Add a confirmation box when you go below a certain threshold on certain server settings.
For example, if you set the thrall decay below 10 days, you get a confirmation window asking if you’re sure you want to change that particular setting. But anything above 10 doesn’t need a confirmation.
This way it acts as a safeguard and, because it only triggers below a certain threshold, it’s a bit more jarring if you select a setting that has some bad consequences. Less chance that anyone gets into the habit of just confirming every setting when they adjust it.
I’m not saying that the suggestion doesn’t have some merit… but 20+ years in IT technical support has shown me too often that people tend to ignore confirmation boxes, pop-up warnings and even sheets of paper with HUGE writing on their keyboards telling them not to do something.
Too many times a client calls me to visit their office because their computer isn’t working properly. When I arrive and ask them to show what they’re doing, they click on a thing, a pop-up box appears, they immediately close the pop-up without reading it, and smugly tell me “See? I told you it doesn’t work!”
Then I look them in the eye and ask them what the pop-up they closed was saying. Then I see realization dawning upon their dim little brains when they figure out that the box was actually telling them what was wrong.
One would hope, of course, that people responsible for prodding at server settings were more careful and considerate with the settings they prod… but I’ve seen enough examples during my career that I wouldn’t put my money on it.
“A suggestion to help keep this from happening again” uninstall Conan, don’t get Dune.
I can guarantee this, or something similar will happen again. It’s a risk you have to take to play Conan.
If funcom hadn’t done the roll back I’d be playing small land right now. And most assuredly wouldn’t buy Dune.
That’s true. You can’t completely prevent this from ever happening again, but you can try to make it harder to happen again.
A group of people at Funcom has the ability to deploy new settings to the whole official server fleet. Adding a bit of judicious friction there would make it harder to have another disaster like this.
“Judicious” is the key word, though. If you add a new confirmation stage that pops up every time you do a deployment, people will get used to it after a while and it will have no effect. However, if it pops up only under certain conditions – for example, when deploying to the whole fleet and/or when something about the deployment seems anomalous (like a setting configured outside “reasonable” range) – then it should help. It’s especially helpful when the confirmation isn’t just a “yes/no” choice, but asks you to confirm a value.
For example, if you’re deploying to the whole fleet, the confirmation pop up could say:
WARNING!!!
You are deploying the following settings to 780 servers:
<summary of settings changes>
Please enter the number of servers in the box below to confirm the deployment:
And all you would have to do is enter the same number you see on the screen, but hopefully it would make you stop and look at the settings you’re deploying before doing it.
Again, nothing is foolproof, but there are measures that have been proven to help.
I doubt this would work for the intent you mean. They’re not adjusting settings in the server section of the ingame settings, they are using a script to adjust all 780 servers at once.
What happened here was somehow the line for thrall decay got altered when they were adjusting the building decay. Probably the result of an extra space or line break or some other sort of fat fingered thing in the file they used.
There’s no popup to be had in what they’re likely using, it is probably command line based without a GUI.
All they really need to do is make setting changes on Monday morning, NOT Friday Afternoon. To which they might be doing according to their last post.
Indeed. If the same popup appears every time, people start ignoring it and clicking “OK” without reading.
A backup cloud service I used to use required that I type “delete my data” in a popup box every time I delete a user’s backup file. After a while, that became automatic to me to the point I didn’t read the popup anymore. Not that there was a point to read it because the popup didn’t tell me whose backup I was deleting, so it didn’t even help with accidentally deleting the wrong user’s backups. All it prevented was drunken clicking the delete button.
Long story short, whatever measures Funcom chooses to take need to be more meaningful than that.