Another 'unannounced' major server barf
By
Adelie,
Posted on: 2009-06-29 04:25 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
[ QUOTE ]
He is right folks. If they brought down the servers without warning for something scheduled (at least for them), that's pretty crappy; and they do that a lot. The reason they're doing it shouldn't matter, it comes down to courtesy to your player base.
Also, saying this is the release of Issue 15, which we're pretty sure it is, why does do these never get formally announced? I know it was strongly hinted at and they don't want to make promises they can't keep, but if you're bringing down the servers and preventing play, we as players need to know about that.
The OP might be a little over the top angry, but I think he's trying to make a point and I do understand why he's angry about it. All I'm sayin'.
[/ QUOTE ]
I totally understand, don't get me wrong. But another thing to consider is... if the servers are mostly in the U.S... What about the poor guys that have to work on it? Scheduling it just before or during 'acceptable' work hours for the people working on it, while still trying to make sure you impact as few players as possible, seems like the most ideal solution even if it does end up becoming a bit of a balancing act.
Game companies aren't 7/11's, yanno. They don't run 24/7.
I've had a number of 'international' games out of Korea burn me on maintenance times for similar reasons. It sucked, but eh. Not something that a whole lot can be really done about. Getting upset won't change anything in this case - though I'm totally behind them giving a bit more of a warning period before they do it (if it's at all possible - sometimes policies take a little time to change).
The irony of this particular rant is that you're complaining about one of the very -few- times the servers are down for an unscheduled, unannounced maintenance.
If the game servers for this game were only up say half the time then no one would whine when it was down because it'd be considered situation normal. But because the game servers here are usually so perfectly reliable that the once in a blue moon they actually go down unexpectedly people scream bloody murder.
Turns out it would seem NcSoft/Paragon Studios are a victim of their own success in this case. 
As for the issue about it being during your primetime well, yeah that does suck. But as been pointed out these things are going to happen during "somebody's" primetime. Next time they physically base a game's servers on your side of the planet then I guess we can deal with that. *shrugs*
Loth 50 Fire/Rad Controller [1392 Badges] [300 non-AE Souvenirs]
Ryver 50 Ele� Blaster [1392 Badges]
Silandra 50 Peacebringer [1138 Badges] [No Redside Badges]
--{=====> Virtue ♀
When I played EQ years ago I was on a night shift, and they used to do maintenance EVERY morning during the week. It got really old.
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
[ QUOTE ]
The irony of this particular rant is that you're complaining about one of the very -few- times the servers are down for an unscheduled, unannounced maintenance.
[/ QUOTE ]
They are pushing out a large patch. Its scheculed, just unannounced.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The irony of this particular rant is that you're complaining about one of the very -few- times the servers are down for an unscheduled, unannounced maintenance.
[/ QUOTE ]
They are pushing out a large patch. Its scheculed, just unannounced.
[/ QUOTE ]
My point still stands regardless.
Loth 50 Fire/Rad Controller [1392 Badges] [300 non-AE Souvenirs]
Ryver 50 Ele� Blaster [1392 Badges]
Silandra 50 Peacebringer [1138 Badges] [No Redside Badges]
--{=====> Virtue ♀
[ QUOTE ]
When I played EQ years ago I was on a night shift, and they used to do maintenance EVERY morning during the week. It got really old.
[/ QUOTE ]
Heh. EVEOnline (based in Iceland) does maintenance every day from... 6-7? AM EST, and have a much more widespread playerbase. They also do respawns of most of the major asteroids just after maintenance on Monday and Friday...
...meaning that the only people that actually get to capitalize on it without waking up fairly early are Russians, Aussies, and Oceanics. 
And annoyingly, I have to eat a 1-hour downtime (if I'm lucky it's just one - depends on what else is going on that maintenance) during my most active play period on a consistent and regular basis. :/
iRagnarok Online also had a lot of problems with that, too - they would have maintenance back when I'd regularly have the only playtime I could get (after school hours - based out of Korea), as did Rohan Online (Japanese, iirc) and Asda Story (Korean). Just got used to it after a while. Complaining about it on those forums, though, usually got the thread deleted or the mods telling you to get over it (in exactly that many words). I'm thankful that NCSoft has far better customer service standards, honestly.
EDIT: Missed a point of clarification - that comment about bad customer service doesn't apply to EVE, but only out of all the Asian games specifically mentioned, which are a small sample size of every game out there. There have been a few that actually had frighteningly good customer service (Flyff, for example) in comparison, but those three in particular had a habit of giving everyone the finger (in more ways then one - international getting some things late if they get them at all, huge changes in the balance structure [or the balance structure being outright ignored for anyone but home-based servers]) that just made you feel kind of like dirt. Can't quite say that about CCP - they have a reputation for playing a somewhat biased game, but they do at least try to take into consideration their entire playerbase as a whole over just one aspect of it.
