Genuine Question.

ThePlacidHatter

Why does maintenance, for this game, take so long?
I'm not a game dev, so I dunno what it involves, but I do play a lot of games and I've never played a game which came down for several hours, each week, for updates.

Why, at the very least, does ZOS not push out the update during this time, so players with slow internet (like myself) can download the file and the time is not completely wasted?

SilverWF

ThePlacidHatter wrote: »

Why does maintenance, for this game, take so long?

Wonder about this too...

pkuronen

Maybe some manual cleanups of timeoutted / chrashed logins. I am sure there's quite a bit of garbage.

Turelus

The hamsters need longer periods of rest after a PETA investigation.

Panomania

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

kevlarto_ESO

I think Bob the intern does it and he still learning LOL

The game has always been slow on updates since day one, anything less that 2 hours is a miracle, but they do a lot of back end stuff clean ups and so forth plus patch then test patch after it has been loaded before they let us play, I worked in a huge server environment doing updates and sometime the most simple update can turn into a nightmare if not tested before you turn it lose to the users.

Magdalina

I remember there was a blessed time when their maint ranged from ~30-40 mins for non patch to 1-2 hours for patch. It was a glorious time and like all glorious things it did not last long.

Illurian

Panomania wrote: »

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

GW2 has zero downtime.

BnS has weekly downtimes of 1-2 hours, with an ETA, compared to ESO's 4-8 with no ETA.

I also play TSW, but I haven't noticed its downtime duration.

sirston

I always hated the Havoc engine.

ESO_Maya

Turelus wrote: »

The hamsters need longer periods of rest after a PETA investigation.

the ESO Hamsters

Turelus

EVE Online used to have an hours downtime every day, they still have downtime every day but managed to get it to 15mins. Patches still take additional time and expansions hours.

The only person who will ever be able to answer this question in full for you is a ZOS employee actually involved.

ThePlacidHatter

Panomania wrote: »

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

Seriously? Have you played any games other than ESO?

GW2 is the other MMO I have played in recent years. As Illurian said, it had(/has?) next to no downtime.

Bringer

Turelus wrote: »

EVE Online used to have an hours downtime every day, they still have downtime every day but managed to get it to 15mins. Patches still take additional time and expansions hours.

The only person who will ever be able to answer this question in full for you is a ZOS employee actually involved.

The official bracket was an hour but it often only took half an hour or so.


Really mmos started having this 'downtime-creep' with WoW. WoW was the first mmo i ever played that regularly went down for like 6 hours in their downtime, and eventually it got up to like 12 hours or something rediculous with some regularity.

The first mmo i ever played never had downtimes in the 5 years i played it other than a couple times when their ISP went out, and they actually gave everyone a weeks subscription extension each time for only a ~day inconvinience. All they had was a daily reset which basically meant the servers came down for 1-2 minutes at most and then you were back. It didn't even disrupt groups doing things it was so fast.

blacksghost

I think they secretly make the down time, and load screen times so long so we can't sue them for making the game addictive its their little way of saving us from ourselves

Sergun

and patch builded 5 days ago !!!

Muramasa89

Panomania wrote: »

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

RuneScape has a downtime of however long it takes for you to close the launcher (or re-load the browser if you play that way) and load it up again. There's also none of this maintenance every other day, or during peak times (barring emergencies but they're rare).

teladoy

Well sometime is because the person in charge starts the maintenance and then he has to do something else and forget what he was doing and till he remembers that servers are still down and the maintenance is not over, this can take several hours...

I know it from first hand, becase it happens to me usually when i say to my wife "i'm coming" but i continue playing and i forget what i had to do.

Azurulia

ThePlacidHatter wrote: »

Why does maintenance, for this game, take so long?
I'm not a game dev, so I dunno what it involves, but I do play a lot of games and I've never played a game which came down for several hours, each week, for updates.

Why, at the very least, does ZOS not push out the update during this time, so players with slow internet (like myself) can download the file and the time is not completely wasted?

SilverWF wrote: »

ThePlacidHatter wrote: »

Why does maintenance, for this game, take so long?

Wonder about this too...

