Why so many Maintenance?

blue_peaceful_Manticore

Every week, or almost every week ZoS does a maintenance. Why?

Does they fix main bugs? No
Does they fix\change anything in game? No

Then, why we lost almost 32hours of ESO+ every month.

Can any one help me understand why so many Maintenance for no reason at all? (Or maybe this make sence, but i don't get it)

davidtk

One week is maintenence, servers needs maintenence, database other stuff etc, restart or whatever just few hours.
Megaservers aren't just one computer...
So if regular maintenence to the hardware and software is for no reason, what reason you want for maintenences?

Some games have less frekvent maintenences or i know some games what have maintenence EVERY day.

Maitsukas

The banner's been there for days, and it was mentioned on Friday's ESO livestream. The keyword for the current one is patch

Treeshka

Like the maintenance happens every week and it is normal for a live service game. Patch maintenance on the other hand happens every two week.

robwolf666

EnKor wrote: »

Every week, or almost every week ZoS does a maintenance. Why?

I'm probably completely wrong, but I think of it like they're defragging a hard drive to make it run more smoothly and faster, especially if they've added a patch.

Rasoma

I have found that the regular maintenance is actually a boon as it means far less unscheduled maintenance. Other online games have realms, worlds, shards or whatever so you have a lobby and a selection of dozens of "servers" to connect to. For those games one server can be taken offline and the rest remain (a pain if your characters are on the offline server).

ESO and the mega server means that you all share the servers - its a far more robust way of doing business as you can discreetly add and remove servers behind the scenes as demand changes and you do not have to add or remove realms, worlds etc.

Mesite

I would prefer the maintenance to be mid week. If I decide to take a long weekend then I can't play on a Monday. I rarely take a Wednesday off.

Xarc

servers need maintenance, every mmo do that.

Eve online for exemple is off everyday at 12:00 during 15min

WhisperLFE

Every MMO I've ever played (and there have been many) has done weekly or near-weekly maintenance.

wilykcat

I used to play WoW and that game was almost always on maintenance. I used to play guild wars 2 until I got banned for life, that game did maintenance once a month. I'm newer to Elderscroll and this is the first maintenance I've seen. I joined approximately 5 months ago.

TechMaybeHic

Honestly it's happening every other week but should be EVERY week

The disappointment is their failure to fix much. Even the things they claim to be testing 2 weeks ago

Grega

Mesite wrote: »

I would prefer the maintenance to be mid week. If I decide to take a long weekend then I can't play on a Monday. I rarely take a Wednesday off.

I have Wednesday's off. So what works for you doesn’t work for me.

Then…there’s the “alleged millions” of others with their preferences.

So the only fair way is for them to do it when they want regardless of when any player wants it ☺️. Which is how they do it

Xandreia_

Because if they didn't performance would be even worse than it is now

boi_anachronism_

I mean lots of bugs right now. A ton of hot fixes came through as well. There were a ton of maintenance days as a result.

Maitsukas

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

Honestly it's happening every other week but should be EVERY week

The disappointment is their failure to fix much. Even the things they claim to be testing 2 weeks ago

Once Stadia finally shuts down next month, we can hope to return to the weekly patch schedule.

Kiralyn2000

EnKor wrote: »

Every week, or almost every week ZoS does a maintenance. Why?

Every MMO I've played over the last 15 years has had some sort of weekly maintenance where the servers go offline. It's normal.

Additional maintenance is expected around large content releases, due to bugs & problems with that release.


Patches and bug fixes are separate from that, but do tend to occur during regular maintenance times. (hotfixes and emergency maint are always an unexpected occurrence, of course.)


tl;dr - 15+ years experience with MMOs tells me that this is normal and expected. It doesn't bother me. /shrug

shaxigamingeb17_ESO

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

I mean lots of bugs right now. A ton of hot fixes came through as well. There were a ton of maintenance days as a result.