[ QUOTE ]
When I played EQ years ago I was on a night shift, and they used to do maintenance EVERY morning during the week. It got really old.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm sure it did but you still have to look at it the way the people who run these games do. They are always going to do maintenance at the times which affect the -least- amount of people. The people who are in the minority in that case are -always- going to suffer. Whining about it may allow you to vent, but it's not going to change a thing.
I'm not completely unsympathetic to the OP here. I live on the East Coast of the US but I travel to places like Japan and Singapore often. When I'm over there I get affected by these "crummy" maintenance times too. But it not like there's really much that can be done unless a game ever gets big enough to have servers sprinkled all around the world. *shrugs*
Loth 50 Fire/Rad Controller [1392 Badges] [300 non-AE Souvenirs]
Ryver 50 Ele� Blaster [1392 Badges]
Silandra 50 Peacebringer [1138 Badges] [No Redside Badges]
--{=====> Virtue ♀
*shrug*
I may be in North America, but I work graveyard shift. This is my 'primetime' too, but, frankly, it's Monday.
Maintenance happens.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
<QR>
ABout the only "notice" I've seen is this that Nivieve put up on Firday afternoon. Even in that thread, most of the speculation was that it wasn't that close.
I'm trying to do a Main-to-Test comparison right now. Thing is, I don't recall a update to the test happening over the weekend... 'Cause it's updating as well.
Oh this'll be fun...
THank you for the time...
@Travlr (Main) / @Tymers Realm (Test) 
The version number is now the same between live and test.
[ QUOTE ]
<QR>
I'm trying to do a Main-to-Test comparison right now. Thing is, I don't recall a update to the test happening over the weekend... 'Cause it's updating as well.
Oh this'll be fun...
THank you for the time...
[/ QUOTE ]
Hah if that is the case, then someone made a nasty boo boo...
@Lasher
First Of The Year
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Edgar Allan Poe
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
|
[ QUOTE ]
The version number is now the same between live and test.
[/ QUOTE ]
So they updated test and live? Without testing out the stuff in the newest patch on test? Strange. I do not see this going well.
@Lasher
First Of The Year
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Edgar Allan Poe
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
|
I'm not going to fight the OP fight for him, but he's not complaining (well, not this thread anyway) about scheduled maintenance; he's complaining they just shut down the servers for a patch they knew they were going to apply without telling the people who were on the servers playing the game.
If you were playing, knowing the servers were going down in two hours for maintenance you're used to seeing, had events planned out accordingly (or was finishing a task force or whatever) and then you get a five minute message saying the servers were going down... Come on. That would suck. And there's no reason for it. It's not like the patch team woke up this morning and just noticed there was a patch to push down. They've probably know about this for at least a week. They could have given an a couple hours warning in game and on the boards. That's all it would have taken (for me at least).
And what I think makes it worse is they do keep saying, "Um, sorry. We'll do better next time" without doing better next time. It's something that seems so simple from our side of the fence, it's hard to understand why it isn't getting done. I work with big corporate servers. We have to give two weeks notice for planned outages to all our clients. I'm not asking for two weeks, but a couple hours would be nice.
[ QUOTE ]
I say I-15 is going live. Hopefully with a newer version than they've shown us on Test though.
[/ QUOTE ]
That's not possible. They never release a patch to Live without first testing it on the Test Server. What you see on Test is what we'll be getting on Live when the servers come back up.
EDIT: This'll be the first time a new issue has ever been released on a Monday.
QR-
Too many "glass is half empty" people, not enough "glass is half full" ones.
We're getting the Issue today folks. Let's be positive. Starting the week out by whining about something that's relatively minor doesn't bode well.
Loose --> not tight.
Lose --> Did not win, misplace, cannot find, subtract.
One extra 'o' makes a big difference.
[ QUOTE ]
QR-
Too many "glass is half empty" people, not enough "glass is half full" ones.
We're getting the Issue today folks. Let's be positive. Starting the week out by whining about something that's relatively minor doesn't bode well.
[/ QUOTE ]
It does bode well. Someone at NCSoft is not doing their job.
@Lasher
First Of The Year
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Edgar Allan Poe
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
|
[ QUOTE ]
I'm not going to fight the OP fight for him, but he's not complaining (well, not this thread anyway) about scheduled maintenance; he's complaining they just shut down the servers for a patch they knew they were going to apply without telling the people who were on the servers playing the game.
If you were playing, knowing the servers were going down in two hours for maintenance you're used to seeing, had events planned out accordingly (or was finishing a task force or whatever) and then you get a five minute message saying the servers were going down... Come on. That would suck. And there's no reason for it. It's not like the patch team woke up this morning and just noticed there was a patch to push down. They've probably know about this for at least a week. They could have given an a couple hours warning in game and on the boards. That's all it would have taken (for me at least).
