Why all the cancelled maintenances?

Anvos · September 2014

Likely one part holiday and one part they did this before update 3.

p_tsakirisb16_ESO · September 2014

kitsinni wrote: »

p_tsakirisb16_ESO wrote: »

fromtesonlineb16_ESO wrote: »

Untrue, I play an MMO which hasn't had scheduled maintenance for many years and whose servers usually run for weeks at a time, only being taken down to apply content updates: FFXI.

And LOL at a "re-boot once a week to keep the servers clean", a re-boot should achieve nothing on a well setup and working system in terms of provide smoother running, etc: not sure what your segmented comment refers to in this context.

EVE Online has a server reboot every single day.

It is also an 11 year old game.

And is rebooting since day one everyday. On the most powerful game server cluster that ever existed (for game). Which for many years now is on the top 500 most powerful machines on the planet.......

And if you refer to "dated" software, consider that gets major expansions many times a year.

Ashtaris · September 2014

This really gave me a good laugh. You have a bunch of users who complain about the maintenance and downtime almost every week, and now another group pops up to complain about the lack of maintenance and downtime. I can just imagine the ZOS developers walking around doing /facepalms right about now

rsciw · September 2014

squicker wrote: »

LOL. Yes because a game with perhaps 1 million users is so much more important than all the billions of dollars worth of data that is stored, transmitted and used by billions of people every day, using MS solutions.

rsciw wrote: »

Gigglesnort wrote: »

Maybe there are waiting for the MS patch Tuesday on the 9th to hit, then on Wednesday they will apply all their updates as well.

If anyone runs an application like this on MS software, they should go back to school...

And a heck of a lot more using non-MS infrastructure for that, mainly for efficiency and performance. Not necessarily costs, some of the implementations can be very expensive too, just look at AIX (though AIX would not really be something for a game I'd reckon). Obviously not every company publicly states what they run, do only know for SWG, which used Linux and Oracle DBs, and STO, which uses Linux servers (no idea about DB).

Based on requirements even for the Zenimax Online Studios Business Intelligence Analyst job, I guess Linux is used widely too ( http://jobs.zenimax.com/requisitions/view/714 ).

And when it comes to important data / monetary value: Banks / Financial Services usually run a mix of Linux (newer machines) and Unix (often AIX).
(I used to work in the City of London and Canary Wharf a while (both the financial hubs of London / Europe next to Frankfurt)), Gambling corporations (in the UK) work with Linux (and Windows too, DBs more on Linux than Windows from my experience, but both exist), large corporations we all know like Google, Amazon, Facebook, with data worth a lot of billions, you can figure out yourself the underlying OS, and it's not Windows.

anywho, what was supposed to be side remark for some lulz on the side turns into getting OT now

raglau · September 2014

rsciw wrote: »

And when it comes to important data / monetary value: Banks / Financial Services usually run a mix of Linux (newer machines) and Unix (often AIX).
(I used to work in the City of London and Canary Wharf a while (both the financial hubs of London / Europe next to Frankfurt)), Gambling corporations (in the UK) work with Linux (and Windows too, DBs more on Linux than Windows from my experience, but both exist), large corporations we all know like Google, Amazon, Facebook, with data worth a lot of billions, you can figure out yourself the underlying OS, and it's not Windows.

Just as well I didn't say Windows is the prevalent OS, then isn't it? ;-) I merely - sardonically - stated that enterprises far larger than ZOS entrust far more value to Windows solutions than a (relatively) little game.

I know what and where Canary Wharf is: You may have used to work there, but I work there to this very day architecting systems for all of the meaningful players in the district, and Windows is used far more than you state. The two largest banks in the district actually have a 'Windows Server First' architecture policy, as do a lot of the smaller players (still 10,000 to 20,000 seat orgs).

Pretty much no medium or large enterprise uses anything except Exchange Server for email and all enterprises list email in their top 5 business critical applications. All medium and large enterprises use Active Directory as their authoritative authentication directory, and worker authentication is of course universally listed as the number 1 mission critical IT process in all enterprises. So the most valuable commodity in any enterprise - the staff - are explicitly governed, authorised and enabled by Windows. Can't authenticate? Can't work.

Google and Amazon use a significant number of Windows clients, and Servers (I am an Amazon architect and the consultancy I own is a tier 1 partner), although EC2 is Linux of course.

This old Windows vs Others view is long gone. Anyone working in technology today recognises the strengths and weaknesses of all solutions available to them and architects accordingly.

Yes the other poster said it for lulz and it is getting OT but you can't expect to place a misinformed post and not be corrected, that's not how the Internet works.

