Error Message Hell

[wacko]

So I have a questions and would like people to vote in this poll. If your the player of a game on an online gaming network... lets say Steam... and you tried to join a Chat Channel and the server hosting the channel was not online which of the following would you want to see the user experience be.

[Cybbe]

Well, for me, that depends on whether or not the client will actually keep trying to connect or not. If it does, I'd really prefer to be informed, since it'd save me the work of spamming reconnect if I know the server is in fact up or is going to be soon. On the other hand, (as is annoying me a lot with mIRC), I don't like to see the repeated message saying I still can't connect, especially if it steals focus everytime it pops up, so it should probably be kept short as a "Retrying..." message or so instead of a full error message for every repeated attempt. This is especially if you lose connection or know you'll be able to connect very soon, you want to know that it's still trying, but you don't want to get the error message for each attempt, when you know what's wrong.

(EDIT: I didn't vote, as I opted for somewhat of a third option)

[Sentura]

print the exception then allow me to debug owait

joking aside, an exception message with 4 retries is something i consider standard

[Spellbinder]

I voted send message, i have the same stand as Sentura and Cybbe. I would like to know, but then again to many times it gets annoying. I think the best for me would actually to see it try to connect, when i know that it is trying i want the option to turn this off.

[wacko]

hmm

[Gorion]

I would make it so, that it will never fail, and if it does, it will crash and brick your computer.