The European Servers are back online - Thursday, 11th November 2010
By
AmazingMOO,
Posted on: 2010-11-09 18:31 in The European Lounge
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As a comparison for how much data it *could* be.... Eve Onlines main database is 1.5TB of player data, and considering that they have a daily clean up (removal of database ID's pertaining to destroyed ships/modules/POS's etc etc), I reckon that CoX's ISNT as large.... probably 400-600GB in size to be honest. When Eve Online did a database upgrade just recently, their server was down for close to 14 hours....
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Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA
Are you serious about this? Really? You think it's trivial to export, copy, import, test and validate 5 years worth of data from one server to another, especially something as important to people as this?
6 hours is a pretty excellent turn-around time to do something of this order of magnitude, even if they've been laying the groundwork for the last few weeks in preparation. |
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There is more to NCSoft than just CoH you know. |
Originally Posted by Soul Storm
From the consumer perspective 6 hours is a long time to wait in the middle of the day, but it should also mean the servers are back up for EU prime time so its compromise.
IT really does seem a little weird to me that they're bringing back NCSoft EU and then moving everything away from them. Sure they might be marketing but with the amount of marketing we see for CoH anywhere this just means its one less thing for them to do while they play hopscotch in the playground... |
@True Metal
Co-leader of Callous Crew SG. Based on Union server.
*Puts on her reason hat.*
1: We're getting new server hardware. Woo!
2: 6 hours is less downtime than I expected for setting up the EU servers data in their new home.
3: I'd expect that if we ever wanted to see anything like cross-server listings, cross-server teamings or so forth, it'd be extremely helpful if both sets of server were in the same data centre..
4: As someone else has mentioned, they would be insane to get servers moved and a new system installed for merged server lists.
5: If all the servers have been moved, that includes EU Training Room, if they were going to test EU/US server list merging, they'd likely do it on the EU/US Training Rooms first, seeing as they're accessed seperately. To my knowledge, they aren't.
6: The distance is greater in miles to the US, but the Internet is not real life, there's a SuperHyperAutobahn between the UK and US's backbones, with less junctions to take (Less hops). UK to Germany on the other hand is the child of the M25, Rural Norfolk B roads and the Birmingham Spaghetti Junction, with a dash of a multi-story carpark in High Wycombe that loves to lock up if someone snafu's a parking manoeuvre.
7: Having the servers with the US ones gives us a bit more security in terms of the continued operation of the EU servers, either seperate, or with a server list merge. Cost cutting measures shutting down a data centre's operations are probably more likely than culling a few servers in one main data centre.
*takes off hat.*
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Originally Posted by Guffy
With the expectation of a server list merge 'any day now' - I have always suspected that if all EU and US account holders could access all of the servers then at some point someone will say - "Hang on! Seth's US account cost's less than mine per month, bla bla bla" or, what would be even worse for NCSoft is if when the exchange rate changes, as it does daily, that there a myriad of US subscribers who refuse to pay anymore on the basis that the EU based accounts were getting a better deal.
I suspect if they do merge accounts NCSoft would have to take some kind of revenue 'hit' to be consistent in price, not easy to implement in a global economy. |
Doubt it. Before there were EU servers that situation existed and didn't seem to be a problem.
Thelonious Monk
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Originally Posted by Judgement_Dave
Usually I don't run a reservation/booking system, but given that it's you... |
Hey don't knock it - I've even got an Incarnate Slot with your name on it in my sights!
Thelonious Monk
Inherent Stamina? Incarnate slots? Nails hard task forces? 24 man trials? And now you give EU players better servers with an eye to US-EU unification?
...You mean I can have dessert with EVERY meal?!
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...Oh god, oh man, oh God, oh Man, OH GOD, OH MAN OH GOD OH MAN
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Originally Posted by Zortel
UK to Germany on the other hand is the child of the M25, Rural Norfolk B roads and the Birmingham Spaghetti Junction-
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Necrobond - 50 BS/Inv Scrapper made in I1
Rickar - 50 Bots/FF Mastermind
Anti-Muon - 42 Warshade
Ivory Sicarius - 45 Crab Spider
Aber ja, nat�rlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall.
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It surprised me as much as anyone that they went for a Dave Slot...
