Server Maintenance Downtime Over Christmas Period

[wibbleboy]

Aye, that's why I'm staying up, waiting for the servers to return. I had a mission to collect cargo, and was ready to deliver the goods when server downtime happened.

Also, To Mr. Phillips, this has most certainly been nearly four times the normal downtime length Are we having longer maintenance periods on weekends?

Me too, launching the game every minutes to see if the "Servers Down" message has gone yet. The "going down" message pinged up when I was on a long trip to a secondary star, and I couldn't get docked in time.

 

[CMDR DeadPorkins]

Now I'm beginning to see why people were in an uproar about the decision to cut out offline mode.

 

[TANDKO]

Back online now

 

[Zhura]

Back online.

approoved. thanks

 

[insidah]

Yep, there definitely needs to be a new Launcher that incorporates the status of the game servers, so we don't keep having to start the game, to confirm that its down...
Maybe even a feed that states duration time, status, and also some technical update notes, so we know whats happening.

Since it's a kickstarter, I'm sure we are allowed to know whats happening behind the scenes.

 

[CMDR DeadPorkins]

Yep, there definitely needs to be a new Launcher that incorporates the status of the game servers, so we don't keep having to start the game, to confirm that its down...
Maybe even a feed that states duration time, status, and also some technical update notes, so we know whats happening.

Since it's a kickstarter, I'm sure we are allowed to know whats happening behind the scenes.

Agreed! +1 rep.

 

[Darian]

And that is why i want an real oofline elite dangerous, now i do not only have to worry about my own computer running but some server too...grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

[Korenwolf]

Also, do you expect the server team to be up and in the office at 5 AM? Be reasonable.

Given the nature of the system you're running the timeslot isn't unreasonable.

However performing maintenance in low traffic periods regardless of the time is standard practice, the windows my guys work with tend to be 23:00-05:00 local time for the system concerned. However we want to be done before people wake up and start using their mobiles.

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Yep, there definitely needs to be a new Launcher that incorporates the status of the game servers, so we don't keep having to start the game, to confirm that its down...
Maybe even a feed that states duration time, status, and also some technical update notes, so we know whats happening.

Since it's a kickstarter, I'm sure we are allowed to know whats happening behind the scenes.

Having a server status page is pretty standard out there for gaming. So I would expect they would be aiming to provide it within the next 3-6 months, if only to cut down on the tickets being opened along the lines of "can't connect, must be a fault".

 

[kfsone]

I don't see any mention of this in the launcher or the game.

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Having a server status page is pretty standard out there for gaming. So I would expect they would be aiming to provide it within the next 3-6 months, if only to cut down on the tickets being opened along the lines of "can't connect, must be a fault".

Now, now. Don't get all bent out of shape. Frontier chose to do something new and exciting and different ... and repeat /all/ the mistakes any shrink-wrap game developer has ever made during their first "it's not an mmo, infact it's not like anything else, well, ok, its kinda like an mmo" game while rebooting their 30 year old franchise; not so much the daily maintenance (although how they got into that boat in this timeframe is typical) but that there's no real customer-facing channel for communicating it.

Oh, I'm sure there's a forum post somewhere, but I said "customer facing", and the cold hard truth is that even in forum-heavy games that have a healthy and/or positive population growth, you only anticipate a peak of about 10% of your active players using your forums (fingers crossed, count on CS lead being in your office angry on Monday). In a typical [mm]o you anticipate under 5%. Most of your players, most of the time, interact with your game thru the game or the launcher. That's where you front your critical player announcements and communications, and downtime is critical for an online game.

They'll get there. We just have to wait while they catch up on ~20 years of online gaming development. Quit yer whinin'.

 

[wibbleboy]

Having a server status page is pretty standard out there for gaming. So I would expect they would be aiming to provide it within the next 3-6 months, if only to cut down on the tickets being opened along the lines of "can't connect, must be a fault".

Well, given that the bulk of the launcher functionality appears to be a simple wrapper for the launcher webpage:

http://hosting.zaonce.net/launcher/index.html

Then in theory, the work required is minimal. Assuming that Frontier have a web developer with a couple of spare hours to add a dynamically updating feed to that page.

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Maybe even a feed that states duration time, status, and also some technical update notes, so we know whats happening.