And yet the bugs remain or are merely altered slightly

Ciotola

wilykcat wrote: »

I used to play WoW and that game was almost always on maintenance. I used to play guild wars 2 until I got banned for life, that game did maintenance once a month. I'm newer to Elderscroll and this is the first maintenance I've seen. I joined approximately 5 months ago.

this is not correct information given the lack of temporal collocation.

not to break a spear in favor of wow , it has had problems for years between incompetent moderators and increasingly copy paste and cowardly expansions in making a memorable product (to name just 2 things ) but wow currently offers one of the status servers .

as a player who quit in the DF prepatch, I can assure you that the server down moments are not every week, but at least every 2-3 (sometimes only 1 per month), approximately they last from 3-4 hours but already after 2h it is possible to log in, most of the time they give 1h even less.
blizzard allows a service, both on wow and on other titles, so they can do maintenance and leave the servers online (and currently wow is considered a megaserver given the cross play between servers / factions)

on the contrary, this has maintenance that always lasts more than 4 hours, without the possibility of playing in real time with any minor maintenance, it has them at least every 1-2 weeks and it is not uncommon to see extensions of the maintenance periods.

quality side: eso has various maintenances of various nature and bugs which, if all goes well, are resolved after MONTHS, from their discovery (I could mention the fact that eso is based on a bug that has never been resolved, weaving , but here it would be like shooting on some kids and then the fanboys would freak out...so let's ignore the fact that eso is a game that lives on a bug...)

quality side wow has fast bug resolution times, it has many fewer bugs active than you think. and many of these assets date back to the pre-cataclysm period or to very recent things on which, as much as I know, they haven't tested enough.
wow bugs can often be solved with tickets or with game/interface reloads, because they are not related to structural problems of the game itself and therefore totally out of the control of the player/moderators.

and so it is a "triple A" mmo and as such I compare it to the other triple a in the sector: I don't know ffxiv, but for those who want references: I play wow from wotlk, now no longer with continuity with subscriptions every month, I concluded pve endgame content with scores well above average (and all without a guild), so much so that in the pandaria period one of the strongest guilds on the server I'm in (a hardcore guild) tried several times to recruit me.

this flexx because I can afford it and because I'm not the first run away from home who doesn't know what mmo are.

FlopsyPrince

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

Honestly it's happening every other week but should be EVERY week

The disappointment is their failure to fix much. Even the things they claim to be testing 2 weeks ago

They SHOULD design a system that doesn't need such frequent maintenance and one that could handle rebooting some servers without taking the entire game down.

A bit late for that as many architectural decisions probably don't account for it now.

Tyralbin

For those that ask why?

There are 2 forums which actually answer this question.

For every patch there are Patch Notes forum you can go check there for every patch they have ever done.

Although, for general maintenance there is a forum but their is hardly ever anything added to that. Would be nice if then even added a quick one line just to let us know what they did that week.

DinoZavr

Only game-makers can answer this reliably.

My guess is the reason is similar to daily EVE Online or World of Tanks server reboots -- the memory leak.
Tracking combat and projectiles might cause memory leaks even with close to ideal coding, so no surprise here.
Word of Warcraft uses the rolling restart, but this feature had to be in the game architecture design from the very start. Implementing this feature should take the game core code to be completely re-written, which i doubt can be done reasonably fast and smooth.

SaintJohnHM

I'll take a new patch every night if it means bugs will really be fixed.

FlopsyPrince

DinoZavr wrote: »

Only game-makers can answer this reliably.

My guess is the reason is similar to daily EVE Online or World of Tanks server reboots -- the memory leak.
Tracking combat and projectiles might cause memory leaks even with close to ideal coding, so no surprise here.
Word of Warcraft uses the rolling restart, but this feature had to be in the game architecture design from the very start. Implementing this feature should take the game core code to be completely re-written, which i doubt can be done reasonably fast and smooth.

That is not entirely true. Those making an MMO will clearly have more focus there, but making robust massive systems is a major focus in many areas.

You are correct that the architecture needs to be designed for that and I would bet few (if any) modern MMOs have been architected for that. The lack of competitive pressure in that area is especially at fault.

Necrotech_Master

even if im off work on patch days, its very rare the maintenance is still ongoing after i get out of bed lol