And what I think makes it worse is they do keep saying, "Um, sorry. We'll do better next time" without doing better next time. It's something that seems so simple from our side of the fence, it's hard to understand why it isn't getting done. I work with big corporate servers. We have to give two weeks notice for planned outages to all our clients. I'm not asking for two weeks, but a couple hours would be nice.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm not suggesting that having advanced warnings about servers going down wouldn't be nice.
But again I'll stress the point I made with my first post on this thread: The servers going down unexpectedly in this game simply doesn't happen -that- often to get -that- upset about it. Again if this kind of thing happened every 3 days we'd all be used to it. But when this kind of thing effectively never happens the times they do seem very disruptive and bad.
I simply think the OP is blowing things out of proportion here...
Loth 50 Fire/Rad Controller [1392 Badges] [300 non-AE Souvenirs]
Ryver 50 Ele� Blaster [1392 Badges]
Silandra 50 Peacebringer [1138 Badges] [No Redside Badges]
--{=====> Virtue ♀
[ QUOTE ]
The version number is now the same between live and test.
[/ QUOTE ]
Did you launch both updaters (Live and Test) and checked the version numbers from there? Or are you getting Test's version number from the Test Server patch notes?
Looks like Test is being updated too, and if the version numbers match after THAT, then that's a little suspicious. I can't see them throwing stuff into a patch that's not been tested (like I said earlier, they've never done that before).
The stated server down time is 9 am to 11 am EST. This happened before hand, and it was unannounced. I see where the OP is coming from. Also seeing it as a patch (I15) and still unannounced makes it even worse.
@Lasher
First Of The Year
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Edgar Allan Poe
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
|
Besides denying some folks a couple of hours of gameplay, how does that affect the average person in this game? I'm not asking folks to dismiss the less-than-ideal way it's being handled. I'm just suggesting that some perspective be used. YMMV.
Loose --> not tight.
Lose --> Did not win, misplace, cannot find, subtract.
One extra 'o' makes a big difference.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I say I-15 is going live. Hopefully with a newer version than they've shown us on Test though.
[/ QUOTE ]
That's not possible. They never release a patch to Live without first testing it on the Test Server. What you see on Test is what we'll be getting on Live when the servers come back up.
EDIT: This'll be the first time a new issue has ever been released on a Monday.
[/ QUOTE ]
It's my understanding that they can test stuff internally on a more private testing server other than the official Test server... and I seem to recall that they've done this sort of thing before (gone live with a newer version than the current Test version, which people said was buggy). But I could be wrong.
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
[ QUOTE ]
The stated server down time is 9 am to 11 am EST. This happened before hand, and it was unannounced. I see where the OP is coming from. Also seeing it as a patch (I15) and still unannounced makes it even worse.
[/ QUOTE ]
And just -how- often do we have new Issues pushed to the live servers, either on purpose or not?
My point still stands...
Loth 50 Fire/Rad Controller [1392 Badges] [300 non-AE Souvenirs]
Ryver 50 Ele� Blaster [1392 Badges]
Silandra 50 Peacebringer [1138 Badges] [No Redside Badges]
--{=====> Virtue ♀
What perspective should we use? I'm using a user side perspective, that is not enough?
@Lasher
First Of The Year
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Edgar Allan Poe
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
|
[ QUOTE ]
<QR>
ABout the only "notice" I've seen is this that Nivieve put up on Firday afternoon. Even in that thread, most of the speculation was that it wasn't that close.
I'm trying to do a Main-to-Test comparison right now. Thing is, I don't recall a update to the test happening over the weekend... 'Cause it's updating as well.
Oh this'll be fun...
THank you for the time...
[/ QUOTE ]
There was a small 4.5M patch to Test on Saturday, myself and a few of the regular crew over on Test all remarked about it.
No patch notes came from it, and the version number didn't change.
But at least we know someone was there this weekend working on getting this ready for... well, today, it would seem.
[ QUOTE ]
You guys would be MUCH less braindead about 'normal maintenance, isn't it?' if it occurred during your prime time.
Normal maintenance starts about 15 minutes from now, some 2 HOURS after this current 'oh sorry, the servers are going down, bye bye' debacle.
Thats 2.5 hours of 'gameplay' we Aussies don't get between 8:30pm and the 'normal' maintenance start of 11pm.
But hey, live in your glasshouses, unthinking brethren. Your time will come and then you'll be up in arms when the servers go down during -your- primetime.
[/ QUOTE ]
sorry its during your primetime sir....but if you dont want that to happen....move to where the food is......pretty simple actually