Great Moments In Customer Service Pt. XCII: InstallShield Is Hard

SOE’s kind of busy with launching DC Online and all, so could you just uninstall the beta manually yourself? And come in on Saturday? Yeah, that’d be great. (GoogleCache due to DCO beta forums being taken down.)

I’m sure you all realize that the focus of the development staff is currently going to be bmaking the game as awesome as possible for the retail release. The broken uninstaller is a forgivable and understandable over-sight.


Response from the Internet?

If a user has to hand-delete every file associated with your product, including digging through their registry, that is bad and your programmers should feel bad.

  • http://idempot.net/blog/ Matthew Weigel

    If a user has to hand-delete every file associated with your product, including digging through their registry… what makes you think they will install the product a second time?

    Also: I’m a bit confused as to why telling your players that something you did is “forgivable” actually MEANS that it’s forgivable. I don’t think it’s in a CM’s power to dictate how the community feels; if it is, I have completely misunderstood the position and I’m frankly agog at their power.

  • http://Website yunk

    That is why you need to integrate the installer as your first item.

    Just like, when working on databases, you have to make sure your model and install files are in sync every single step of the way. If you say “well I’ll make this quick change and document/put it in my generator later” not only will no one know, but when it’s time to migrate to qa or prod you will miss tons of things that you need to migrate.

    This is not just an oversight, but evidence of bad programming practice at the very beginning of the project. It’s what rookie developers and project managers do, you learn after the first time.

    Of course, it’s not like they are the only company out there that does this. But after decades you’d think more people would learn.

  • http://Website Jon “Calandryll” Hanna

    Yea. One of the things I always tell new CMs is you don’t get to decide what is and what is not a big deal. In fact, trying to do so often makes something a bigger deal than it otherwise would have been. That’s not to say CMs should act like the sky is falling every time a player complains, but dismissing thier concern outright is rarely the right tactic.

    Also, reading all of the Community Management stories here is making me sad.

  • http://Website Akutan

    Goodness and I had to do just that the other day. I hope CCleaner caught everything.

  • http://Website v

    Oh, lord. Telling an angry person that what you’ve done is forgivable (even when it IS, or at least, should be) is such a bad idea. Telling that to an internet mob is…a stupid human trick.

    If I had to hand delete an app, I’d never install it again, just on principle. Hand deleting shit is what I do when a computer has a virus and nothing else fixes it apart from an OS reinstall.

  • http://Website Rodalpho

    It’s not exactly a breathtaking GM darwin level scandal, but this is a fine example of poor community management.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    Well, there’s a chore for me to look forward to.

    To argue devil’s advocate, you could say that this is what you sign up for when you look to enter a beta test, and those who simply signed on to preview a game are reaping karma.

    However, the developer’s reputarion is more likely to suffer. Worries that the game will claim a permanent spot on peoples’ hard drives will take a shot at this horse as it leaves the starting gatr.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    Bah accidentally hit submit trying to change “gatr” to “gate.” The hazards of iPad commenting.

    One big point I wanted to make: the game is charging a monthly subscription and shouldn’t be. That’s the big thing that will turn it into a ghost town a month after release, which is pity, because it is otherwise a well-wrought action persistenent space hero game.

  • http://Website JuJutsu

    On the one hand, I agree with Geldon..broken stuff is the price you pay for being a beta tester. On the other hand, I’m not a beta tester and this sort of stuff undermines my confidence in the game as a whole.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich

    It actually uninstalled fine for me, aside from leaving behind its configuration files. I’m guessing the issue only affects certain individuals, or perhaps later patches fixed it.

    I really enjoyed the beta… for three days. Then I had maximum level and exhausted the greater body of the content in the process.

    If I can scrounge together $50 I may well end up trying to be there at release, but I get the feeling I won’t be hanging around for $15/mo to play a game in the vein of, “like Prototype/Infamous, with the DC license, except greatly hindered by MMORPG overhead.”

  • http://Website Mark Asher

    I’m always surprised by these kinds of things. It doesn’t take much common sense to simply apologize rather than attempt to justify a mistake.

    So what this says to me is that if SOE is busy they won’t have time to fix problems. Not exactly a good message to send to potential customers.

  • http://Website DSJ

    Better yet, apologize and give the people with the problem a timeline on when you’ll have an actual working un-installer.

