[2019] 343 Community Management

Recently I had an issue with the Flight program, but this post is mainly about the management of the issues of users in the flight program, and not about the flight itself.

/u/Aggressive_Sharts this post might help you resolve the same issue.

The story:

I could not access any site on the support.halowaypoint.com domain, and the game could not access any network related feature (Firefight, multiplayer).

The backstory:

It was indeed my fault at the beginning, but a series of non intuitive UI, mail, design choices and lack of help led to this point, so a less-technical user couldn't even get any close to resolving this issue, if arised.

The process:

At first, I wrote a feedback in the megathread regarding the issue. I got a reply from 343. I already did that several times, and re-do after their response just in case, but did not worked. The second reply from 343 was a bit generic, because I wrote in my comment that I have no access to those pages, but at this point they could point out that

1. That blank "access denied" page is not an error, it is the actual page.
2. The invitation e-mail does not contains user data at all
3. Exclusively only the "preferred" e-mail address will receive the invitation, regardless of the main account
4. The main account e-mail address will NOT receive the invitation e-mail
5. The preferred address is not a secondary notification address, where you would get "Your xyz[at]outlook.com account received Halo MCC PC Flight 3 invitation" like message.

The response felt that Reddit will not help me resolve the issue, so I headed to Discord, the conversation is here.

And my issues with the responses, and the overall quality

"access denied" because you aren't using the correct account.

the email you got the invite at isn't necessarily the same account that registered.

it's just the email you put down to get communications at.

Right, I see this. But

1. The mod could mention, that you only get notification on the "preferred" e-mail address, so your actual e-mail that actually received the invitation gets no message at all.
2. Since this is a preferred address for communication, anyone could think that the mail will contain an information about your actual account that got invited. Since there was absolutely nothing regarding my hotmail account in the mail, I didn't even questioned that my Gmail address got the invitation.

"access denied" means "you don't have access"

but now that you are aware you were using the incorrect account

you can move on and play the flight

1. Access denied indeed means you have no access. but, the access denied page looks like THIS, and looking at this as a full-stack developer, this looks to me more like a webserver issue's fallback page. Adding some content, maybe a halo wallpaper, ANYTHING would actually indicate that the error message is intended and not a safety as-is result would be really helpful. Secondly, when I refresh this page I get a HTTP Code 500, which means Internal server error, so any thinking being would think there is an issue on the server.
2. The mod did NOT even tried to tell me that the error page is okay, it should looks like this or whatsoever, all he said that the error message is okay, which would be indeed okay on a site that actually looks like a "you have no access to this content" page. Since the email said "This flight isn’t strictly about MCC on PC, but also a Beta test of our new Halo Support site." there you are, here is the issue: it is not descriptive enough and refreshing the page causes a HTTP Error 500.

then next time set your communications email to the one you want

that's 100% on you, not us

lol

and it did give you a useful error. "access denied" tells you that you are denied access.

The first line is extremely rude and unprofessional for a community manager as I literally did that. And even after this, he still did not mention, that the page is actually "should" look like this. He still did not mentioned that the actual e-mail that received the invitation does not get an e-mail (?!?!?!?!) about the invitation, and he still not pointed out that the email "should not" (why???) contain the actual user who received the invitation.

"that's 100% on you, not us" let me ask you one thing: If you allow your page to set up a different notification address, don't you think that the email should at least contain the source of the notification? For example Reddit allows you to use the same e-mail for multiple accounts, wouldn't it look weird that the emails would only contains "You got a message from X", okay, but on WHICH account? I shouldn't even mention that "lol" makes it high-level cringy and makes it look like a response from a weeb and not an actual employee of a game developer company (this was not intended to be a personal attack, or something).

"and it did give you a useful error. "access denied" tells you that you are denied access." A proper, intended error page shows relation to the site itself, like having the frame, a background, a font, an icon related to the topic or something similar. The waypoint's current message looks more like a generic fallback response from a webserver when an error happened (no frame, no markdown, no content, no relation to the site, just a text with minimal to no design), especially backed up with the Error code 500.

"access denied" means "you don't have access"

but now that you are aware you were using the incorrect account

you can move on and play the flight

No comment on the first line, just repeating himself/herself. After all, ya know you could message like "We noted the issues with the support site and I'll forward it to the team" or whatever that makes the people feel they actually wants to help, but this whole attitude feels like "Oh, so you have a problem with a Beta game and a Beta site, and we asked you to submit problems with the beta game and beta site and you are trying to submit an issue with the Beta game or Beta site? Go away, we don't care".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not pushing the blame on one side, I'm just as faulty in this situation as 343 and this dude on Discord, but to be honest: a better attitude, a more helpful response and at least the illusion of helpfulness (even if they doesn't care at all) could make this whole story much better.

So here is my issues:

1. The invitation e-mail does not contains any info about the actual user who received the invitation, while the Waypoint site lets multiple accounts to set the same preferred e-mail address.
2. The actual e-mail associated with the account does not receive a copy of the e-mail about the invitation.
3. The support.halowaypoint.com does not show a useful error message, but more like a generic webserver error page.
   1. Backed up when you try to refresh it, it responds a HTTP Error Code 500, which makes it feel 99.9% that it's a server error.
4. The client itself does not shows a "You have no access to the Flight program" but hangs on the "Connecting to the server" forever.
5. The minimum a user would expect that it WILL show an error message, the point 4, 3 and 3.1 combined makes it looks like 99.9999% a server related error (looking at it as a developer).

^{Side note: you are right, English is not my primary language.}

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