A lot happens during server maintenance down time.

backups from Logs taken of all sorts of data collected during the week on a temporary collection mainframe needs to be moved to an archive database for future reference and detailed observation. Logs are collected of things such as crash reports, npc spawns and deaths, player deaths, loot dropped and then looted by who and when, snapshots of player characters inventory and stats... the list goes on.

Now if you take into consideration just how many players and how much they do happens during a given week...

That is a tremendous amount of data to move for safe-keeping. (even by our current technology standards)

Also hardware changes, etc. are also done during this time.

Generally this is done within an hour and a half or so. However they give themselves 3 encase there is a snag or extra work to be done somewhere for consistancy. The really long server downtime are generally the result of something unexpected to really bad happening during these processes. This can happen very easily while implementing a patch.

Anyone who has done programming knows very well that Murpy's Law can be a tremendous *** bag.

So yeah. Lots happens during this downtime.

Sergun

Panomania

And when GW2 started patches were nowhere near as fast as they are now (played from beta til about a year after launch). Also....sorry, but GW2, unless things have DRASTICALLY changed since I stopped playing back in '13, is like a vegan meal, or Jessica Alba: visually beautiful but lacking in depth or content. ESO is a far more complex game, and thats gonna take time.

BnS? Blade and Soul? Never played it. I gave up on Korean MMO's after the sixth try....got tired of getting identity theft attacks from Chinese sources (happened on 3 different Korean games I tried, only on the dummy prepay cards I used specifically for these games), but seen 8 hour patches before on some of them, and rather often. Requiem comes to mind, or 9Dragons.

I played TSW very early on, and it had its share of day long patches, too.

As for WoW....please. One, the games been out for 12 years, and they've gotten better at things (I still remember day long or worse, including one weekend down, patches and updates early on in WoW.....in some cases even after BC released).

Rift was probably one of the slickest launches I have EVER seen in an MMO (VERY polished at launch even though it had substantial content throughout) and it wasnt unusual for 4 to 6 hour patches.

City of Heroes, sometimes it was a couple hours, sometimes FAR longer. Warhammer....same, though I recall some 12 and 18 hour long doozies, though they were typically for enhanced content.

Age of Conan.....bleh, If you played it, you remember.

Not really fair comparison, but going back a ways I remember some ridiculously long downtimes on old UO, EQ and DAoC.

Patches take time, especially in a game this young (yes, a game this size with as many changes as we've seen recently....3 years is young). Also consider that they are typically pushing core changes into place behind the scenes on the server in preparation for coming changes and big patches, so the day of they arent down for 12 hours and have time ahead to troubleshoot.

Running a large MMO isnt like running other types of software projects. Chaos factors bite you in the ass a lot harder, and the sheer varieties of systems that can use the product have a much heavier impact on unforeseen glitches than they do elsewhere....and the more complex the game, the more this increases.

Danikat

I think most games have shorter down-time because they only take 1 server at a time offline, whereas ESO has to take them all down, update them and put them all back online together because of the megaserver system.

Although...

Illurian wrote: »

Panomania wrote: »

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

GW2 has zero downtime.

BnS has weekly downtimes of 1-2 hours, with an ETA, compared to ESO's 4-8 with no ETA.

I also play TSW, but I haven't noticed its downtime duration.

Guild Wars 2 (and Guild Wars 1) uses a special system built into the game from the very beginning to be able to pull that off. The way I've heard it described for the laymen like me is that when one of their servers is taken offline for maintenance another one "covers for it" - all the data is shared between the physical machines so any of them can act as any of the servers, meaning players will never notice when they go offline. But that also requires being able to run two versions of the game at the same time - one with the new build and one with the old build and gradually shift players from one to the other.

If you want more detail there's a video where they explain it here: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016640/Guild-Wars-2-Programming-the (The relevant part starts at 9:48, or it's the section titled 'no downtime for builds')

I have to admit I do often wonder why other companies don't do the same thing, especially ESO which from a players perspective appears to already have a lot of the same technology (megaservers, sharding on open-world maps and phasing allowing different versions of the same map for different players) but I guess it's proprietary technology and I don't know what else is needed to make it work.