    Even if you think the mistake is a forgivable one, and the customer thinks so too are you simply going to leave it there?

  • http://Website Mitch

    You actually can uninstall if you go in the program directory and run uninstall.exe – it’s just the alias to the uninstaller that is broken (worked for me).

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  • http://skalenda.wordpress.com Syd K.

    I was wondering why my pageviews exploded. HOLY. Hello!

    It is true that as a beta tester, you are volunteering to test a product that is not yet finished and, thus, riddled with bugs. This weirdness with the uninstaller asking me if I wanted to uninstall my Windows/System32 directory instead of DCUO itself, however, happened the day the beta test ended. By that point, you would think this would have been patched out, especially since the official forums had people complaining about it and seeking solutions weeks ago.

    I just wish I could figure out why the uninstaller has been working fine for some people and not at all for others — I tried to use REVO to get it dealt with on the suggestion of multiple other testers, but even that didn’t work in my case. It’s all just very surreal.

    Mostly, as an aspiring CM, I want to grab TSR AndyD by the lapels, shake him and find out why he thought that response was better than a simple, honest mea culpa. Most CMs are supposed to represent the community to the developers, not tell the community to Deal With It when they report a bug that may very well cost them sales.

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  • http://Website Peter S.

    I’m kinda glad to know it wasn’t just me panickedly hitting Cancel when I saw it going after System32.

    Oddly, rebooting and running the uninstaller present in their directory seemed to then work fine, though now I’ll need to check once I get back home. Annoying, but still better than the Temple of Elemental Evil. :P

  • http://skalenda.wordpress.com Syd K.

    I actually tried that too, and it still gave me the System32 query. SO INCONSISTENT. D:

    I wound up having to just nuke the DCUO folder entirely and then go combing through my registry to hand-nuke the keys, after every other method I could find from other testers didn’t work.

  • http://Website Freakazoid

    I must’ve been lucky. I went into the add/remove programs and got rid of it that way and never saw anything about touching a windows folder.

    They should feel more than bad, but we’re talking about SOE here. They have no feelings.

    Too bad Jim Lee himself ended up being a drooling fanboy mouthpiece. You’d figure a guy who’s gotten so far in the comic industry would have a head on his shoulers, but he’s as blind as a newborn puppy when it comes to video games.

  • http:/./ds180.net/specialk klaitu

    I guess I dodged a bullet, because I uninstalled the thing like 3 weeks ago, and it didn’t give me any sass, it just worked.. but now I wonder if it really did anything or not.

    Gonna have to investigate.

  • http://skalenda.wordpress.com Syd K.

    I think somebody at SOE reads you, since I just received an entirely unsolicited, very nice email from an SOE community rep about this whole thing. That was a surprise!

    Here is my follow-up post, which includes his message (and my reply) in full.

  • http://Website dartwick

    At least they didnt delete the players boot.ini file.

  • Genda

    If anyone’s surprised by this attitude from SOE, I’m just going to go ahead and assume they haven’t been paying any attention.

  • http://Website Chris D.

    First, Installshield sucks, everyone knows that. Why else do most decent game shops roll their own or build off NSIS?

    >> The broken uninstaller is a forgivable and understandable over-sight.

    Andy.. are ya an intern? Computers and software for said computers — not a niche market. People expect a certain experience.

    Take World of Warcraft for example, I never had trouble with their installer/uninstaller EVER (beta or.. wait.. MMOs are always beta :) ). And, even after installing, if you backup WoW and reinstall your system, WoW runs WITHOUT reinstalling.

    Why you have SO many hooks into the OS is beyond me. A great game barely needs an unzipper to install their game. Oh wait, you’re using Installshield…

  • http://myspace.com/murmanda foerdi@gmail.com

    Chris, IS is a very professional software.

    Either as a developer you follow Windows best practices (deployment via MSI, integration with MS API) or you take some scripting tool/stuff and do your own thing.

    In this case, obviously the IS devs @ sony made some mess, but if you use IS and MSI like you should it’s tons better than any other installation solution.

    Or do you really just want to go back to zip-deployment, that was “easy” right?

    BTW can please somebody send me the installer / upload it, so I can check it? Would be nice to see what happens there, but I can’t find the beta installer in www

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