AOWC Testimonial

[eclyps]

:)

http://forums.artofwarcentral.com/showthread.php?t=1060

[*david*]

That was an increadlibly eliquent and reasoned testimonial. Good luck as we move on to new hosting. I know I speak for everyone when I say how much we appriciate you guys putting so much time and energy into making Stompfest the best it can be.

-- E is my hero --

[armond21]

Well played E, thats the only way to get taken seriously.

[m_d_butler]

Thank you for representing all of us, E. That gratitude extends to the rest of the team who puts forth so many hours to build the foundation for this community to thrive. Briz, Jokerz, and the rest of you, Thanks.

[A Spiral Ham]

" Maybe with time and dedication, you guys can once again become what you gloat about, but for now, you fall very short." (sniff) (sniff) You smell that? I smell something Burning.

[hot6]

saucey and i will spam their forums with racist remarks!










jaykay

[chewy]

<3 u E....you're such a smart kid!!

[leoftw]

nice :) it will be deleted though :P

[The Penultimate Mohican]

Nice job e!

[m_d_butler]

nice :) it will be deleted though :P

I have a snagit image of his entire post. I would attach it, but it is 640k.

[pancakes? c'est charmant!]

look out, e, or one will forum ban you for flaming those other forums. shame on you.

[Anathema]

Yeah E! Way to take a stand against incompetent Server hosting :D

[blahdan]

I just checked the thread and it said that the thread i specified was invalid. Guess they couldnt handle the truth and decided to delete it.

As I looked through the customer testimonials all of the negative threads that used to be there are now 'missing'

[eclyps]

oh it finally took them 3 days to delete it

[leoftw]

*^#$*^#$*^#$*^#$en Ghey.

I knew that was going to happen :P

[eclyps]

Don't worry they will regret it. A report from me as well as brad will be sent to the BBB, and my testimonial along with their decision to remove it will be posted on every website I can find...

[leoftw]

lol I was going to buy a vent server from them too. screw them :P

[armond21]

Wow, bad move on their part.

[m_d_butler]

oh it finally took them 3 days to delete it

I have a snagit image of his entire post. I would attach it, but it is 640k.

:cool:

The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters.

[Ginkan]

Don't worry they will regret it. A report from me as well as brad will be sent to the BBB, and my testimonial along with their decision to remove it will be posted on every website I can find...

Truly epic, the ongoing war with the collective enemies of Stompfest escalates further! Time to call in the allied BBB / Fellow Forums to apply pressure and explicitly redeclare what E has said.

Bah, I can't get my creative juices flowing today.

[mgz]

Did you have a copy we can read? I missed it :(

[blahdan]

m_d_butler took a screenshot of it. Ask him.

[eclyps]

It was pretty much this, give or take a sentence or two...

I’d like to give my testimonial. Now this isn’t a rant. I’ve had 2 dedicated servers with Art of War Central for 2 years. I’ve taken everything that’s happened over the last year into consideration when writing this. And please note, I have never actually rented a single game server from AOWC, only dedicated servers.



So where do I start… ah yes, lets start with their tech support.



When it comes to support, AOWC is absolutely lacking. What I've gathered is that when it comes to dedicated servers, Art Of War Central does not actually have any more control over things than the customer does. When you submit a ticket to AOWC, it appears that they then contact the datacenter somehow (call? submit a ticket of their own?) and have whoever is working at that particular datacenter fix the problem. What is the need for the middle man? Why am I paying AOWC? When there is an issue with our servers, I like to know what happened. “Oh it’s fixed now sorry” doesn’t cut it for me. When I ask what the problem was, I get a response such as “I do not know, the datacenter fixed it they didn't give me a description”. This is pretty poor communication. The datacenter should relay what the issue was back to AOWC and AOWC should be able to supply me with a cause when I request. To give them credit, they were able to get our first box “rebuilt” because it was giving us so many issues. Unfortunately, when we got that server up, we went from 6 IPs to 1 IP, and they were trying to charge us to get them back. After it reached management they just gave them back to us.





While still on the subject of poor support, lets talk about the lag and what kind of responses I get when bringing it up via a ticket.





The general response from anyone except management will be “Send me a tracert”. No matter how much we stress that it’s happening to EVERYONE on the server, we still get “Send me a tracert”. Even after we send tracerts, they say everything’s fine you shouldn’t be getting lag. Well, that obviously wasn’t the case, because the lag continued.



We’ve actually managed to get our lag reports to reach management a few times. We sent them tracerts and pings showing between 17% and 30% loss over hundreds and hundreds of sent packets. Management comes back requesting 3 MTR reports each with over 1000 packets, as well as my home IP. No matter how many times we say that the issue is going on right now with everyone one the server and not just me, they simply will not investigate the situation. Instead they require you to do all the work so they can tell you the obvious several hours later. “We are having a network outage on one of our providers”.



