Again............................? Are you joking?

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

What the actual [snip] are we paying you for? Come on now.... lets be reasonable. How many maintenance is this? Once a day? [snip]

[Edited to remove Bashing]

danno8

If the problem is companion gear disappearing, I can see why they might want to fix it now and not wait another week.

SeaGtGruff

I'd rather have maintenance than no maintenance ever.

TairenSoul

I'm right in the middle of something, Ray!

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

Notify in advance; take it down, sensible ETA till its back up. Taking it down EVERY DAY is a bit ...uhhh unprofessional for a AAA title that has had weeks on PTS.

Mahabahabtha

danno8 wrote: »

If the problem is companion gear disappearing, I can see why they might want to fix it now and not wait another week.

Wise_Will

You woulnd't think it had weeks in testing and this was a triple A game would you

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

@If the problem is companion gear disappearing, I can see why they might want to fix it now and not wait another week.

Why was that not picked up on private / internal severs before PTS? Not today Satan.

nukk3r

As a PC EU resident:

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

Alright it was notified, my bad.

biovitalb16_ESO

It's probably something to do with the crown store....let's be honest, we all know that is what they mean....

Oh and of course a couple stealth nerfs to furniture plan drops and a total gutting of the new mythic kilt.

Kiralyn2000

Between MMOs having regular maintenance;

And online/live-service games having lots of extra maintenance around the time of big releases; (see: the release of every big online game/expansion of the last 5 years)


I'm honestly surprised at people being surprised at this.

Galbsadi

Maintenance happens. There have been a number of small bugs I've seen, hopefully this fixes some of them.

biovitalb16_ESO

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO wrote: »

Notify in advance; take it down, sensible ETA till its back up. Taking it down EVERY DAY is a bit ...uhhh unprofessional for a AAA title that has had weeks on PTS.

The problem with their testing is the people that go on it. They just go on to test rotations and see what the best builds will be, they don't actually test it for them.

Chuck_Finley

This is getting to be unacceptable. We get it, maintenance needs to happen you aren't taking the servers down constantly just for fun.

But at what point do we start getting a "we care about our customers" payback? It wasn't so long ago that constant server downtime during an event would extend the event, but not this last time. Used to be this many problems and this many downtimes would warrant an explanation from the team and a "sorry but we are trying" message, but not anymore. We have had perpetually more and more problems with the server with not so much as a "here is an ingame glowing pet" as a apology and acknowledgement of the trouble.

Fine, take the maintenance you need to make the game work, that part can't be helped. But the silence and no attempts to make it right to your paying customers is going to make us paying customers to some other company.

Sirona_Starr

If this is for companion gear bugs, it's the third or fourth time to try to fix it. Just saying. As an optimist, perhaps the fourth time is the charm? or the fifth? I've lost maintenance count since release LOL and

danno8

Mahabahabtha wrote: »

danno8 wrote: »

If the problem is companion gear disappearing, I can see why they might want to fix it now and not wait another week.

A backend issue could certainly be disappearing gear if the servers are not properly saving your inventory or recording loot drops for specific items.

L_Nici

The worst is just that EU has issues as well, but there its not important enough for Maintenance. No idea how it is on NA, but PvP still doesn't work on EU.

Viewsfrom6ix

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO wrote: »

@If the problem is companion gear disappearing, I can see why they might want to fix it now and not wait another week.

Why was that not picked up on private / internal severs before PTS? Not today Satan.

If I had to guess, It is hard to replicate production (live) data and scenarios in a testing or PTS environment. The scale of PTS or their private testing environment is nothing compared to the live servers. This causes edge cases and unconsidered workflows to slip through. Software development on a large scale like this is not easy but they can certainly improve how they test. It could be allocating more resources on testing or add more automated tests which blocks deployments until they are fixed. Only ZOS knows.

React

biovitalb16_ESO wrote: »

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO wrote: »

Notify in advance; take it down, sensible ETA till its back up. Taking it down EVERY DAY is a bit ...uhhh unprofessional for a AAA title that has had weeks on PTS.

The problem with their testing is the people that go on it. They just go on to test rotations and see what the best builds will be, they don't actually test it for them.

Nah, this just is not true. Historically, zenimax has let major bugs go live EVERY patch after they were reported on the pts.

For example, the gear set bug where 5th piece bonuses don't work was reported week 2 of the PTS.

The gamepad bug where you cannot cast conal aoe abilities at all while facing 6/12 of the clock positions was reported week 2 of the pts, and videos were provided to show how to replicate the bug.

This isn't anything new. It seems like the real reason the PTS exists is for zenimax to make sure the bulk of what they're selling - new DLC content - is functional out of the gate. They ALWAYS let combat bugs go live.

stewhead2ub17_ESO

The "outrage" over maintenance makes me laugh. Settle down. Real world problems. I find such complaints to be comparable to a child stamping their feet & holding their breath while lying in the middle of the aisle in the supermarket. Get a grip.

siddique

Man, forget the damn companions, fix the block glitch!