SHADOW2KK · September 2014

Hehe its been the same all week, and as I am sure others have already said, patch incoming next week, downloaded something last night actually, still not sure what its about.
I hyperventilated thinking it was the new patch, but its not sadly hiss lol

It will come soon enough, probably next week, when I am back at work:(

Sindala · September 2014

Srugzal wrote: »

Sindala wrote: »

Why have you cancelled another maint time? the second in a row??
It's not like the game don't need it, Euro server is suffering from horrible lag spikes and other 'no maint' related problems.

It's ok maybe to cancel the odd one but 2 in a row? the game is nowhere near ready for that sort of gap between re-starts.

Or is it that the recent lay-offs were all from the maint department......
If your gonna cancel the maint then atleast let us know why.

Seriously, calm down. Monday was a national holiday in the US, the last big 3-day weekend of the summer, Labor Day. People want to roll out the barbecue, have a beer.

Can you imagine, too, having a maintenance period smack in the middle of a such a holiday, prime game time? People would be screaming their heads off.

Your telling me that somebody is actually sat there at a computer in the USA doing the re-boot of a mega-server in Germany?.....and it's not auto-mated.....hehe, seriously nobody touches a server unless it's broke. It's all done by computers now.
Yes i can imagine having a server maint smack in the middle of prime time gaming....they did it to Europe for a few months, sometimes 3 times a week..
Oh and why should a holiday in US goven if we get a maint re-boot in Europe?

Sindala · September 2014

guybrushtb16_ESO wrote: »

Sindala wrote: »

The quickest way to tell a server needs a re-boot is to get hold of the camera and look around. If it's fluid (or as fluid as it normally is on you PC) then you can hold off on maint.
If it starts looking 'choppy' like it's missing frames then the server is struggling and if lots of people start doing that then it will overload and crash because it's working un-efficiently and thus too hard.

(I was told that little snippet by the Glorious Lord Long Starr himself back in the day and it's still true today)

Notice the lols under your post? Sorry, but Lord Long Starr probably was either being an idiot himself or mocking you back then. Things being choppy like you describe is a fps issue, which depends entirely on your machine.

Nothing the server has to do will ever affect your fps directly. Although some situations (like many people fighting in the same area simultaneously) may have both issues coinciding, they are still completely different things.

Do people not read post's anymore? just pull out keywords and make their own posts up from them?
I said that you find the norm for your own computer THEN if it suddenly starts going choppy the server is working too hard. It's called Frame skipping and ALOT of servers will do this when they are under stress to be able to cope and not explode.

Sindala · September 2014

fromtesonlineb16_ESO wrote: »

Sindala wrote: »

Every MMO will have a Maint (re-boot) once a week to keep the servers clean and efficient.

Untrue, I play an MMO which hasn't had scheduled maintenance for many years and whose servers usually run for weeks at a time, only being taken down to apply content updates: FFXI.

And LOL at a "re-boot once a week to keep the servers clean", a re-boot should achieve nothing on a well setup and working system in terms of provide smoother running, etc: not sure what your segmented comment refers to in this context.

Don't take rubbish.
Here is one page of your games 'No maint times' from the past few months....it goes back years....
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/info/list_mnt.shtml

Sindala · September 2014

Phantax wrote: »

Why all the cancelled maintenances?

Because they keep laying off all their staff and the ones left are really busy...lol

I actually think there are more 'suits' than there are staff now. It just don't add up however you look at it......about to release the game on 2 separate gaming playforms ASWELL as keep a PC version going.......yeah lets lay-off half the staff now then hire a bunch of people with no knowledge of the game systems in a month or 2......

nerevarine1138 · September 2014

Why? Because they wanted to see people complaining about the lack of maintenance. After next week, they'll do them again, and then people will complain about too many maintenance periods. I mean, it has to get boring if they don't switch it up once in a while.

Knootewoot · September 2014

Do maintanance all day tomorrow please from 06:00 to 22:00. I have to go to my in-laws all day and if i must suffer so must all others.

Elsonso · September 2014

Sindala wrote: »

Your telling me that somebody is actually sat there at a computer in the USA doing the re-boot of a mega-server in Germany?

Oh and why should a holiday in US goven if we get a maint re-boot in Europe?

Yes, it is very likely that someone in the US sits at a computer and "reboots" the megaserver in Germany. The only people in Germany are likely to be the "hands and feet" people that get to touch the hardware when it breaks, and they may not even be employees of Zenimax.

With that established, that the Zenimax server operations people are in the US, they will probably defer to the US holiday. If something goes wrong, they only have the basic server operations staff on duty. They would have to call people in if something went wrong, which would delay the maintenance. That is assuming that the server operations staff does the maintenance and not some special group of people.

