Server Maintenance Downtime Over Christmas Period
- Thread starter Michael Brookes
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One a day, apparently. At the same time each day.
I'm certainly not pleased about the down times and the reports of lost credits. If they were going to make the game be online only then they damn well should be on top of server issues regardless of the time.
It's that sort of thing that will affect whether I buy any expansions for the game down the line (having missed the 40€ package they had ages ago)
It's that sort of thing that will affect whether I buy any expansions for the game down the line (having missed the 40€ package they had ages ago)
Agreed. I work in IT and we have a weekly maintenance window. Not sure what they think they're fixing with a daily maintenance, but it happens right in the middle of the couple of hours I have to play each night. This sort of limits what I can realistically try to accomplish. Especially since there's no guarantee it'll only be a 15-minute downtime or an hour.
I sincerely hope that the daily schedule is only temporary. I've been in games where that has happened for the first month or so after launch. It's more than a little annoying. =/
I work in IT and our servers don't have any maintenance (technically once per year). Does this mean anything? Yes - that we don't need it. Does it mean that ED servers don't need it? NO. What's your point with that comparison?
I understand that you might be annoyed but some services need more maintenance some need less. Timing of any maintenance will NEVER suit everyone.
Yes, and your multinational company probably makes more money in 24 hours than FD spent on whole ED so far ...
Be more realistic, please. FD will never provide the same level of availability as huge IT behemoths. Get over it.
That was one of the reasons why I was so angry because of the lack of offline mode - I have bought game (beta) few days before the announcement.
And whenever maintenance is happening during my playtime I switch to one of my hundreds of other games.
I was refering to the fact, that IF their servers require a regular downtime each day, the design, and/or the software they developed is crap.
As they, unlike multinational companies, developed the 'server side' according to their needs and they said MMO was the design concept all along, I dare say they should have designed and built it in a way it does not require daily downtimes. May be unexpected downtimes like all systems 'may' have, or a regular annual maintenance, but not a daily window, nor weekly downs over hours...
It is not that they have application owners, that bought crappy Application servers with MS SQL express that 'require' a regukar maintenance, and have no flexible instancing or other modern methods to keep the service running while one cluster node is in maintenance...
In fact bad desjgn cost you more money and ressources (people fixing problems) than a working resilient approach. And as you said yourself, they don't make much money with the game.
At least they bragged 'how much experience they had with game programmimg and in the games industry'
To me it seems it is their first attempt at a MMO desaster...
God, what would I have loved an offline mode!
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the games not long been released jezz. let the game progress and soon optimization of server code or an overhaul etc might happen to witch they might not need to do server maintenance daily..
or maybe hey are tweaking as they go day by day, you never know
My point with the comparison was that they're apparently not fixing anything with a daily maintenance. Weekly ought to suffice.
Also, this goes beyond annoyance. Their daily maintenance occurs exactly in the middle of the limited time I have to play each night. I've stopped playing during the week and only log in on the weekends. That this is Less than satisfactory would be an understatement. Fortunately there is no monthly-sub, so I'm not wasting any money.
As I stated, I have been in other games where there was a daily maintenance for the first month or so after launch and my observation was that it never helped. Whatever it is they're doing can be moved to a single maintenance window, unless it's something game-breaking and/or an emergency ptf or fix-pack, obviously.
I'm happy for you that your maintenance is only annual. I wish ours were and it'd be lovely if FD aimed for something along those lines.
Don't misunderstand me. I love this game and wish to devote more time to it, but the maintenance simply doesn't allow me to. Also, I've paid for the game, so I can be critical of issues associated with it. I have a stake in it and its success. My hope is that if enough people voice displeasure that they'll consider altering their maintenance schedule to perhaps every other day, or weekly as with other MMOs. I'm not an unreasonable person. I simply wish to spend more time enjoying FD's game.
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eta: Perhaps if FD were a little more transparent on why the maintenance were necessary that would silence my criticism. I still wouldn't be able to play, but at least I would have some understanding of what exactly was going on.
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Much better 15 min a day than over hour or something once per week.
And what comes to complaints about the "when" it occurs, is pure selfishness.
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at a guess i'd say the maintenance is mostly about backing up the DB in case of an unrecoverable error, that's not something you can really do on a live server so 15 minutes down time a day instead of weekly backups could prevent a weeks worth of progress being lost if the worst should happen.
That's your opinion. I'd rather have one longer disruption than multiple smaller ones. One long disruption means that only one day is interrupted if that's when your play window happens to fall. Multiple smaller disruptions means that _all_ your days are interrupted if your play window falls across that period.
This is much the same argument as to why I get angry when people want MMOs to be darker at night. They typically play in timezones (for MMO's which have a day length which is divisible into the real day length) where they are either playing entirely in daytime or are playing during a period where they see both day and night. As for the people who can only play when the MMO is in darkness?
Yeah, dark nights aren't so great for those people. Not at all. Funny how people are usually happy with disruptions that don't affect them much, eh?
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You can totally back up a database live.
The reboots were put in place because the Frontier staff went on holiday and it was a pre-emptive measure to try to keep the servers reasonably stable during a low support period.
Most MMOs I know which have day/night cycle have it accelerated, not real-life scale. Which however has nothing to do with downtimes.
And yes, my opinion is that I *hate* long downtimes and much prefer short ones. Besides, those long downtimes in case of some games tend to occur at the so called "prime time" in my timezone, becoming available late evening - in essence, one day almost completely unplayable.
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WoW has a 1:1 relation between day and night. Guild Wars 2 has a 120 minute day/night cycle. I'll use those two examples because I'm most familiar with them. Since both of those divide into 24 hours (1 in the case of WoW, and 12 in the case of GW2), this means that a specific individual who can only play at a specific time always enters the game at the same period in the day/night cycle. If that happens to fall within the night time period of the game, it's always dark for them. I haven't seen an MMO that does _not_ use a day/night cycle that divides perfectly into 24 hours.
At any rate, it's relevant because it's an illustration about how the population tends to be quite comfortable with disruptions that don't affect them much. Funny that.
As for you. You'd prefer to have _every_ day disrupted rather than just one? Somehow, I have the funny feeling that your playtime doesn't span across ED's maintenance period.
I general I'm not referring just to ED, but all games which have a potential to disrupt the flow with maintenances. Rather a coffee break than no gaming at all.
That would be a database from the 90ies! No "modern" database does require a "downtime" for back up! It usually is designed to cache transactions and changes occurring during back ups and real modern once can do that with even locking only the datasets currently in progress... ok, that depends a bit on architecture and realations / interfaces.
Yet, a "back up" in the year 2015 should not require a downtime, unless you have a crappy design.
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The point is, if you happen to have just one hour each day you can dedicate to this game (as you have a job, a family, or "a life") it is more than annoying to have a coffe break enforced in the middle of your playtime... again, this was one of the complaints about "no offline", and here it is, spoiling the experience of some players, outright!
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