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Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker
Hey don't knock it - I've even got an Incarnate Slot with your name on it in my sights!
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By my mohawk shall ye know me!
my toons
Funny: Ee-Ai-Ee-Ai-Oh! #3662 * The foul-mouthed Handyman! #1076 * City of Norms #132944
Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)
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Y'know, going on weight of evidence it probably will.|
Originally Posted by matsuri23
prepares himself for pings over 200 and a hilarious gameplay since it was lagging on the european servers with a ping of 110-500 when beeing logged in from germany. so sending the data over the atlantic will definetly improve my ingame perfomance
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Originally Posted by Zortel
6: The distance is greater in miles to the US, but the Internet is not real life, there's a SuperHyperAutobahn between the UK and US's backbones, with less junctions to take (Less hops). UK to Germany on the other hand is the child of the M25, Rural Norfolk B roads and the Birmingham Spaghetti Junction, with a dash of a multi-story carpark in High Wycombe that loves to lock up if someone snafu's a parking manoeuvre.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Ok, I am seeing a COMPLETE lack of DOOOOOM posts in here!! What's going on, are we not Forumites?? Shouldn't someone be looking for the Bad Thing about this??
Seriously though, I'm praying for a list merge, just tack the 4 EU ones on the bottom, it's win win, the US players get 4 new servers to make alts on, giving more players on the quieter servers, the EU players get alllll those new servers to play on, former EU and US players can catch up with all friends, global lists explode, all is happy and Rosie.....rosie, sorry
Come onnnnn, Devs and Mods, you know it makes sense! 
We built this city on Rock and Roll!
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As foretold in the Book of Revelations of Dave the Deluded the loss of DOOOOOOM-saying amongst CoX forumites is a sure sign of impending DOOOOOOOOM.|
Originally Posted by Coin
Ok, I am seeing a COMPLETE lack of DOOOOOM posts in here!! What's going on, are we not Forumites?? Shouldn't someone be looking for the Bad Thing about this??
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End times are here.
By my mohawk shall ye know me!
my toons
Funny: Ee-Ai-Ee-Ai-Oh! #3662 * The foul-mouthed Handyman! #1076 * City of Norms #132944
Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)
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I'm worried too - I'm in Guernsey (Channel Islands) and we connect to mainland Europe through a relatively new undersea fibre optic cable 30-40 miles long to France, but connect to the UK backbone via very old undersea copper cables 80-90 miles long - plus when I connect to US servers the route usually goes through busy London and has several hops and quite a bit of ping added there. So I usually get far far better connections to gaming servers based on continental Western Europe than anything in the UK and especially the US (it's the difference between 40-100+ ping and 250+ ping - it was especially noticeable when trialling US WoW compared to EU WoW) - that fact has stopped me from enjoying MMOs and other games without European-based servers in the past - so this will likely impact me negatively.|
Originally Posted by UnknownWarrior
Good news for the UK players, I guess.
I hope the connection from continental europe to the US has improved in the last few years, because the game was nearly unplayable for me on NA Trial accounts due to heavy lag back in '07. |
Admittedly I haven't played much CoH since ultra-mode was added so nothing changes for me short term - even with UM switched off and my graphics options set lower than they were pre-I17 I've been getting terrible graphics performance and framerate stuttering (dreadful in Praetoria, not as bad but still horrid everywhere else - honestly it's worse everywhere than it was for me in Grandville in I7) that it has made CoH unplayable for me, so I've had to take a break - but at least I had the hope of returning to CoH once I am able to buy a new PC in the new year.
But now it seems I'll also be waiting on my telecoms company to make an upgrade to their infrastructure as well, so my break from CoH looks like it just became indefinite
I'll give it a try before I cancel my sub, but piling internet latency on top of graphical lag isn't going to make for a very fun experience.Grats to all the UK players who are happy about this, though - can't please all of the people all of the time, but pleasing the majority is a good thing.
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dooooooom!
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Originally Posted by judgement_dave
as foretold in the book of revelations of dave the deluded the loss of doooooom-saying amongst cox forumites is a sure sign of impending doooooooom.
