Official Discussion Thread for "European Megaserver Migration"

Titansteele

Wow - This is proof that you really can not please everyone all of the time.

I work in the field around data center migrations and management and I am sure they have planned some contingency into their plan so we may see things back sooner than expected. The time frame will have been well thought out and tested with backup copies of databases to ensure the transfer times were realistic and achievable. The smoke testing will have been planned out and tested as well, I am sure they have already been play testing on the new kit already.

Moaning and whining is never acceptable and rarely gets anyone anywhere, constructive complaints however are welcomed by any good company as it is the best vehicle for self improvement.

I get why people are questioning the time picked for the migration, the statement seems reasonable on the surface but fly in the face of my experiences of managing migrations. People working night shifts is common practice for this kind of work all over the world as often companies have a real financial cost to downtime (no sales for example) so the quiet times absolutely MUST be picked.

With that said I am sure keeping the costs down on this must be a priority and that is understandable and the short term inconvenience is probably not worth the extra costs of making sure this is done "off peak". The decision around this may not be finance related, it could be as simple as the availability of key people. These guys/girls will have nagging partners and kids and night-shift may not be an option for them for a plethora of very understandable reasons.

If the real reason is any of the above they are not going to put that in a press release "Paul Sage`s wife says he cant help out tonight because he forgot their anniversary last week" is never going to be known outwith ZOS no matter how amusing it may be.

Thank you for this move ZOS, even if the gains are marginal they are gains and in our best interest and for that you have my thanks.

Vicodine

Yay, the servers, they are moving!


Take your time, I'll spend the evening playing on PTS. Hope you give a complimentary supply of RedBull and donuts to all the people working on this, you know, IT engineers live on sugar (I know I do)

Love the way you keep moving the game forward. Don't let the trolls get you down.

KhajitFurTrader

Gizzarduk wrote: »

Nice work, Are those HP Blades I spy.

Yep, looks like HP c-Class Blade Servers.

Shiny!

thijs160b16_ESO

Will this also be the last time you're using American Time Zones for European servers?

Smaxx

thijs160b16_ESO wrote: »

Will this also be the last time you're using American Time Zones for European servers?

What do you mean? News texts? I guess that's just a minor oversight on their end and they typically forget about English speaking people from Europe I guess. The French and German news typically have CE(S)T times or sometimes even both.

Wainamoinen

I was disappointed to learn the EU server would initially be located in North America; with the best tech in the world , distance means you'll get delays that affect play in a game whose combat can depend on reactions, particularly in PvP.

So I was delighted to get a date for transfer to a European data centre, and in only a couple of days. Thank you Zenimax, and good luck with the move (really, those are my guys you're juggling).

Sleep

I'm in China. The migration doesn't mean much to me. I just hope it won't get worse. And the migration processes during happy hours here in the evening to midnight.

thijs160b16_ESO

Smaxx wrote: »

thijs160b16_ESO wrote: »

Will this also be the last time you're using American Time Zones for European servers?

What do you mean? News texts?

I mean that all times, related to the European Megaserver have been in EDT, rather than CE(S)T or even GMT, something Europeans can relate to. Instead all times have been related to very specific local locations, EST, CDT, BST. Some of which I, and I'm sure many other Europeans, have never even heard about. It gets quite confusing.

Cogo

thijs160b16_ESO wrote: »

Smaxx wrote: »

thijs160b16_ESO wrote: »

Will this also be the last time you're using American Time Zones for European servers?

What do you mean? News texts?

I mean that all times, related to the European Megaserver have been in EDT, rather than CE(S)T or even GMT, something Europeans can relate to. Instead all times have been related to very specific local locations, EST, CDT, BST. Some of which I, and I'm sure many other Europeans, have never even heard about. It gets quite confusing.

Google something is such a hard thing to do, I know. Why dont they tell ME MY TIME!!! Dont they know only MY time is important?????

Phheewwwww. It took me......"pant* *pant*...it took me SECONDS!!! To google this....I need a red bull...so hard to DO something myself!

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/

Slaunyeh

Titansteele wrote: »

Wow - This is proof that you really can not please everyone all of the time.

Well, at least it's not being hosted by GOA.

k9mouse

odiasuda wrote: »

Has it ever been answered, to anyone's satisfaction, why the euro server wasn't physically located in Europe to being with?