It seems that there used to be a feed; there's still one active now, though it appears to be back from the Alpha:

https://api.orerve.net/1.5/elite/news/latest

 

[Ommasaur]

There is always going to be an outage during someone's prime time, unfortunately (me this time too, living in Australia). I imagine most of the people posting how fine they are with the downtime are not Aussies or Kiwis though, so it doesn't impact on them much.

it would be much fairer if the server team rotated the time of the outage after some time (a week? A month?) so the pain wasn't always focused on the same group of players, in my opinion. What are our chances, do you think?

 

[redpoint]

it would be much fairer if the server team rotated the time of the outage after some time (a week? A month?) so the pain wasn't always focused on the same group of players, in my opinion. What are our chances, do you think?

Seconded.

I want to play for an hour or so after my family goes to bed. This UTC 7am policy coincides exactly with my timeframe. So if this policy continues, I never get to play an uninterrupted session. That is poor value for the money I spent and a real disappointment.

 

[c64orinoco]

There is always going to be an outage during someone's prime time, unfortunately (me this time too, living in Australia). I imagine most of the people posting how fine they are with the downtime are not Aussies or Kiwis though, so it doesn't impact on them much.

it would be much fairer if the server team rotated the time of the outage after some time (a week? A month?) so the pain wasn't always focused on the same group of players, in my opinion. What are our chances, do you think?

I'm Australian, I just take the 6PM downtime to mean it's time to make dinner. I'm on annual leave now anyway, so once I'm back at work I won't notice the downtime.

 

[Deyn]

I don't understand, why they do need a downtime at all? They use a cloud service (as in dynamically capable of moving sessions etc. to Server ressources not in maintenance etc.)
And before people complain and argue about "technical reasons" - yes it can be done, if you programmed the application accordingly, just look at Amazon or Google, they don't have "downtimes" for maintenance, neither have critical systems in large corporations!

What I find odd, is: when people complained that Offline Singleplayer was dropped, and they said this exactly is one of the reasons, they don't want to be dependent on a god damn server, lots of people expressed the view "it won't happen", "they will have the ressources to deal with it", "it is a cluster environment, there is no need for downtimes", and so on.

Now people lose missions, can't play when they want, and Frontier seems incapable even to provide a "modern" backend without "maintenance windows" EVERY day???

Good job there, Frontier, really! Good job!

 

[LuciusEsox]

Just been kicked out at 7 am forgot about the downtime...

In all honesty though I am not sure about the moans as it is pretty normal for this to happen for persistent online games, I know for sure Eve does it and WOW (yes am sad enough to have experienced the WOW one at about three in the morning it used to be I think) and as for why do they do it............ well its got to be to p as many people off as possible hasn't it ?

Why in any heavens name would they do it otherwise ?


:S

 

[Nonya]

The downtime is probably to stop the services, rotate the logs, and take snapshot backups of the virtual servers this thing runs on so in the event of a major catastrophe they can quickly recover. I'm sure as time goes on and if they expand their server base they'll figure out a way to do all that without having to shut the entire thing down, possibly by moving players to other virtual servers when they jump from one system to another and then backing up the now-empty servers - who the heck knows how they've built this thing? The engineering behind these things alone are usually trade secrets.
This is no different from any other company that runs it's own servers and isn't Amazon, Microsoft, or Google with literally hundreds of thousands of servers each scattered all over the planet.

 

[SgtLennin]

No problem with down-times. Cheers.

 

[Dewar]

Just been kicked out at 7 am forgot about the downtime...

In all honesty though I am not sure about the moans as it is pretty normal for this to happen for persistent online games, I know for sure Eve does it and WOW (yes am sad enough to have experienced the WOW one at about three in the morning it used to be I think) and as for why do they do it............ well its got to be to p as many people off as possible hasn't it ?

Why in any heavens name would they do it otherwise ?


:S

While I don't begrudge them the downtime, they set themselves up for these complaints by including missions that tick down in real time, and don't stop timers when the servers are down.

 

[GrillMonkey]

While I don't begrudge them the downtime, they set themselves up for these complaints by including missions that tick down in real time, and don't stop timers when the servers are down.

How' s 15 minutes going to upset a normally 7 hour mission timer. Ive accepted missions at lunch time. Gone back to work and completed them in the evening. Even short missions can be completed from the time the 30 minutes warning starts with enough time to complete two or three more.

 

[LuciusEsox]

While I don't begrudge them the downtime, they set themselves up for these complaints by including missions that tick down in real time, and don't stop timers when the servers are down.

Fair comment there. If the timer still keeps ticking when we are unable to do anything about it that is not good at all although I suspect when the server is down the BIG DADDY program (sorry all I could think of ) is probably stopped as well... has anyone checked this, do timers change after server downtime ?