Maintenance Update?

Gromulus

IronMaiden_burnout wrote: »

5 hours and counting to add a patch damn this mega server crap !

WoW had their scheduled maintenance yesterday, no patch, and it took 7 hours, so going on 5 hours with a patch release isn't so bad. Nothing to do with megaserver (which in reality are hundreds of machines providing presence awareness across thousands of instances of zones).

Reignskream

Ur-Quan wrote: »

Reignskream wrote: »

I love when people complain about something they agreed to.

We agreed to terrible communication? I'm fine with server downtime. I'm fine with both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. What I'm not fine with is a lack of communication on roughly how long the downtime is expected to be (and, going hand in hand with that, updates if and when things are taking longer than they expected).

That was my big complaint with the bank bug too: absolutely terrible communication. It's clear that ZOS simply doesn't have an effective communication strategy.

You agreed to an understanding that ZOS doesn't have to let anybody know about anything going on. Maybe if you would have read what you agreed to, you would have a better understanding.

While it's not a good business practice to not fill in the community on what is going on, ZOS clearly stands by it allot of the time.

Elsonso

Auric_ESO wrote: »

I wish I was running this show: From Auric: The servers will be down whenever we think is neccessary for the first 2 months in order to fix everything we can so your experience will be as good as possible. After than we'll work out a schedule that will attempt to impact people as little as possible and we'll abide by it excepting emergency patches. If you dont like it or you complain about the schedule you'll be banned.

Except for that last line, I think that pretty much sums up what they have said, in bits and pieces, over the last month.

It is certainly what I, as a customer, fully expect.

UrQuan

Fairydragon3 wrote: »

Ur-Quan wrote: »

Reignskream wrote: »

I love when people complain about something they agreed to.

We agreed to terrible communication? I'm fine with server downtime. I'm fine with both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. What I'm not fine with is a lack of communication on roughly how long the downtime is expected to be (and, going hand in hand with that, updates if and when things are taking longer than they expected).

That was my big complaint with the bank bug too: absolutely terrible communication. It's clear that ZOS simply doesn't have an effective communication strategy.

Did you ever think that they don't know?
there is a list of stuff to fix. Unless you know how to fix a build, I wouldn't be complaining on communication. I'm guessing anyone who would know what is going on is working on the patch. Besides wasn't this patch supposed to happen YESTERDAY?

I work in IT (banking software). We put out new builds, patches, and hotfixes all the time. When you're doing maintenance and applying a patch you know how long it should take. You also know pretty quickly if it's not going as expected and it'll take longer. Failing to let your clients know how long maintenance is expected to take, and failing to provide updates when things change from the expectation is strictly amateur hour. In my world it would result in heads rolling. In fact, in my world I've seen IT managers and even people as high as the executive level "move on to pursue other career opportunities" for that.

Gromulus

Ur-Quan wrote: »

Fairydragon3 wrote: »

Ur-Quan wrote: »

Reignskream wrote: »

I love when people complain about something they agreed to.

We agreed to terrible communication? I'm fine with server downtime. I'm fine with both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. What I'm not fine with is a lack of communication on roughly how long the downtime is expected to be (and, going hand in hand with that, updates if and when things are taking longer than they expected).

That was my big complaint with the bank bug too: absolutely terrible communication. It's clear that ZOS simply doesn't have an effective communication strategy.

Did you ever think that they don't know?
there is a list of stuff to fix. Unless you know how to fix a build, I wouldn't be complaining on communication. I'm guessing anyone who would know what is going on is working on the patch. Besides wasn't this patch supposed to happen YESTERDAY?

I work in IT (banking software). We put out new builds, patches, and hotfixes all the time. When you're doing maintenance and applying a patch you know how long it should take. You also know pretty quickly if it's not going as expected and it'll take longer. Failing to let your clients know how long maintenance is expected to take, and failing to provide updates when things change from the expectation is strictly amateur hour. In my world it would result in heads rolling. In fact, in my world I've seen IT managers and even people as high as the executive level "move on to pursue other career opportunities" for that.