They could have avoided the expense of a server migration, and the induction of nerd rage due to a service outage of an MMO, with some forethought.

At any rate - I am looking forward to pings with less than three digits.

@odiasuda
From What I hear, ZOS was waiting for a building to be finish being built. That was the delay was for. Do what a Megaserver under a tent for a few months?

Sindala

Lol, you could have waited another week or so. Imagine the Horror on the forums if it read....
Europe, we are taking your server down to migrate it to actual Europe, downtime expected to be 1 day (poss more)
NA we have applied patch 1.3 to your server now...enjoy.

Ojustaboo

Cogo wrote: »

thijs160b16_ESO wrote: »

Smaxx wrote: »

thijs160b16_ESO wrote: »

Will this also be the last time you're using American Time Zones for European servers?

What do you mean? News texts?

I mean that all times, related to the European Megaserver have been in EDT, rather than CE(S)T or even GMT, something Europeans can relate to. Instead all times have been related to very specific local locations, EST, CDT, BST. Some of which I, and I'm sure many other Europeans, have never even heard about. It gets quite confusing.

Google something is such a hard thing to do, I know. Why dont they tell ME MY TIME!!! Dont they know only MY time is important?????

Phheewwwww. It took me......"pant* *pant*...it took me SECONDS!!! To google this....I need a red bull...so hard to DO something myself!

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/

While I agree 100%, at the same time it would be polite for Zenimax when posting about EU downtime, to also spend that 5 seconds googling, it simply gives a better impression to those in the EU.

Sangcœur

What about Celarus campaign ? Do we get extra-time due to the maintenance ?

s2firestar

Sindala wrote: »

Lol, you could have waited another week or so. Imagine the Horror on the forums if it read....
Europe, we are taking your server down to migrate it to actual Europe, downtime expected to be 1 day (poss more)
NA we have applied patch 1.3 to your server now...enjoy.

I find it unlikely to create such a rolling delay for the EU servers. But yes, it would be a huge uproar. Luckily, they read the forums, so here's the hint

terryammon

Nice to see the server is fully moving to the EU, But i must say, WHY do this at 1PM

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

This is the official discussion thread for the blog article European Megaserver Migration. We're looking forward to the move to Frankfurt on Wednesday!

Nice to see the server is fully moving to the EU, But i must say, WHY do this at 1PM BST??? Dont anyone have a clue at Zenimax??
Why not do the transfer at 1AM BTS when it's not peak time for the EU players?? Will we get a extra day added to our Subs?
ALSO Day time Europe = millions and millions of people using the internet, now wouldn't it be a faster transfer the data when the internet wasn't at its peek?

LupX

It's great that the server is finally coming closer to us EU-folks!

I wonder if it's possible when announcing stuff in the future to use a more common time zone for europeans? And perhaps use both the 24 hour clock (or military time, as the 12h-people call it) and 12 hour clock.

I would suggest the use of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) also called Zulu time. Then people living east of the Atlantic ocean don't have to use converters from wierd time zones some online converters don't even have.

KhajitFurTrader

terryammon wrote: »

Nice to see the server is fully moving to the EU, But i must say, WHY do this at 1PM BST??? Dont anyone have a clue at Zenimax??
Why not do the transfer at 1AM BTS when it's not peak time for the EU players?? Will we get a extra day added to our Subs?
ALSO Day time Europe = millions and millions of people using the internet, now wouldn't it be a faster transfer the data when the internet wasn't at its peek?

Go ahead, read the announcement:

Moving everything over to our new datacenter is a complex operation involving a large number of our engineers and support staff in Europe and North America. It’s important to us that everyone we need for the process is awake, ready, and available. This will help us make the transition as smooth as possible.

As for the bandwidth concerns: there are things called Virtual, or Point-to-Point Leased Lines (a little background). These come with guaranteed bandwidths, and thus are quite independent from prime times.

stefan9

Poor excuse in my book. My engineers work through nights to get transfers done. This was simply done to keeps costs down and again to show they don't care about their EU customers when it comes to timings...

