the rerturn of the daily maintenance?

You know, call me crazy, but I don't think wanting people to say what they mean - particularly in a communications medium that relies entirely on the use of words and not at all on their delivery - is an act of wanton pedantry.

I think most of the people ignored your timezone conversions in favor of more whining about downtime.

Sorry

Actually, I think I can prove, not with scientific finality, but reasonably, that it cannot be done.

As petulant as is sounds, because it has not been done. If it were possible, for a 'reasonable' amount of money, one of the new MMOs would be doing it and they don't or one of the current popular MMOs that could, would change it's internal framework.

I think it would be done if it could be. It would be a HUGE selling point.

As a matter of fact, I have many years in this field, not directly for MMOs, my company creates software that connects to large databases which thousands of users connect to simultaneously and we still consider MMO code to be more complex in some areas.

Additionally, one of the big three MMO's is made in the building my company resides within and I have conversations on the subject often not only with our engineers but with said MMO's as well.

The entire idea that any system with a large user base connected to and accessing a transaction heavy database, regardless of infrastructure, will not have to have regular maintenance outages is simply a non-starter. Even the most resilient database systems like the stock market have scheduled downtime for users.

The reason this topic makes me rage, BTW, is that anyone in the technology industry speaking from a position of authority who informs people that impossible things can be done, irritates me.

I'm coming from a different angle, obviously, but I disagree for two reasons. Firstly, I have worked in the game industry as a programmer, and seen the stuff that gets shipped even as 'A' titles. It would make your stomach turn. But the chief reason for the poor code is the incentive structure: publishers want to get things out to meet various calendar constraints, and of course want to spend the least amount of money; and further, the rewards to the developers for shipping bug-free or at least well maintainable software are slim at best. Granted, MMOs, with their longer-term focus, will have different development pressures.

The second reason, is that I am and have been working right now on a large, distributed, database-backed project which has very infrequent downtimes (one every few months, typically.) And this even uses MS' SQL server (I'm not the one who has to baby sit it, thankfully.) In earlier work, I've written computationally intensive and data intensive software that would run for weeks on a large cluster, with a custom data store that handled the various contention issues. It too did not need to be periodically restarted. So I do know the technology is feasible, even if it certainly is not trivial.

Consequently, I honestly believe it can be done, and that the reason it is not done is primarily one of developer or publisher priority.

That said, we're not talking about five nines uptime here. Even reducing CoH downtime to an hour a month would be a huge improvement for those affected by the choice of maintenance window over the 2 to 6 hours a week we see now.

That would be as good as "not having downtime"... it is such a small percentage, you could get away with that as a selling point (0.14% downtime). 2 hours a week downtime is only 1.11% downtime... which although good, is actually better than other MMO's i can name (800lb gorilla had between 4 and 6 hour weekly downtimes when i was playing it).

About the *only* MMO that i can think of that has downtime on that level (correct me if i am wrong) is Guild Wars.

What is it that Guild Wars (an NCsoft title remember) does differently to other MMOs that enables it to get away with extremely limited downtimes?

And is it actually feasible to implement the *same* idea's and concepts behind it towards other MMO's or is it something that just so happens to work for it alone?

I cannot answer this one, i do not know the answer to it.

And is the Guild Wars methodology behind it actually scalable enough to get away with it being put into a larger (more persistant) world and still do the same job.

I guess that the answer will be seen when Guild Wars 2 comes out, and if that has downtimes or not on a similar scale to Guild Wars, or if it goes the way of more persistant MMO's and actually does downtimes the "standard"[1] way

[1] Standard being a regularly scheduled downtime.


Question: When your server (that you have coded for) has a downtime, how long is it for?

But can it be done within the margins a game company needs to produce and can it done with the massive number of users an MMO has?

Also, another thought, was it feasible 10 years ago? This system was designed then.

A large user base doing a TON of un-expected things that happen in an MMO puts a decidedly different spin on things compared to well planned 'jobs' that cause massive numbers of ordered database transactions.

I should add that the front page announcement gets the links to the World Clock Event Time page wrong, leading me to a brief moment of panic ("Finishing on Saturday?!") before I realized what was going on.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Then irritate yourself. Travel industry reservations systems have NO scheduled down time. They are up 24/7, barring crashes. We even loaded new software with the system up. Granted, we did it for the airline I worked for during the lowest user load times, but the system did not go down.

Oh, these things happen.

What also happens, rarely, is bit code changes to programs (BAL, Basic Assembler Language, code) on the fly while the system is up. Just don't tell upper management, they get real uptight about that. I had to make the coding change (it was my program), and the people in Systems checked it with three sets of eyes before their lead made the actual change with me watching.

But once again, how appropriate would that infrastructure and setup be towards running an MMO?

Also, whilst you are loading up the software, did it have any side effect to the running of the system, or was it effectively transparent so that there was *no* delay on the tasks being ran.

Because, at least from the *customer* point of view, when some servers get under heavy load everything takes longer to complete. Buying/Booking a holiday... those extra 15-30 seconds isnt going to make a blind bit of difference (typically)... if it went up to 5 minutes, then yes... a problem has arisen.

But playing an MMO where you had 15 second lag? Who in their right mind would play a game like that?

I know someone who worked on the software that controlled a hot steel rolling mill. The code was antique and arcane, and the mill couldn't be stopped for the code to be updated. Nothing provides an incentive for careful testing like being the one who has to stand in the control booth in the middle of the mill and press the button to load the new code.