Asking for a more customer friendly downtime implementation

[n13L5]

Just had a horrible experience with the last downtime.

The following suggestions would alleviate the problems:

- With flight times to some stations far exceeding 30 minutes, a 30 minute warning is simply not enough.
Solution: Give a 1, 2 or 3 hour warning
- One may have gone to the bathroom or to the kitchen to get coffee, when that momentary warning popped up.
Solution: Put a permanent count-down timer on the screen, so its impossible to miss and you can keep track of how much time is left.
- To make matters worse, mission timers don't stop ticking down while the server is down!
Solution: Stop timers while the server is down, so we have a chance to turn in missions afterwards.

Given the time it takes to pick up missions and then delivering them, a 3 hour count-down seems to make the most sense.



A further issue in this regard: when the 15 minute server down warning popped up, my arrival time to the station was shown at 8 minutes!
However, the 8 minutes were completely illusory, as I still had not reached the station when the server went down.
Why is the remaining-flight-time indicator so completely wrong?

 

[varonica]

Just had a horrible experience with the last downtime.

The following suggestions would alleviate the problems:

- With flight times to some stations far exceeding 30 minutes, a 30 minute warning is simply not enough.
Solution: Give a 1, 2 or 3 hour warning
- One may have gone to the bathroom or to the kitchen to get coffee, when that momentary warning popped up.
Solution: Put a permanent count-down timer on the screen, so its impossible to miss and you can keep track of how much time is left.
- To make matters worse, mission timers don't stop ticking down while the server is down!
Solution: Stop timers while the server is down, so we have a chance to turn in missions afterwards.

Given the time it takes to pick up missions and then delivering them, a 3 hour count-down seems to make the most sense.

Downtime happens the same time and day every week, except for major updates, you actually get 7 days warning before downtime. I know when I turn my machine on for a Thursday afternoon play exactly how much time I have until downtime.

A further issue in this regard:

when the 15 minute server down warning popped up, my arrival time to the station was shown at 8 minutes!
However, the 8 minutes were completely illusory, as I still had not reached the station when the server went down.
Why is the remaining-flight-time indicator so completely wrong?

Been all over this before, the countdown to arrival timer is an instance timer, at any given moment it calculates the amount of time it will take you to arrive at the station, "if you continued to travel the entire distance at your current speed!" The fact is you don't continue to travel at your current speed, you are slowing down, decelerating all the time, so the timer will appear to pause for periods when your deceleration and travel time get in sync, so at times it will appear to sit on say 5 minutes to go for a good number of seconds. It's only a guide, the computer that calculates it has no idea whether you are going to slow down more, or whether you are going to pass through an area of gravitational fields that will slow you down, or indeed whether you choose to use a technique to speed up your arrival by gravity breaking, spiralling in or even do the dreaded loop of shame. So at any given instance, travelling at the speed you are currently moving, this is how long it will take you to reach your destination.

Indeed bizarrely you can actually be travelling directly away from a station you have targetted and it will still give you a calculated time of arrival because it only calculates it based on your current speed and distance not whether you are actually intending to go to the station.

 

[n13L5]

Just because you are big on calendar and time of day, doesn't mean everybody else is.

Also, I haven't played Elite in years, was just trying it out once more, to see if game play got more interesting with the new additions...
Since we got stiffed for our offline, single player game, where we wouldn't have to deal with things like server maintenance or mission timers continuing with the game shut down, the least they could do is make downtime fool proof.

 

[varonica]

Just because you are big on calendar and time of day, doesn't mean everybody else is.

Also, I haven't played Elite in years, was just trying it out once more, to see if game play got more interesting with the new additions...
Since we got stiffed for our offline, single player game, where we wouldn't have to deal with things like server maintenance or mission timers continuing with the game shut down, the least they could do is make downtime fool proof.

Well I guess you've told me. Thursday, 3pm, downtime <-my time zone of course. It seems foolproof to me. You could always set an alarm on your PC for 3 hours before downtime but it just doesn't seem hard to grasp that downtime happens on the same day and at the same time every week. I guess we must be having some sort of existential divide, we know a week in advance exactly when down time is going to be, they give us warnings in game starting an hour before downtime. I have never been in a game that gave you more than an hours warning in game, an hour seems almost universally accepted as being adequate and it seems adequate to me since we already know a week in advance.

I have no objection to you receiving more warning really, it just seems totally unnecessary.

 

[AndyJ]

With flight times to some stations far exceeding 30 minutes, a 30 minute warning is simply not enough.

A further issue in this regard: when the 15 minute server down warning popped up, my arrival time to the station was shown at 8 minutes!
However, the 8 minutes were completely illusory, as I still had not reached the station when the server went down.
Why is the remaining-flight-time indicator so completely wrong?

They usually warn about downtime for about an hour in my experience. The weekly tick doesn't take more than 30 minutes I think... I'm lucky that I'm not around to play at that time anyway.
The main issue I've found is that if you're in the station services then you can't see these messages appearing.

If you're in SC flight though and are running out of time before the servers go off, then best course is to slow down and drop to normal space. That should preserve your current location when you restart I think. Otherwise, if you keep going until you hit a server error, then you'll possibly get put back near the star or a great distance away.

But half an hour to stations?
Crikey, where are you playing you must be doing some really long distance hauls or simply aren't applying enough throttle...?

Keep it in the blue, the 'set' speed marker at the top end of that zone and tweaked to keep that blue too.

But you can also try flying towards stations at full speed for most of the way. Just before the timer hits 7 seconds, zero your speed then slowly increase it back as your velocity reduces back to the blue region and from then keep it in the blue. This is a lot quicker.