End times are here. |
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I like that wording.... so its not part of the migration... doesnt mean its not on teh cards for the (near) future.. soon(tm)
| Please note that City of Heroes European game servers can only be accessed by European accounts, and City of Heroes North American game servers can only be accessed by North American accounts. There will be no server list merge or server merge as part of this migration. |
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I was more referring to the fact that its in the middle of the bloody day, unlike the Americans who get there stuff in the morning|
Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA
Are you serious about this? Really? You think it's trivial to export, copy, import, test and validate 5 years worth of data from one server to another, especially something as important to people as this?
6 hours is a pretty excellent turn-around time to do something of this order of magnitude, even if they've been laying the groundwork for the last few weeks in preparation. |
Plus if i19 does go live on the 16th that'll be about 5 hours too so thats 11 hours of daylight play time that we are gunna miss in 6 days. i dont personally get much lag while playing and i play on a wifi dongle so this upgrade seems pointless and inconvenient
QR.. it might be in the middle of the day for the EU players, but its 5am for the engineers over there...
To be honest, I see this kind of complaint raising up ALOT in other MMO's where the *DAILY* 1 hour downtime is in the middle of their peak time. Thing is, its for the *convenience* of the engineers, and NOT for the convenience of the players.
If it was at night time (where load is generally lower, but there are still active players), you would get all the night time players complaining.
There is an acronym for this...
NIMBY... Not In My Back Yard... it refers to people who *want* something to happen, but they dont want it to affect them in any way shape or form.
If the *general* consensus is that its best for the engineers to do it early on in *their* shift, where if anything goes wrong, they are not going to end up pulling a 16 hour shift (necessarily), due to working all through their normal day, and then having all THIS at the end of it, it just makes sense to have it so that it would take up most of their normal working day, instead of all the hours being slapped on top.
Oh, isnt Thursday a normal "maintenance" day? So if anything, just view it as an extended downtime.
When a new Issue gets released, it will make it ALOT easier to have everything in the same building, because then you have ALL the engineers working on the same timeslots to get it sorted out, instead of split shifts with EU (or US) players getting the release earlier, depending on which one completes patching 1st...
TBH, _gohan661_ I think you are a NIMBY overall...
Well, nothing to complain about, here. I finish work at 18.00 tomorrow, it takes me 30-45 minutes to get home, I'll sit down, eat dinner, and load up CoH just in time for the servers to come back up, assuming they're on schedule.
I will just say 1pm to 7pm is NOT peak playing time. It is not prime-time. Also, servers are generally available 98.8% of the time. That is an ungodly rate of service. This week they're only going to be up for 96.4% of the time. Assuming I19 goes live next week (*crosses fingers*) with a 5 hour downtime, then from 4th November, through to November 16th, NCSoft will have maintained service for 95.8% of the time.
Really, honestly, that is an utterly ungodly level of service to maintain.
On the basis of those figures, there's probably a target of 95% service. That means that you can lose 3 minutes out of every hour. If there is anyone who plays this game in such a way that for every 4 hour playing session, they begrudge 12 minutes in which they cannot do anything in the game, then they really do need to take a good long hard look at themselves.
The wisdom of Shadowe: Ghostraptor: The Shadowe is wise ...; FFM: Shadowe is no longer wise.
; Techbot_Alpha: Also, what Shadowe said. It seems he is still somewhat wise ; Bull Throttle: Shadowe was unwise in this instance...; Rock_Powerfist: in this instance Shadowe is wise.; Techbot_Alpha: Shadowe is very wise *nods*; Zortel: *Quotable line about Shadowe being wise goes here.*
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*Quotable line about Shadowe being wise goes here.*
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Originally Posted by Shadowe
Well, nothing to complain about, here. I finish work at 18.00 tomorrow, it takes me 30-45 minutes to get home, I'll sit down, eat dinner, and load up CoH just in time for the servers to come back up, assuming they're on schedule.