So we know the drill now. Send tracerts, send a ton of MTR reports with thousands of packets, send a home IP, and wait. Well next time we’re having loss, we pinpoint the problem on a SAVVIS hub. We’re getting loss when we hit that hop. It’s shown clearly in all of the MTR reports. Granted, there’s not a whole lot AOWC can do about this, since they do not run SAVVIS, but their response to all of our data was to get in game screenshots if we see loss on the server, and the problematic IPs that we found are fine. Please tell me you’re joking. So now apart from tracerts, 3 MTR reports with over 1000 packets each, and my home IP, I ALSO need to send in game screenshots showing loss? Again, why am I paying AOWC?



There was one time in particular that we were having loss around 20%. We submitted a tracert showing clear packet loss and the response from management was “thoes time outs are normal router reaction data is till going though fast”. Eventually we got sick of trying to submit tickets for lag. The stress of dealing with these guys was far worse than the stress of players complaining.





Now on to the “powerful” rigs they’re running





I can’t really blame a whole lot of this on AOWC. They didn’t force me to pick the rig I picked. And maybe it’s just me, but it seems like I should be getting a lot more for my money… If we’re showing incredibly low performance (severe drop in tick for source servers) they tell us that we’re running too much on our machine. Please don’t tell me that we’re paying $240 dollars per month for a box that can’t handle 2 24 man 50 tick TF2 servers… If you plan on getting a dedicated server from AOWC for source games, don’t plan on getting their dual 3.0 Xeon rigs. I can’t say how other game engines run though, so it may just be a source thing.





Servers crashing/randomly disconnecting



We’ve had probably close to a dozen or more total crashes/network failures/power outages over the last year that lasted more than a few hours. Many actually last entire nights. The latest one occurred 2 days ago. About mid-day we noticed one of our dedicated servers were down. We could ping the server, but we couldn’t log into RDC and we none of the dedicated servers running on that box were functional. We submitted a ticket at 1:21PM. 2 hours later we get a reply saying our RDC was fixed. Well I tried logging on and it was still dead. We gave them a call, hoping something would get done a bit quicker. They said they would have the server pulled for closer inspection. At 9:30AM the next day they ask if we have a firewall that could be blocking the RDC. I told them that we don’t have a firewall on there that blocks ports. I’m not sure if he was trying to be cool, or if they were legitimate spelling mistakes, but his response was “Aiite they're checking into it I'll tell you when I got more infos.”. So I waited and waited. Our machine finally came back up but was going incredibly slow (took about 20 seconds for a right mouse click to work). I asked for a hard reboot and that was the last time I saw the server online… 1 of the 3 AOWC support guys actually asked us if we knew what the issue was, which I found somewhat odd. The last thing they said to me, 2 days after the initial crash, is that they think it might be a hardware failure. Uptime for our 2 servers is definitely below their 99.5% guarantee.







All in all, I’m incredibly dissatisfied with what I got from Art of War Central due to their lack of helpful support, unreliable network hardware, and overall ignorance. I have, however, never had a ticket go completely ignored by AOWC support, so it seems as though they are at least trying. Unfortunately, trying just doesn’t cut it when you have 80,000 players across 4 servers.



I rate them a 4/10.



Good luck in the future. Our contract is almost up, we have purchased a server and are moving to a different host. Maybe with time and dedication, you guys can once again become what you gloat about, but for now, you fall very short.

[m_d_butler]

I just checked the thread and it said that the thread i specified was invalid. Guess they couldnt handle the truth and decided to delete it.

As I looked through the customer testimonials all of the negative threads that used to be there are now 'missing'

I have a snagit image of his entire post. I would attach it, but it is 640k.

PM me and I will email the file to anyone interested in the jpg of the entire post.

[Enlightened Viet]

nice, that was quite a long post.

[Ganwen]

I posted a msg to the server admin calling them asshats and whatnot for deleted posts :)

didnt even need to register either.. GO SPAM THEM!!!!

[L2P]

Goodjob E! I know we put you through a lot of shit for these server problems. We realize you are as frustrated as we were/are. It just sucks we all got screwed buy this hosting service. Therefore after the new servers are up, I am planning a community wide SPAM to their forums. If they want to delete your forum post, try deleting 80,000.....GG!

[eclyps]

lol no, don't spam their forums. They are not worth your time. I'd rather have you guys spend that time here making the community even better :)

[Anathema]

lol no, don't spam their forums. They are not worth your time. I'd rather have you guys spend that time here making the community even better :)

Indeed. Spamming is never the answer. Rational thought and perseverance will always win in the end! :)

[Ganwen]

but spamming is more fun... :(

[m_d_butler]

but spamming is more fun... :(

Would you want people who are upset with Stompfest to spam our forums?:confused:

[eclyps]

they could have been men and responded to it, saying they are making improvements, etc. I would have let it go and just moved on. But when they pull this crap, they'll get it 10x worse.