I mostly agree. I also work in IT, as a lead developer on large enterprise applications. We have staging servers when new code is promoted to that are a mirror of production servers, so once we deploy to staging we have a good idea how long the deployment to production will take.

However, these are business applications. Gaming servers are a different world. We don't know how many hundreds of machines underpin what they call the megaserver. Can they have a staging environment that mirrors this? Does part of their deployment deal with fixing data issues that aren't all known before they deployment starts? I don't know, but I can appreciate that there are differences between business app servers and gaming servers and personally tolerate some unknowns regarding maintenance window lengths.

Chryos

Here is the work around for this: Go outside and do something else for awhile. Go pay attention to your family (I.e. feed them), do unfun stuff like chores and work. Most important GO TAKE A SHOWER! You smell funny.

Chryos

I dont think any online gaming company is blatently trying to ignore their customers. They might be trying to work their butts off behind the scenes to get the servers back up and running. Everyone knows what it's like to try and get work done and have to deal with customers constantly bombarding them with questions while they are busy tryin to get stuff done. I'd rather them spend a little bit longer working on patches and the unexpected problems that arise with applying them than to field my requests for constant updates. It'll be up when it's up.

UrQuan

Gromulus wrote: »

Ur-Quan wrote: »

Fairydragon3 wrote: »

Ur-Quan wrote: »

Reignskream wrote: »

I love when people complain about something they agreed to.

We agreed to terrible communication? I'm fine with server downtime. I'm fine with both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. What I'm not fine with is a lack of communication on roughly how long the downtime is expected to be (and, going hand in hand with that, updates if and when things are taking longer than they expected).

That was my big complaint with the bank bug too: absolutely terrible communication. It's clear that ZOS simply doesn't have an effective communication strategy.

Did you ever think that they don't know?
there is a list of stuff to fix. Unless you know how to fix a build, I wouldn't be complaining on communication. I'm guessing anyone who would know what is going on is working on the patch. Besides wasn't this patch supposed to happen YESTERDAY?

I work in IT (banking software). We put out new builds, patches, and hotfixes all the time. When you're doing maintenance and applying a patch you know how long it should take. You also know pretty quickly if it's not going as expected and it'll take longer. Failing to let your clients know how long maintenance is expected to take, and failing to provide updates when things change from the expectation is strictly amateur hour. In my world it would result in heads rolling. In fact, in my world I've seen IT managers and even people as high as the executive level "move on to pursue other career opportunities" for that.

I mostly agree. I also work in IT, as a lead developer on large enterprise applications. We have staging servers when new code is promoted to that are a mirror of production servers, so once we deploy to staging we have a good idea how long the deployment to production will take.

However, these are business applications. Gaming servers are a different world. We don't know how many hundreds of machines underpin what they call the megaserver. Can they have a staging environment that mirrors this? Does part of their deployment deal with fixing data issues that aren't all known before they deployment starts? I don't know, but I can appreciate that there are differences between business app servers and gaming servers and personally tolerate some unknowns regarding maintenance window lengths.

Oh absolutely, I'd expect some degree of uncertainty. You should still know whether you expect it to be in the range of 1-3 hours vs a range of 4-6 hours, though. Also, 9 times out of 10 you should be able to tell fairly quickly if your initial expectation was off and in such a case the communication should likely be along the lines of "things are taking longer than expected and we'll give you an ETA when we have one". That's the type of communication I would expect to see.

AryaWythers

Auric_ESO wrote: »

I wish I was running this show: From Auric: The servers will be down whenever we think is neccessary for the first 2 months in order to fix everything we can so your experience will be as good as possible. After than we'll work out a schedule that will attempt to impact people as little as possible and we'll abide by it excepting emergency patches. If you dont like it or you complain about the schedule you'll be banned.

Well when a company has a BETA and ignores everyone for a year about all the bugs and multitude of other problems... then maybe that company should be patient and not charge people until they can competently release a product. And banning people for complaining about your sub-standard product will only hasten the downfall.