The Game Dame™

For years I have refused to play any MMO because I knew I would instantly become completely, ridiculously addicted. But I wore down. When I got an invite to play the beta version of Faunasphere and found out that it was actually Mac compatible, I couldn’t resist any longer. And I was kind of banking on the hope that I wasn’t going to like it. Well, that was dumb. This game is awesome. And while you might think it’s typical for a girl to enjoy a game where you create, nurture, and breed creatures with different powers in order to take care of the environment, I have two words for you: Viva Piñata. That game may have been a bit “girly”, but there were plenty of dudes who sheepishly admitted loving it. There’s something to be said for a well-designed game that lets you do whatever the hell you want at your own pace sprinkled with the ability to breed all sorts of totally insane creatures.

I’ll be delving into a little more detail about the game after I’ve spent more time playing it, but I felt compelled to reveal a little behind-the-scenes action. As a beta tester, it’s my job to find any bugs and report them so that the tech team can get them all fixed before the game is officially released. The second weekend I played, I ran into some problems loading the game. The following is my email correspondence with the Faunasphere technical support team:

Customer 07/05/2009 08:44 PM

Heya – I’ve been playing around with the game tonight (fun stuff) and ran into a loading issue. I’m on Mac OS 10.4.11 using Firefox 3.0.11. When I logged in the first time, I got the loading message, but the estimated time to complete kept increasing (this was around 9:40 PM). I refreshed the page and it loaded just fine the second time. Once I was in the game, however, I couldn’t get my fauna to move. I could see my cursor on the screen and could click links within other pages just fine, but not on the playing field. When I refreshed/reloaded a 3rd time, everything worked. (Around 9:43 pm.)

Response (Angela, Seattle) 07/06/2009 04:18 PM

Hello Kate,

Thank you for your e-mail. I am very sorry for the trouble you experienced. On July 3rd, there was a fire in the basement of the building where all of our major servers are located, as well as flooding due to the emergency sprinkler system that was set off. This immediately terminated all services, and forced our IT department to immediately transfer the servers to a new location and restore all of our data. This is a very time consuming process that took a few days.

We are currently up and running again for the most part, but services are still sketchy at this time and may not be fully restored in some areas such as the Forums. This area of the site may be down as late as Wednesday as there have been some complications with restoring some of the data.

Again, I am very sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you. At this time, our wonderful IT department continues to restore all services. They worked very diligently over the holiday weekend, and will continue to do so until everything is running as normal. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during this time.

If you have any other questions please reply directly to this email. I am more than happy to help in any way that I can. Have a wonderful day!

JEEZ! That is some serious customer support! You guys can rest assured that – even if there is a freaking fire and a flood – the Faunasphere tech team will drop whatever they’re doing (EVEN ON A HOLIDAY WEEKEND) and put your game first. There’s got to be some sort of IT department award these guys can be given, but for now, the least I can do is give them a shout out on my site.

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