FLuFFyxMuFFiN wrote: »

Geez with this amount of whining over a few hours of downtime you would think people have nothing else to do with their lives. Yes you paid for the game but you also agreed to the ToS which clearly states that ZOS has the right to take the servers offline whenever they want with or without notifying you. Also I might add that even though you paid for the game you still don't own the account or anything attached to the account. So how about instead of whining and acting all entitled why don't some of you people go experience the outside world for once or maybe go play another game for a couple hours.

Look how cool this guy is. Dude seriously because of this statement you are better than all of us. I can only hope to achieve your edge and wit someday. But until that day I'm going to sit here and be a regular person who is irritated with server downtime.

HatchetHaro wrote: »

I have updated my post with images that should make the scenarios much easier to process. Hopefully it'll be clearer to you guys.

Current system:

My proposed system:

Perfect!

This is exactly how every company I've worked for in the past 25 years that has a large server-side infrastructure has worked, because it's the sensible way to do it. One, customers can still keep doing what they're doing, and two, if you accidentally pour bleach into the second tank instead of water you can scrub it out and start again and nobody will ever know you screwed up.

The comments defending ZoS are so cringey. I'm not even bothered by the downtime, my expectations for ESO are rock bottom -- I'm excited every time my character isn't stuck in Grahtwood. But to blindly defend them on the platform of "QuITuTUT UrRRrRRR BITtCHCHnNInNNN" is pathetic.

There's probably a logical reason as to why the servers are down for such substantial amounts of time, and why it happens so frequently. It's likely to be an issue of money -- there are IT guys here who could probably point to more specific reasons, but money has to be at the very top.

I was going to call you a whining female dog but the fish illustration of the problem got me laughing so hard I just gave an awesome!

SnubbS wrote: »

The comments defending ZoS are so cringey. I'm not even bothered by the downtime, my expectations for ESO are rock bottom -- I'm excited every time my character isn't stuck in Grahtwood. But to blindly defend them on the platform of "QuITuTUT UrRRrRRR BITtCHCHnNInNNN" is pathetic.

There's probably a logical reason as to why the servers are down for such substantial amounts of time, and why it happens so frequently. It's likely to be an issue of money -- there are IT guys here who could probably point to more specific reasons, but money has to be at the very top.

I can only guess, but I have worked in Operations for a extremely large company doing updates on critical systems that NEED 24 hour a day up time. It wasn't an MMO but some of the concepts are the same.

I can tell you that even in this situation, there were times we needed to take the servers offline for updates. But we did it only twice a year, in the middle of the night, and we limited the downtime to no more than 60 minutes(but those were a tense 60 minutes for us). The vast majority of patches were done with the servers still up so there was no downtime.

Either way, my guess is that they know that people have grown to expect downtime and it's cheaper not to pay people overtime to stay up all night to do a patch. But it's likely that importing the database is the most important reason.

Most patches likely make changes to the database structure. So, all the information on all of the Guilds, PvP stats, and character records are all stored in a database. Any changes to the database structure tends to require an import process and with a database the size of the one required for a game like this probably takes hours to import. It also makes 2 versions of the game completely incompatible. So, if you try to run 2 copies of the game simultaneously (one with the old version and one with the new version) then the old version would stop working immediately as soon as you changed the database structure since it wouldn't be able to read or write to the database(and likely would cause a bunch of corruption and possible data loss). You could make a copy of the database, do the import and set up a second server while the first one was still running but then all of the changes made since you copied the database wouldn't be reflected on the new server. Which means that everything everyone did for the last 2 or 3 hours would be erased when they switched to the new server.

That's not a very good user experience. You might as well take down the servers rather than keep them up and then have everyone complain that everything they did for a couple of hours went away. It's technically possible to code something that could figure out all of the changes to the database in the last couple of hours and then apply the same changes to the new database. But you'd likely need to re-code the tool each time a patch happened. That adds extra work each time there's a patch. And there's a real risk that if the tool fails then you corrupt your database and you need to restore from backups, meaning you add another couple of hours to the time required to patch. Also, those changes take time to put into the new database as well, so anyone who has been playing while the patch process happened would likely need to wait at least some time for the last couple of hours to be imported into the new server. But they couldn't keep playing because it would mean more changes that need to be imported. So, there HAS to be some downtime for at least some people. If you have fast enough servers (which, or course, cost more money), you can make the import process quicker...but it really depends on the size of your database. It's likely that the Everquest database was a lot smaller and less complicated than the ESO one, for instance.

For smaller patches with no database changes, you probably could do this a lot easier. Make two copies of the servers and have them both access the same database. Then you can just shut one down and everyone can keep playing on the new one. But most changes of any significance likely require database changes.

Typhoios wrote: »

For some reason MMO players have come to accept server downtime and random outages. People would be pissed if Netflix, Facebook, Google etc... went down for hours at a time, but an MMO? Apparently it is just accepted. If you mention it, you get yelled at for whining. For some reason people are against promoting and trying to implement better systems. There is nothing wrong with trying to do things better and keep the servers up as much as possible.

It's called cultural adaptation. The same thing happened with ads on websites and mobile apps, people used to hate it and complain constantly, now it's just accepted. Same thing with microtransactions in games and mobile apps, same thing with paid dlc for minimal content in games, same thing with data mining for personal information. It happens across just about everything, something absurd is introduced, people whine and complain about it, a couple years later it's the norm and is accepted by the vast majority.

As for the OP, I get what you're saying. I believe Guild Wars did the same thing, you could keep playing all day on an old version of the game once a new version was pushed out, all you had to do was relog because the patch updated in the background. But, VERY few games have done this. It's the norm to have downtime to apply patches and maintenance. Some game engines and server setups probably just can't support it, at least not without a total overhaul of core systems, which would lead to more downtime and cause people to complain more.