want to right now) prove this because I never cared to note those things down, but at least for Card Hunter this might even be provable by means of forum posts, but is it just me who feels that the announcements are being delayed until it is almost too late nowadays? Sure, if there is something in the game that needs immediate attention (or something might happen, players can hack into the game, exploit a major bug, pull the whole player database with all the personal information, etc) I get it, the game has to be shut down the second this problem gets noticed. But we are speaking of planned maintenance here. Either your definition of "planned" is really messed up, or it is your conscious decision to keep us in the dark. And with a game like Card Hunter there is (as far as I know) no way for the player to profit from getting this information early. It's just all about convenience. Not this time obviously, but I already ran into the situation in the past that I only noticed a down time when I tried to log in and couldn't, because of the down-time. And that was back when I played almost daily and was an active forum participant.

If you plan something there is (almost) no harm in teasing the players a bit. Quite the opposite because that can create additional hype. And especially give us a time-frame for the changes. In cases like the three annual events, these could be planned years ahead in theory. That would even guarantee that they don't get forgotten like it happened before. And I know that game development can get delayed for a lot of reasons and that this might even cause updates to be postponed. But announcing down-times hours before they happen makes it look like you only decided in this minute that you are ready for the update. Then, there was no actual plan and I would feel cautious about the actual update quality if you needed until 24h before the patch to "fix"/prepare the end of the Winter event. In contrast to the dev-team, whose job it is to work on this game almost daily, for us players this is different, we might only be able to find time to open this game once a week. Still, we (or at least I) would like to get those messages in advance just that I know what is going on.

Again, yes, I also had bad experiences with other games that you aren't responsible for, but sadly you aren't an exception here either. Yes, we live in a fast-paced world, but would it cost you an arm or a leg to be more a part of the community than the inaccessible and merciless ruler from afar (metaphorically speaking) when it comes to announcements?