 

[n13L5]

This station is 1,8xx,xxx LS out. I was definitely at full throttle at speeds of ~14xx C.

The number of minutes and seconds given under the distance count down are completely inaccurate. Since I wrote my first post above, I've noticed, that toward the end of the journey, the seconds start counting down significantly slower than the second hand on my watch does!

At one point, for every second that was subtracted from Elite's travel time, the second hand on my watch moved about 2 and a half seconds...
If you have a good feel for what one second is, you can actually tell its too slow even without grabbing your watch to compare...

I don't know what reason there might be, but one thing is sure - remaining travel time is useless in case of x minute server down warnings.

My main problem was the continuing mission timer during downtime and failing several missions after spending ~40 minutes in super cruise.

 

[Clariko]

What time does the server go down in UTC (or AEST )?

 

[Non Grata]

n13l5 - Varonica has already explained this.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

This station is 1,8xx,xxx LS out. I was definitely at full throttle at speeds of ~14xx C.

The number of minutes and seconds given under the distance count down are completely inaccurate. Since I wrote my first post above, I've noticed, that toward the end of the journey, the seconds start counting down significantly slower than the second hand on my watch does!

At one point, for every second that was subtracted from Elite's travel time, the second hand on my watch moved about 2 and a half seconds...
If you have a good feel for what one second is, you can actually tell its too slow even without grabbing your watch to compare...

I don't know what reason there might be, but one thing is sure - remaining travel time is useless in case of x minute server down warnings.

My main problem was the continuing mission timer during downtime and failing several missions after spending ~40 minutes in super cruise.

The ETA timer is an estimate, based on your current velocity at the time.

But your velocity in supercruise is rarely constant, so the ETA timer is always changing to match.

As you approach your destination, gravity slows you down, so the ETA timer increases.

The only number you need to look for on the ETA timer is 0.07. Everything is not worth noting.
Once you hit that magical number, slam the throttle to 75% (the blue zone, I think), and you should reach the drop speed at the same time as you reach drop distance.
Gravity from other sources can interfere with this however, so it's not 100%. But a good guide.


This has already been explained to you once before.

 

[Nitross]

It would probably be hard to upgrade the server infrastructure for this but, Arena Net's Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 use a system where the servers can run different versions of the server software at the same time.

When they deploy a patch, you get a warning that the new version is available and you only need to restart the game to get it right away. You also have a "grace" period of an hour to finish what you are doing before being forced to restart your game client.

They even did a presentation of this concept at GDC 2017: 'Guild Wars' Microservices and 24/7 Uptime

It would be nice to have something like this for Elite Dangerous, but it would require a server architecture overhaul.

 

[Ronzer]

I've seen the question about remaining time come up a few times. There needs to be an option for this. Simply, just as you have an option for linear or logarithmic things, time remaining could have a toggle. You want 2 options at the least. The first option, default as it is now. This is used for optimal speed to get to your destination ie. ~5 secs or whatever you prefer. Second option would be logarithmic, or whatever system your ships friendship drive is using to govern its speed (it's gonna be based on some equation,no? ) and would give you a closer approximation to the real time expected.
If you start a trip to a station and it's far, you click second option and it says 76 minutes, well now that'd be good to know.

Or have both times show, always. Then we could come up with some elite sciency sounding terms for when the 2 times show as the same. I'd call that a zenith.

Fly Punctuatually

 

[varonica]

. Second option would be logarithmic, or whatever system your ships friendship drive is using to govern its speed (it's gonna be based on some equation,no? ) and would give you a closer approximation to the real time expected.
If you start a trip to a station and it's far, you click second option and it says 76 minutes, well now that'd be good to know.

It would be just as inaccurate as the first method. The reason they don't do that is because there are to many factors that affect your timing. You would see this "logarithmic" time (which it isn't) go up and down all over the place because the amount of time you take to get to a station isn't actually based on any sort of logarithmic value. The speed you travel in SC is determined by the strength of the local gravitational field, and since this varies depending on the direction you are approaching a station it isn't possible to calculate it. For instance lets say you start approaching a station from the same distance but from two different directions. If in the first case you have the sun at your back the time you take to reach the station will reduce faster than the second instance where you are flying towards the sun.

In the first instance the local gravitation effect reduces as you move away from the sun, resulting in a accelerating faster over time as you get further away from the sun, when you are flying towards the sun your acceleration will be slower as you approach the station because the local gravitational field will be increasing as you approach the station. Of course if you are flying parallel to the suns gravitational field the acceleration will be roughly constant. These will vary of course depending in how far away from the sun the station is, and all this is of course ignoring all other sources of gravitational effect like gas giants whose gravity extends a long way and can slow you down as well. Just to sum it up, given the same distance to travel, it's likely that every single trip over a given distance will take a different amount of time, sometimes a hugely different amount of time, so getting an accurate time isn't some simple calculation.

 

[Raino]

This station is 1,8xx,xxx LS out. I was definitely at full throttle at speeds of ~14xx C.

The number of minutes and seconds given under the distance count down are completely inaccurate. Since I wrote my first post above, I've noticed, that toward the end of the journey, the seconds start counting down significantly slower than the second hand on my watch does!

At one point, for every second that was subtracted from Elite's travel time, the second hand on my watch moved about 2 and a half seconds...
If you have a good feel for what one second is, you can actually tell its too slow even without grabbing your watch to compare...

I don't know what reason there might be, but one thing is sure - remaining travel time is useless in case of x minute server down warnings.

My main problem was the continuing mission timer during downtime and failing several missions after spending ~40 minutes in super cruise.

do you even read others posts????