Edit: There's a more up to date and detailed version of the talk here, but you have to be a member to see more than the slides: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024442/-Guild-Wars-Microservices-and

Sergun

seems it very big natchpotes will be

Avidspark

Muramasa89 wrote: »

Panomania wrote: »

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

RuneScape has a downtime of however long it takes for you to close the launcher (or re-load the browser if you play that way) and load it up again. There's also none of this maintenance every other day, or during peak times (barring emergencies but they're rare).

omg, someone else still plays RS!

Doctordarkspawn

ThePlacidHatter wrote: »

Why does maintenance, for this game, take so long?
I'm not a game dev, so I dunno what it involves, but I do play a lot of games and I've never played a game which came down for several hours, each week, for updates.

Why, at the very least, does ZOS not push out the update during this time, so players with slow internet (like myself) can download the file and the time is not completely wasted?

Honestly we have no idea.

Given the ammount of disconnect issues I'd wager it has something to do with how people and ISP's connect to the system, but that's just a guess, we legitimately dont know.

SilverWF

It's already goes for 4 hours! ><

Illurian

Panomania wrote: »

And when GW2 started patches were nowhere near as fast as they are now (played from beta til about a year after launch). Also....sorry, but GW2, unless things have DRASTICALLY changed since I stopped playing back in '13, is like a vegan meal, or Jessica Alba: visually beautiful but lacking in depth or content. ESO is a far more complex game, and thats gonna take time.

It's quite amusing watching apologists come up with the most random points and try to pass them off as legitimate arguments. GW2 lacking depth is entirely subjective. You haven't played in 4 years out of its 4.5 years of existence and you think you have sufficient knowledge to form a reliable opinion?

Tyria is as large, if not larger than Tamriel. GW2 also supports 3D depth with gliding and swimming, underwater combat and a plethora of other functions ESO does not have. I don't want to compare the two as I love both, but you trying to pass off your opinion on depth as a fact and reason for long dowtimes is simply wrong.

Panomania wrote: »

BnS? Blade and Soul? Never played it. I gave up on Korean MMO's after the sixth try....got tired of getting identity theft attacks from Chinese sources (happened on 3 different Korean games I tried, only on the dummy prepay cards I used specifically for these games), but seen 8 hour patches before on some of them, and rather often. Requiem comes to mind, or 9Dragons.

So you have no knowledge on BnS, so you just lump it together with all other Korean MMOs. I haven't played any of those other Korean MMOs, but BnS has regular downtimes similar to what I previously mentioned. You bringing in the other Korean MMOs add no weight to your argument.

Panomania wrote: »

I played TSW very early on, and it had its share of day long patches, too.

All games have long patches at release, that's to be expected. ESO has been out for three years now.

I haven't personally played any of the other games you listed, so I can't comment on them.

Panomania wrote: »

Patches take time, especially in a game this young (yes, a game this size with as many changes as we've seen recently....3 years is young). Also consider that they are typically pushing core changes into place behind the scenes on the server in preparation for coming changes and big patches, so the day of they arent down for 12 hours and have time ahead to troubleshoot.

Running a large MMO isnt like running other types of software projects. Chaos factors bite you in the ass a lot harder, and the sheer varieties of systems that can use the product have a much heavier impact on unforeseen glitches than they do elsewhere....and the more complex the game, the more this increases.

Absolutely, technically everything you said is understandable. However, this is simply not the case with other large MMOs (GW2 being the main competitor with zero downtime). When drawing a comparison, these understandable reasons become a lot less acceptable.

Ch4mpTW

Panomania wrote: »

And when GW2 started patches were nowhere near as fast as they are now (played from beta til about a year after launch). Also....sorry, but GW2, unless things have DRASTICALLY changed since I stopped playing back in '13, is like a vegan meal, or Jessica Alba: visually beautiful but lacking in depth or content. ESO is a far more complex game, and thats gonna take time.

BnS? Blade and Soul? Never played it. I gave up on Korean MMO's after the sixth try....got tired of getting identity theft attacks from Chinese sources (happened on 3 different Korean games I tried, only on the dummy prepay cards I used specifically for these games), but seen 8 hour patches before on some of them, and rather often. Requiem comes to mind, or 9Dragons.

I played TSW very early on, and it had its share of day long patches, too.

