Discussion: Extended Live Server Maintenance - Thursday, September 22, 2011

ROFL. Wouldn't you know it-- tomorrow is my day off.

But I take it from these upgrades that the floodgates are opening quite soon for the free players then? Let's face it, it would be the pits if so many new players stormed the place (as happens with every AAA MMORPG title that goes F2P) that the servers were constant balls of wreckage from the overload.

One way to think about it is someone, in surgery, with all of their skin and bones removed and their various organs distributed amongst physical hardware, the nerves and bones the cabling running between them. Logical services, say for the market, are in no way reflected in the physical layout of the hardware. The market likely resides on its own dedicated hardware, with special cabling connecting it to devices whose own interrelationship conceptually spans both U.S. coasts (assuming there are still West and East Coast server clusters), but which is physically made up of segments provided by several phone companies, each with their own set of physical components in the mix.

The programmers at Paragon write to the concepts when they design the game, but what lies beneath is implemented by disconnected teams geographically far removed, and who have no concept of the concepts the programmers at Paragon are writing to--those only make sense from inside the game.

It's horridly complicated. And the work being done to the hardware is likely carried out by teams who work in the IT department for NCSoft, not Paragon Studios, and they are probably not familiar enough with the game to parse, "Oh, the market is down" directly into the physical group of connections and machines without having to stop and figure it out.

I'd like, during the downtime, to see an article like the one written oh so long ago when the game launched about the backend itself. I cannot turn the article up readily with a search (it really has been years), but it was an interview in which some description of the City setup itself was given. I seem to recall it was multicore Xeons (at the time quite shiny) but it was a very long time back.

It's inherently interesting (to some of us), and might serve as a way to quietly reinforce an appreciation of the complexity, that what the game runs on in no way resembles the setups most people conceptualize when they think of "computers".

I think it's marvelous it can be made to work at all.

Its not about 12 hours compared to how many hours in a month.

Its how many of those 12 hours take hours away from your actual playtime.

If I play between 10am pst to 1 pm pst which are my normal gaming hours.

Im loosing 3 of 3 hours for that day...

Yes they need to give us free time.

It's better to announce 12 hours and get done early than announce 8 hours but take 12. I take the increase in time as an example that they are starting to estimate better.

So they've had a bit over a week to see where things are gumming up the works and where maybe more hardware firepower is needed. I still think there should be another week or two worth of patches needed before opening the flood gates but that's going to be NCSoft's call as much as Paragon Studios to when they open the doors.

While this ongoing scenario irks me, I fully expected it for a major launch like CoH:Freedom - it's a few days of extended downtime now vs the whole thing crashing and burning and being down for much longer periods of time when it launches. So I'm trying to keep perspective that it's still just a few days out of a year, I have other games to play, tv shows to watch (no, I don't have a social life ), and that this level of downtime has been a pretty rare occurrence in the game's history.

That said, I do think we're starting to cross into levels of peak downtime where some kind of compensatory gesture would be advisable to maintain player morale/goodwill, especially as the current scenario is layering on top of existing dissatisfactions with the way things have worked out since the EU servers joined with the US ones.

Am I happy about another 12 hour downtime? Not really, no.
Do I understand why it's needed? Absolutely.
Do I agree that the EU players are the ones getting routinely shafted? Mostly.

But for the love of God, post once and be done with it. After that, take it up directly with customer support. You're not getting refunded, and the odds of them adding "days" to anyone's account is probably minimal. It's already been suggested that the existing current VIP subscribers be given extra Paragon Points (or Tokens) for this month. When they host the U-stream tomorrow, instead of baying for blood, ASK what considerations, if any, Customer Service is willing to make for the excessive downtime. That whole honey-flies-and-vinegar thing.

In the oh-so-true words of Helen Parr...

"THIS IS NOT... ABOUT... YOU!"

And FFS, don't rip Zwill's head off. He's not the one who fixes the servers; he's not the one who schedules the time; he's not the one who makes the decision on what recompense, if any, a player or players get for excessive downtime. He's the poor schmuck who's stuck having to relay information to us and from us. By now, I'd guess CS can see the rage about this easier from space than they can the Great Wall of China.

And one more thing - Zwill - if there's a way to put a text bar at the bottom of the U-stream like some newscast things where they have the headline while the anchor talks about stuff? Might I suggest adding something like that with an ETA on when the servers will be back up (or at least a message saying, "Update XX:XXam/pm - no ETA yet") so we don't have four thousand horked-off players flooding the Ustream with "when are they coming back up?"

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Thank you for ruining the one day off in the week I have to play properly.

really devs? your forums are looking more wowesque b/c of these botched "fixes" . ur bandaid solution is clearly not working as bugs and issues are either left unchecked or new ones are created. this is what u get for rushing this issue out

at least be nice enough to reward your players with extra paragon points this month b/c this wont be the last maintenance this month

I'm sorry, I don't bother reading through each and every post when it comes to these threads because of constant repetition, so I've skipped to the end to ask a quick question.

Am I the only one who understands that "VIP Head Start" stands for "Final wave of testing to ensure a solid game state at F2P launch"?

The reason they've been down so often lately is that they're getting ready for Freedom. Also, they're upgrading the servers from the sound of it, so, yeah, it's fine.

Also, they're working on an NA schedule, not a European one. Stop whining.

I can go a few hours without playing a videogame, especially if that downtime results in more stable servers.

I'm mostly loving all the i21 ness
But this downtime in the EU is getting old - the reason I'm not playing on Exalted is that the rollout was late - I think it went live about 01:30 in the morning London time eventually. I stayed up till 12:00 waiting. Of course all the names I wanted went by the time I did log on the next morning.
I do like most of i21 though and I do appreciate the work put in

Dear NCSoft.

This really isn't good enough anymore. You have 9 pages of comments regarding this downtime so I don't see the point in typing more of the same thing.
But I would like to add just a couple of things - whatever the grounds for more server downtime are, it would actually be nice if one of the updates/patches that take so much of your subscribing customers' "play-time" away actually really resolved the issues they address. It is pointless saying "thank you for your patience" when quite honestly, our patience is running very thin now.
Double XP weekends/opening the chalet/giving away free codes etc doesnt negate the fact that all most players want is to be able to play the game error free and without continual downtime.
It would be nice if your Customer Service personnel took heed of what is being written, and actually came up with a compensation package which is directed at EVERYONE involved and not just a few "lucky" individuals, and in my opinion, that would be to grant ALL paying customers a partial refund or extended free playtime.

What you are currently doing not only aggravates your current customers, but also gives new players a very poor impression of your company.

I do hope you can get a grip on the problem once and for all before the inevitable happens and people start drifting away to other more reliable games, because that would be the demise of a game that I and many other veteran players enjoy playing.