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

I can understand 1.... MAYBE 2 unscheduled downtimes on a MAJOR patch *was it... really? that's been on PTS for two weeks but everyday like clockwork, that reeks of a poorly prepared, poorly implemented and untested release.

Mahabahabtha

danno8 wrote: »

Mahabahabtha wrote: »

danno8 wrote: »

If the problem is companion gear disappearing, I can see why they might want to fix it now and not wait another week.

A backend issue could certainly be disappearing gear if the servers are not properly saving your inventory or recording loot drops for specific items.

Could...

Stevie6

Microsoft needs to step in and move the contents to a better server farm. One server for PVE and another for PVP. In order to reduce lag and other problems, we, the players, need servers setup in different areas such as Texas, New York, California, and in the Midwest somewhere. If a server goes down, then those players will have a choice to log into others. Just an idea.

RedMuse

nukk3r wrote: »

As a PC EU resident:

That was what I was thinking. All PC/NA players have my deepest sympathies, really, but this is what EU have been dealing with for years and NA players usually tells us to calm down and that it's not that big a deal.

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

Stevie6 ./bow

Danikat

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Between MMOs having regular maintenance;

And online/live-service games having lots of extra maintenance around the time of big releases; (see: the release of every big online game/expansion of the last 5 years)


I'm honestly surprised at people being surprised at this.

It surprised me when I first started playing ESO.

For several years my only MMOs had been Guild Wars 2, and GW1 before that and both those games don't need to be taken offline completely for maintenance. If I remember correctly from the GDC talk a few years back they're able to do it because all their servers are in the same data centres (one per region) and connected to each other so they're able to 'cover for' each other - when one is offline another server can take over it's activity. So when they're doing updates they take 1/2 of them offline and update them, then do the other 1/2 once the first ones are back online.

For players it means all you see is a notification saying a new build is available, then you get a window of time (usually 2 hours if I remember correctly) to log out, download the new update and log back in. So the only down time is however long it takes you to get the update. Even if there's several updates in one evening (like after a big patch) it just means you have to log out and back in a few times, but you can still play while the work is being done.

Other things are done much the same way - even when I was working for a company with 35 employees total we could update our website and other systems run through the server without taking it offline entirely by using much the same process.

So I genuinely just assumed that was how all MMOs and other online services did it now and taking all the servers offline for updates together was a thing of the past, so it came as a real surprise when I started playing ESO and found out they still did it 'the old fashioned way', especially since it's a newer game.

Viewsfrom6ix

Stevie6 wrote: »

Microsoft needs to step in and move the contents to a better server farm. One server for PVE and another for PVP. In order to reduce lag and other problems, we, the players, need servers setup in different areas such as Texas, New York, California, and in the Midwest somewhere. If a server goes down, then those players will have a choice to log into others. Just an idea.

Yup, like AWS availability zones. That solves the server issues but not source code. If there was a bug in the source code, the bug would be in all the areas.

Danikat

Liam12548 wrote: »

biovitalb16_ESO wrote: »

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO wrote: »

Notify in advance; take it down, sensible ETA till its back up. Taking it down EVERY DAY is a bit ...uhhh unprofessional for a AAA title that has had weeks on PTS.

The problem with their testing is the people that go on it. They just go on to test rotations and see what the best builds will be, they don't actually test it for them.

Nah, this just is not true. Historically, zenimax has let major bugs go live EVERY patch after they were reported on the pts.

For example, the gear set bug where 5th piece bonuses don't work was reported week 2 of the PTS.

The gamepad bug where you cannot cast conal aoe abilities at all while facing 6/12 of the clock positions was reported week 2 of the pts, and videos were provided to show how to replicate the bug.

This isn't anything new. It seems like the real reason the PTS exists is for zenimax to make sure the bulk of what they're selling - new DLC content - is functional out of the gate. They ALWAYS let combat bugs go live.

Agreed.

But even if the problem was that the players who choose to use the PTS aren't focusing on the things ZOS needs tested or aren't reporting bugs in the right way, or simply that there aren't enough of them that is still a problem for ZOS to fix.

It's their product and their responsibility to get it working. If they were able to rely entirely on untrained volunteer testers to get the data they need that would be fantastic, but if it's not working ZOS need to find another system. Berating the few people who choose to spend their free time submitting feedback which is consistently ignored isn't going to do anything except discourage even those people from continuing to do it.

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

I worked on WOW from just after launch, about a year in Blackwing until Mists dropped... We NEVER has this much downtime.... sure stuff happens that were not caught during internal or PTS testing *gold exploits etc.... but yeah, ./rage Hopefully Microsoft will save the day or you can YouTube all the dead MMOs from the past 10 or so years to figure out why it all went wrong.