As for WoW....please. One, the games been out for 12 years, and they've gotten better at things (I still remember day long or worse, including one weekend down, patches and updates early on in WoW.....in some cases even after BC released).

Rift was probably one of the slickest launches I have EVER seen in an MMO (VERY polished at launch even though it had substantial content throughout) and it wasnt unusual for 4 to 6 hour patches.

City of Heroes, sometimes it was a couple hours, sometimes FAR longer. Warhammer....same, though I recall some 12 and 18 hour long doozies, though they were typically for enhanced content.

Age of Conan.....bleh, If you played it, you remember.

Not really fair comparison, but going back a ways I remember some ridiculously long downtimes on old UO, EQ and DAoC.

Patches take time, especially in a game this young (yes, a game this size with as many changes as we've seen recently....3 years is young). Also consider that they are typically pushing core changes into place behind the scenes on the server in preparation for coming changes and big patches, so the day of they arent down for 12 hours and have time ahead to troubleshoot.

Running a large MMO isnt like running other types of software projects. Chaos factors bite you in the ass a lot harder, and the sheer varieties of systems that can use the product have a much heavier impact on unforeseen glitches than they do elsewhere....and the more complex the game, the more this increases.

N'ah, it's just ESO and ZOS for the most part. For example, Rockstar's GTA 5 has little to no downtime. And when it does, it's incredibly rare. Even days where big patches are being implemented to the game for GTA:O. Mind you that GTA:O has way more people playing it than ESO, and is on platforms even old-gen (XB360 and PS3). So with old-gen consoles included, you're looking at 5 platforms the game is on. 5. And surprisingly enough, the game is packed usually. Even though the game is technically old. It has aged wonderfully.

SilverWF

Honestly, GW2 has downtime - every EU player know that, because it always goes in the damn US night.
But, it has never been more that 1-2 hours.

Danikat

Panomania wrote: »

And when GW2 started patches were nowhere near as fast as they are now (played from beta til about a year after launch). Also....sorry, but GW2, unless things have DRASTICALLY changed since I stopped playing back in '13, is like a vegan meal, or Jessica Alba: visually beautiful but lacking in depth or content. ESO is a far more complex game, and thats gonna take time.

That's like saying a Joe Satriani album must have a bigger file size than a Green Day album because the songs are harder to learn to play. The two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

SilverWF wrote: »

Honestly, GW2 has downtime - every EU player know that, because it always goes in the damn US night.
But, it has never been more that 1-2 hours.

Guild Wars 2 does have downtime. There was a problem recently where no one could log into the EU servers for a few hours.

What it doesn't have is scheduled downtime on patch and maintenance days. When an update is released you don't get booted offline several hours before and have to wait for the servers to come back online before you can even start downloading the patch. You just get a notification that a new build is available and then you can log off, download it immediately and log back in. Or you can stay logged in until you're ready to get the new build (although there is a limit on that, unless you're in a dungeon or something I think it's about an hour).

Panomania

Oh, so they added a better intertwined storyline and quests into GW2? And improved (read: actually added) the endgame? They fixed how one dimensional crafting was? Fixed all the ways PVP was completely lacking a decent reward system? OOH!! Did they finally add housing???

...and sorry, perhaps I should have specified, but while I have not played in 3 and a half years people I still game with are still playing today. They tell me there are some fun changes, but the core issues havent changed, and in many cases have gotten worse: GW2 is fantastic for hypercasual escapist play but its not an enthusiasts game, for the most part.

But all thats irrelevant to the discussion. I wasnt disparaging GW2. It was a GREAT game for what it was....it just wasnt what I was after. My comments were solely in relation to how much they had to push and change for maintenance....and even today, with going on 5 years of changes, it doesnt push as much as ESO has to in a weekly update.

That being said, I DID like GW2's underwater combat (SO much better than EQ's awful system). Wish we'd see that here.

Blackbird_V

Panomania wrote: »

Sorry, but I dont see this as taking long. What game are you comparing it to?

Not a game, but Steam itself has a weekly maintenance and lasts like what? 10-20 minutes? Doesn't even interrupt online games unless you DC...

Blessed be GabeN