Just purchased Blackwood. Hooray for maintenance :|

Trailed

Go to log in, only to find extended maintenance. Not even seen the new content and I already want a refund. Such a joke that every week we've been getting extended maintenance recently. 1/2 the time I've gone to log in the last month, most my would be play time has been put aside to extended maintenance.

Starlight_Whisper

My condolences

DaiKahn

This is my playtime as I work odd hours and am in Australia. But, it's life! I'm just glad they're doing something to fix problems rather than leave the issue(s)

I do understand your frustration though

Nastassiya

Trailed wrote: »

Go to log in, only to find extended maintenance. Not even seen the new content and I already want a refund. Such a joke that every week we've been getting extended maintenance recently. 1/2 the time I've gone to log in the last month, most my would be play time has been put aside to extended maintenance.

[snips own text out of this before a mod does it] This is a video game and not the end of the world. Maintenance is going to happen and it's not an easy decision to bring down a cluster. I work at an airline and when ever I bring down our fleet maintenance QA clusters it takes 20 minutes. It takes double that to bring it back up. It cost us a lot of money just to do this. When we bring down live prod, in the middle of the night, it cost a lot more to do that. We have teams of people evaluating the state of the environment as it happens. People are reviewing logs. But we can still sell aircraft seats.

It's the very same for ZOS, except when they bring down prod no one is buying and spending crowns. Still, it's not just pushing a few buttons to turn ESO on and off. They actually plan every bit of this out in advance because it's a huge financial decision.

zharkovian

Yes, ZoS have reasons to do maintenance, but for a lot of players that does not alleviate their frustration. I suppose when you bring in some daft, game-breaking features such as not right CP changes and not right Companion changes then a fair bit of corrective maintenance is probably to be expected.

Goregrinder

Maintenance is a must, but I have definitely noticed recently they tend to perform maintenance while I'm at work, which I greatly appreciate ZOS!

SirCyanideRose

We should get a refund, or a free month of ESO+. For those who already have ESO+, they should get a discount voucher for the next month due to a faulty product (Blackwood).

If you got an undercooked burger from any restaurant, they'd offer you something as recompense. ZOS owes us something! 5 maintenance this week?

A good company strives for 5 9's of uptime, as in 99.999%. I'd be surprised if ESO is even at 90....

rootimus

SirCyanideRose wrote: »

We should get a refund, or a free month of ESO+.

ZOS should never have removed the one we used to have on the forum:

Trailed

Nastassiya wrote: »

Trailed wrote: »

Go to log in, only to find extended maintenance. Not even seen the new content and I already want a refund. Such a joke that every week we've been getting extended maintenance recently. 1/2 the time I've gone to log in the last month, most my would be play time has been put aside to extended maintenance.

[snips own text out of this before a mod does it] This is a video game and not the end of the world. Maintenance is going to happen and it's not an easy decision to bring down a cluster. I work at an airline and when ever I bring down our fleet maintenance QA clusters it takes 20 minutes. It takes double that to bring it back up. It cost us a lot of money just to do this. When we bring down live prod, in the middle of the night, it cost a lot more to do that. We have teams of people evaluating the state of the environment as it happens. People are reviewing logs. But we can still sell aircraft seats.

It's the very same for ZOS, except when they bring down prod no one is buying and spending crowns. Still, it's not just pushing a few buttons to turn ESO on and off. They actually plan every bit of this out in advance because it's a huge financial decision.

This would be a good comparison if they had the lives of thousands of people in their hands I suppose. I'm sure they planned this out in an extremely advanced fashion as they just posted about it this morning. lul

Nastassiya

SirCyanideRose wrote: »

A good company strives for 5 9's of uptime, as in 99.999%. I'd be surprised if ESO is even at 90....

You can't compare all companies together. Not a single MMO has 99.99% uptime. AWS and Azure have that because they need to make very little changes to a lot of their automation and they spend a lot of time in a DEV and QA environment before it even gets rolled out to US-EAST and then to their other data centers. In MMO's there is always very few players to warrant even having a 24/7 PTS. It would also cost a lot more to run that compared to a small dev/qa test cluster, like AWS or AZURE.

OneForSorrow

Playing a live MMO means downtime. ESPECIALLY if new content just dropped.

I have literally never played a MMORPG that didn't have to go through this.

Trailed

OneForSorrow wrote: »

Playing a live MMO means downtime. ESPECIALLY if new content just dropped.

I have literally never played a MMORPG that didn't have to go through this.

Right. Because they haven't been hyping and testing this for months now. This would have been the first time I've been able to play the new content, however now who knows when that will happen. I have literally never played an MMORPG that has gone through as many extended maintenances after one expansion release as ESO.

Jacozilla

SirCyanideRose wrote: »

We should get a refund, or a free month of ESO+. For those who already have ESO+, they should get a discount voucher for the next month due to a faulty product (Blackwood).

If you got an undercooked burger from any restaurant, they'd offer you something as recompense. ZOS owes us something! 5 maintenance this week?

A good company strives for 5 9's of uptime, as in 99.999%. I'd be surprised if ESO is even at 90....

I am not defending zos in any way, god knows they deserve a lot of the criticism against them. So many screw ups, bugs not caught, even worse bugs that were caught and reminded by players on PTS repeatedly yet ZoS still launches new dlc/expac with those bugs. Plus the frequent unplanned maintenance, outages, etc.

That said though, your assertion re: Five-9 uptime or 99.999% is completely off base.

The gold standard for uptime, 99.999% was and still is a telecommunications standard. Because access to telephones is such a critical part of our infrastructure and daily life, telcos created and pursued this 99.999% uptime standard. Each year has 525,600 min (ignore leap year) - this means telcos monitor, maintain, and build redundancies for ~5.25 minutes of downtime.