Azurya

I Like what they make for affords to have "our" server placed in Europe. It is just the question why it has to be placed in Germany, for the role they played in the near past of our kontinent.....
But I like it anyway, and I will play on, In the some time I will have to make a big journey and probably will not be able to log in for weeks... I will survive

Aetherra

When I tried to play WOW on NA server after my move (cuz all my friends still played in NA) the lag was horrific.
The thing is; I haven't even realized our server was not actually in actual Europe until I read it here today :)the gameplay was so smooth

Anyhow this seems like a lousy way of avoiding overtime pay, they should be doing this at night, not on prime time, the excuse about sleepy engineers is just lame... boohoo cry me a river if you skip one night of sleep.
They would have to give us 1 free day for this *** and that would cost them more than the overtime they are so stingy to pay their techs and engineers.

Ausare

Well, for me it got 2 times worse actually. Yes, I'm changing my provider because of that in 2 days, but it is more then impossible right now.

Valije

You did the migration too fast... Now I can't complain about the downtime

Ravenslock

Could you please explain me some weird thing about the migration?
1) In Windows resource manager, some time after the login. we can see Current Client TCP Connection Address is 159.100.232.160 and similar.
2) If we Trace this address we see the last 3 Addresses of the Path are
c)87.190.232.66
b)195.122.154.4
a)159.100.232.24
Address c is in Germany, Address b is in London and address a is in USA. I have tryed different websites and got the same answer.
Please could you enlight me? Do you warp time and space?

Night_Watch

brimits wrote: »

View of the real hardware for the move!

Seriously though, I sometimes can wait 30 seconds just for the characters to appear in the market so moving the servers nearer the area will surely make a huge improvement.

Go ahead! Mock the most awesomest Home Computer (HC not PC) ever!

The ZX81 was the first 'real' computer I ever had (I had access to many others though). I was ten and learning about computers / computing at school and was amazed when my folks 'stumped up' the cash for me to have my very own computer (joint christmas / birthday gift as I recall). Ah! The memories (I had the 16k add on)! I still have my ZX81 in a shoe box and it still works - the power input has been sort of fiddled with but all is good.

Any way! Back on topic;

I just got back home from Germany (I am in England) and saw this transfer notice when I came to the TESO site / forum. I'm happy to hear that the move has taken place. I do not know if the move will effect my gameplay at all. So I am looking forward to getting back in game to see what's new and 'test' the effect of the move.

Sakara

Hmm just read through everything here and people are talking about lag issues, which i've not experienced , i have lag before in this game, i know what it looks like.
(I'm UK based, have a pretty new high spec gaming laptop ,fast running, fibre optic broadband and never had the below issues before until tonight when i came back on after the server migration.)

What i am experiencing now is-
When im fighting, my character just stops fighting, not freezes due to lag, i can run around but i cant fight. None of my abilities buttons or mouse presses do anything,, but im moving around ( trying not to die) like normal and the enemies are also not freezing up and continue to attack me ( and i checked it wasnt some ability the enemy has to stop me fighting.)

Or when not in combat,people or things i should be able to interact with ( ie can go up to and press the 'E' button,) nothing happens, the highlighted E becomes a dark 'E' and that's it. I often have to go into fight mode for it to suddenly work, ie take out my bow fire a shot, then i can suddenly interact with a person or object.

It's made playing the game today rather frustrating to say the least. and the only thing that's new is the server migrated.

Ausare

I have same freeze issues. They seem to be a server overload issues.
Did we get cheaper servers in Frankfurt?

KhajitFurTrader

Ausare wrote: »

I have same freeze issues. They seem to be a server overload issues.
Did we get cheaper servers in Frankfurt?

Take a look again at the photos of the racks they've posted. HP BladeServers don't come cheap, ever. ^_^

(Besides, in IT circles it's considered certain suicide to change the underlying hardware of a system on a whim. If it ran on HP big irons in Dallas, TX, it will run on HP big irons everywhere)

Rune_Relic

@ZOS_GinaBruno
+3... I was in Bal Foyen lastnight covering the whole map collecting materials.
1. I also had the issue with the collect option blacking out and being unavailable for several attempts.
2. My character was also teleporting back in time 1 second or so. I have heard of 3 steps forward and 2 steps back....but this is silly. lol

I suffered none of these issue using the old megaserver in the US.

Titansteele

The majority of my guild and I had the same issue`s last night. I would suspect it is some resource issue server side which I am sure will be addressed and is being closely monitored.

Someone saying the same with a ZOS badge would go a long way here - Hint Hint