Sindala wrote: »

yeah lets lay-off half the staff now then hire a bunch of people with no knowledge of the game systems in a month or 2......

Half of the staff laid off and they are hiring new staff to replace them, huh? It is pretty amazing how tales grow over time with each retelling.

Tabbycat · September 2014

I can think of two possible reasons.

1. Holiday this week in the US. Monday was Labor Day.

2. Patch coming next week. They usually don't do maintenance the week before a major patch hits.

Srugzal · September 2014

Sindala wrote: »

Your telling me that somebody is actually sat there at a computer in the USA doing the re-boot of a mega-server in Germany?.....and it's not auto-mated.....hehe, seriously nobody touches a server unless it's broke. It's all done by computers now.
Yes i can imagine having a server maint smack in the middle of prime time gaming....they did it to Europe for a few months, sometimes 3 times a week..
Oh and why should a holiday in US goven if we get a maint re-boot in Europe?

I was talking about the Labor Day cancellation, not the EU one. I have no idea why they did that, and, as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. Why don't you ask them yourself?

yiasemi · September 2014

Happy Labor Day. I may labour with an extra vowel, but as someone who does, I am glad someone explained it. See you when you get back.

Vizier · September 2014

They are probably going to wait until Saturday Morning 10AM - 4 PM EST because that would be the worst possible time to do it for the community. They still haven't learned the art of performing maintenance when most in the hemisphere are asleep...shrug.

RazielSR · September 2014

Its more or less how a mmo starts to fall. The first little "strange" things. Of course this doesnt mean it will be next month or in 4 or 5 months, but these are the first things. This and some random users defending the game in the official forum and once you go outside, the whole people is blaming. To create a false satisfaction bubble it cause to explode in a bad way. Lack of maintenance will mean for these so called fans, that the game has no issues, nor the server, so no need to do nothing. So, for the developers is even better.

jambam817_ESO · September 2014

RazielSR wrote: »

Its more or less how a mmo starts to fall. The first little "strange" things. Of course this doesnt mean it will be next month or in 4 or 5 months, but these are the first things. This and some random users defending the game in the official forum and once you go outside, the whole people is blaming. To create a false satisfaction bubble it cause to explode in a bad way. Lack of maintenance will mean for these so called fans, that the game has no issues, nor the server, so no need to do nothing. So, for the developers is even better.

Oh noes, Video Game conspiracy!

-.- seriously though. I played last night and had no problems. Game was running fine, i even jumped into Cyrodiil but zone chat scared me off, too many idiots

Sindala wrote: »

Do people not read post's anymore? just pull out keywords and make their own posts up from them?
I said that you find the norm for your own computer THEN if it suddenly starts going choppy the server is working too hard. It's called Frame skipping and ALOT of servers will do this when they are under stress to be able to cope and not explode.

I apologize, but this is still very inaccurate. Frame loss and skipping results from processing too much rendering data when the CPU is under load, like Cyrodiil in this game. The CPU still feeds the GPU information, and if the CPU is too busy doing character calculations, seeking location information, processing other movements and attacks, you will see the GPU skip to the frames it was able to get rendered from the CPU, hence Frame Skipping.

You may be referring to PACKET loss which means information sent and received by the client's computer is not reaching or leaving the server in its entirety, causing the sensation of "frame skipping" because the world loads choppy or things are rendered at the wrong time, or the server "resets" your location based on previous data received.

That Lord guy's name screams troll. I wouldn't take his advice seriously.

Stratti · September 2014

Sindala wrote: »

That would be an Update though, Maintenance is primarily the term used for 're-booting' the servers. To make sure they run correctly and don't get segmented and cause large lag issues due to the server having to search harder for each bit of information.

Every MMO will have a Maint (re-boot) once a week to keep the servers clean and efficient.
This game only having the 2 mega Servers certainly should NEVER miss a maint atleast once a week.

A quick example is a bug appears due to a corrupt node, Weekly maint picks it up on restart and overwrites it to make good again. If this damaged node is left for a while the next re-boot will leave it in as other things have changed also, so it takes it as part of the new coding and starts creating new bugs because of it.

A lamens terms would be, You see 1 ant in the corner of the room, kill it and it's gone.
Leave it for a week and suddenly there are 40000 ants in the corner of the room and it becomes a big issue.

nb, i'm not a techy so I don't know the correct terms but I understand how things work.

I'm not aTechie either but I call bull shuuut . You have no idea how it works no one here does I would wager. The server is fine everything is working ok . Relax and enjoy.

Honestly people complain about too much maintainence now it's because not enough