I will just say 1pm to 7pm is NOT peak playing time. It is not prime-time. Also, servers are generally available 98.8% of the time. That is an ungodly rate of service. This week they're only going to be up for 96.4% of the time. Assuming I19 goes live next week (*crosses fingers*) with a 5 hour downtime, then from 4th November, through to November 16th, NCSoft will have maintained service for 95.8% of the time. Really, honestly, that is an utterly ungodly level of service to maintain. On the basis of those figures, there's probably a target of 95% service. That means that you can lose 3 minutes out of every hour. If there is anyone who plays this game in such a way that for every 4 hour playing session, they begrudge 12 minutes in which they cannot do anything in the game, then they really do need to take a good long hard look at themselves. |
For those who think this will hurt their play consider this: When the servers were located on the East and West Coasts of the US, people all over the US played on the opposite shore's servers with no problem. The distance from East to West was:
New York to San Francisco
- Miles: 2,560
- Kilometers: 4,130
Now, the distance from, say, London, to the servers in Austin are going to be nearly twice that distance:
London to Austin
- Miles: 4,910
- Kilometers: 7,910
Is that going to be bad? No. It's half the distance that Aussie players have to deal with, and they don't have any problems:
Sydney to Austin
- Miles: 8,460
- Kilometers: 13,620
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i think thats the problem i DONT want it. i DONT have a problem with connection or anything but when playing against Americans on XBL i DO have problems then|
Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
QR.. it might be in the middle of the day for the EU players, but its 5am for the engineers over there...
To be honest, I see this kind of complaint raising up ALOT in other MMO's where the *DAILY* 1 hour downtime is in the middle of their peak time. Thing is, its for the *convenience* of the engineers, and NOT for the convenience of the players. If it was at night time (where load is generally lower, but there are still active players), you would get all the night time players complaining. There is an acronym for this... NIMBY... Not In My Back Yard... it refers to people who *want* something to happen, but they dont want it to affect them in any way shape or form. TBH, _gohan661_ I think you are a NIMBY overall... |
if there is no benefit after this 6 hours it'll just be a colossal inconvenience i'd rather not chance it (i KNOW i dont have a choice its just my opinion)
If the output of any given action is not satisfactorily greater than the input then it is not worth undertaking
"Sooner or later it all comes crashing down" *sings and crosses fingers*
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I play Virtue now, it is generally as smooth if not better than Onion was when I was playing that side. |
Originally Posted by _gohan661_
i think thats the problem i DONT want it. i DONT have a problem with connection or anything but when playing against Americans on XBL i DO have problems then
if there is no benefit after this 6 hours it'll just be a colossal inconvenience i'd rather not chance it (i KNOW i dont have a choice its just my opinion) If the output of any given action is not satisfactorily greater than the input then it is not worth undertaking |
There are a number of benefits here. For the players you are getting the HW upgrades the US got a while back. You are also getting the engineering and backend staff in-house rather than the offshoot which was in Germany.
For NCSoft there are cost benefits in terms of having one group of experienced support staff to maintain the servers, it will be easier to synchronize updates.
Potentially it removes one of the barriers to proper unification of EU and US games into one (although of course there are probably a lot of other barriers as well).
This does indeed appear to be composed entirely of Win and Awesome, topped with Awesomesauce. A Winner is EU.
Nah seriously, quite aside from the technical gains, it goes some way towards fixing the perceived gap between the way they treat the EU an the US. Which is good.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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This is an important point.|
Originally Posted by Zortel
7: Having the servers with the US ones gives us a bit more security in terms of the continued operation of the EU servers, either seperate, or with a server list merge. Cost cutting measures shutting down a data centre's operations are probably more likely than culling a few servers in one main data centre.
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If anyone still had any fears that the EU servers time was limited, this, at the least, should put those fears to rest.
Nobody invests in new server hardware if they're planning on closing the servers down in the forseeable future.
@True Metal
Co-leader of Callous Crew SG. Based on Union server.
Anything that can help improving our EU gaming experience gets my "thumbs up".
Anything that puts us one step closer to a server merge list (not now I know, but who knows along 2011) gets also my "thumbs up".
Proud Coleader of: Fuerza Letal (H), Liga de las Sombras (V), Legion del Fenix (H), Infernal Justice (H), and a happy member of GammaForce (H) and D.O.A. (V).
My alts: http://cit.cohtitan.com/profile/13494
From the consumer perspective 6 hours is a long time to wait in the middle of the day, but it should also mean the servers are back up for EU prime time so its compromise.
IT really does seem a little weird to me that they're bringing back NCSoft EU and then moving everything away from them. Sure they might be marketing but with the amount of marketing we see for CoH anywhere this just means its one less thing for them to do while they play hopscotch in the playground...