Everybody can make a mistake. Every company can suffer from a hazard. Every infrastructure can crash.
The question is not how to be sure to never suffer this kind of situation. Shit will happen, period.
The question is: how do you demonstrate to your community of Players that you care about them?
We could define a scale here:
- level 0 -> slash ignore, don’t answer, don’t explain, get back to the normal and continue to walk. Hmm. Argh.
- level 1 -> almost the same, but add a little bit of communication, direct or indirect, to maintain their hope. Hmm. Grrr.
- level 2 -> hire a community manager and let him/her try to calm down the community just being there and posting cat’s memes. Hmm.
- level 3 -> have a member of the official Team, or the Admins/Mods you would have briefed and trained, to answer the questions. Ok.
- level 4 -> in addition to level 3, have the Team come after the incident, say sorry, and explain what they did for this not to happen again. Good.
- level 5 -> in addition to level 4, seize this opportunity to prove that you care for the mental health of your community, and switch from a bad experience to a good surprise, being generous and distributing freebies or consolation gifts. Great!
No suspense here, we want to deserve the level 5 label on Earthium.
And that’s why we introduce our Servers Crash Policy: every time we suffer a servers crash (due to a mistake from our side, mates, not because you will organize a DDoS attack for everybody to earn free stuff, little cunning devils! :-D), we will offer either a direct consolation prize in in-game Credits for everybody having suffered the crash, or a lottery between all of the Players having suffered the crash, or even both if we need too much time to recover! 🙂