Other than ~5.25 min a year, your phone should give you the dial tone you expect when you pick up or click to initiate a call.

Holding Zos or any other purely -entertainment- based industry to the same gold standard 99.999% uptime as life saving / critical industries is either deliberately disingenuous or clueless.

YandereGirlfriend

Nastassiya wrote: »

SirCyanideRose wrote: »

A good company strives for 5 9's of uptime, as in 99.999%. I'd be surprised if ESO is even at 90....

You can't compare all companies together. Not a single MMO has 99.99% uptime. AWS and Azure have that because they need to make very little changes to a lot of their automation and they spend a lot of time in a DEV and QA environment before it even gets rolled out to US-EAST and then to their other data centers. In MMO's there is always very few players to warrant even having a 24/7 PTS. It would also cost a lot more to run that compared to a small dev/qa test cluster, like AWS or AZURE.

I think that the game is large enough such that ZOS really ought to have invested in automated testing capabilities of their own rather than outsourcing it to the players and their own, presumably small, QA Department.

There will always be bizarre edge-cases that I will happily always give a pass for not discovering but core game systems (e.g. Block modifiers behaving normally, ability ranges being correct determined) should always be tested for integrity before any new content update is pushed live. And all of that would be easy to verify if they simply had a standard battery of tests that was run prior to every commit.

zharkovian

As the thread devolves once again into insults, ZoS extends the maintenance by 3 more hours.

SirCyanideRose

You guys are a bunch of apologetic nerds! I was making a joke and you gotta go explain it. Sheesh. Go sit in the corner with your abacus....

Kosef

I'm with you OP. Got the expansion yesterday and am already regretting it. I took basically a month off the game as I got back to work (used to be work from home). Finally off. Bought the expansion as boom all day maintenance.

Trailed

Yup, and now its down for at least another 3 hours. Oh joy

VelimOrthic

It was 1:30ET and now it's 4:30

gotta love the honesty

BazOfWar

Congrats!!

Get used to it though, the servers seem to be down more than up these days. 🙄

Starlight_Whisper

Nastassiya wrote: »

Trailed wrote: »

Go to log in, only to find extended maintenance. Not even seen the new content and I already want a refund. Such a joke that every week we've been getting extended maintenance recently. 1/2 the time I've gone to log in the last month, most my would be play time has been put aside to extended maintenance.

[snips own text out of this before a mod does it] This is a video game and not the end of the world. Maintenance is going to happen and it's not an easy decision to bring down a cluster. I work at an airline and when ever I bring down our fleet maintenance QA clusters it takes 20 minutes. It takes double that to bring it back up. It cost us a lot of money just to do this. When we bring down live prod, in the middle of the night, it cost a lot more to do that. We have teams of people evaluating the state of the environment as it happens. People are reviewing logs. But we can still sell aircraft seats.

It's the very same for ZOS, except when they bring down prod no one is buying and spending crowns. Still, it's not just pushing a few buttons to turn ESO on and off. They actually plan every bit of this out in advance because it's a huge financial decision.

Except they were just fixing a backend issue. Then there's building resentment for breaking fore function of game block. It was fine a week before pts was over, but then broke.

There's carelessness here for this to happen. They need.a better work flow. I question not the devs but management for this situation.

Starlight_Whisper

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Nastassiya wrote: »

SirCyanideRose wrote: »

A good company strives for 5 9's of uptime, as in 99.999%. I'd be surprised if ESO is even at 90....

You can't compare all companies together. Not a single MMO has 99.99% uptime. AWS and Azure have that because they need to make very little changes to a lot of their automation and they spend a lot of time in a DEV and QA environment before it even gets rolled out to US-EAST and then to their other data centers. In MMO's there is always very few players to warrant even having a 24/7 PTS. It would also cost a lot more to run that compared to a small dev/qa test cluster, like AWS or AZURE.

I think that the game is large enough such that ZOS really ought to have invested in automated testing capabilities of their own rather than outsourcing it to the players and their own, presumably small, QA Department.

There will always be bizarre edge-cases that I will happily always give a pass for not discovering but core game systems (e.g. Block modifiers behaving normally, ability ranges being correct determined) should always be tested for integrity before any new content update is pushed live. And all of that would be easy to verify if they simply had a standard battery of tests that was run prior to every commit.

Or just have outsource department to get caught up on issues. Hire temporary help in some things is what I think.

SammyKhajit

In near future there will be a feature to buy in the crown store: gaming with maintenance and gaming without maintenance

Free to play? Maintenance only.

shadyjane62

I guess your purchase was the proverbial straw that broke the Camel's Back.

purple-magicb16_ESO

Lol! Yep they triple stack 'em nowadays. I wish I could say I feel your pain, but I actually got to play Blackwood for a brief time. My condolences. Hope you enjoy it when you do get to play. Here's hoping the bugs are gone by then.

OneForSorrow

Trailed wrote: »

OneForSorrow wrote: »

Playing a live MMO means downtime. ESPECIALLY if new content just dropped.

I have literally never played a MMORPG that didn't have to go through this.

Right. Because they haven't been hyping and testing this for months now. This would have been the first time I've been able to play the new content, however now who knows when that will happen. I have literally never played an MMORPG that has gone through as many extended maintenances after one expansion release as ESO.

World of Warcraft recently dropped a prepatch for Burning Crusade, an expansion that was already released on the old client a decade ago. We still had down time including the servers being down the entire day the patch went out and down time again for numerous bugs the following days. That release was also hyped and tested.

I'm not saying it isn't annoying, I'm just saying these things happen. Constantly.

[Deleted User]

Hello everyone,

With there already being a thread on this subject, we're going to go ahead and close this one down and ask that you continue the discussion here.

Thank you for your understanding.