Bigevilpeter wrote: »

Omg do them once a month, every time you do a maintenance you break the game and just to make a few fixes. Please for love of Akatosh stop the weekly maintenance.

Have you tried to play PvP without weekly maintenance? It's awful. Even PvE takes a serous decline in performance without weekly maintenance.

Most, if not all, MMOs have a weekly maintenance period. Some even have daily ones. Welcome.

LaiTash wrote: »

Dumbdago wrote: »

Gotta call BS on that one. I've been playing in MMO's longer than some of ZM's player base has been alive (97) and I seldom EVER see patches that short. I havent played Warcrap in years, but their norm was 4 to 6 hours. Old Everquest, depending on the updates, could be longer. GW, CoH, DAoC, RIFT....the list goes on. All their patches took several hours, occasionally half a day.

Wake up, it's 2016, not 2003.

I'm awake now and reread what you quoted. So...what the hell does 2016 have to do with what he said?

What exactly is the "ongoing issue" I wonder??? Hmmm

They need to move the damn maintenance time for EU to nights.

Callous2208 wrote: »

LaiTash wrote: »

Dumbdago wrote: »

Gotta call BS on that one. I've been playing in MMO's longer than some of ZM's player base has been alive (97) and I seldom EVER see patches that short. I havent played Warcrap in years, but their norm was 4 to 6 hours. Old Everquest, depending on the updates, could be longer. GW, CoH, DAoC, RIFT....the list goes on. All their patches took several hours, occasionally half a day.

Wake up, it's 2016, not 2003.

I'm awake now and reread what you quoted. So...what the hell does 2016 have to do with what he said?

Hmm? Well there are new and better ways of doing maintenances and applying patches you know. Eve's maintenances take 15 minutes. Black desert's is ~hour on crappy russian servers. GW2... i'm not sure they have the maintenance downtime at all. The list goes on. 4+ hours of maintenance every monday? Doing this during the day? Not compensating for additional downtime? No, i don't think i've ever seen something like that except for ESO.

The problem isn't the weekly maintenance, or even the time that they do it (4am)... its the fact that EVERY time they do it even if they DONT break something its a 6-8 hour downtime with almost nothing important fixed, and more often than not it seems to end up being 10-12 hours because they DO break something while fixing nothing lol.

old_mufasa wrote: »

Bigevilpeter wrote: »

Omg do them once a month, every time you do a maintenance you break the game and just to make a few fixes. Please for love of Akatosh stop the weekly maintenance.

Wow.. can you be more ignorant

Almost all major mmo's do server maintenance weekly.. and yes server can become unstable and shut done if you do not do the maintenance... even more stable mmos then ESO do it. Maybe you should educate yourself about why and the effects of not doing it before running you mouth off...

Yeah I have played reputable MMO's... you know where they actually tell you whats going on when something happens, they give you a timeline for maint downtime, and normal weekly maint is 2 - maybe 4 hours, not 8 lol.

Bigevilpeter wrote: »

Servers won't crash if they don't do maintenaces

It was working just fine until they brought it down to "patch".

old_mufasa wrote: »

Bigevilpeter wrote: »

Omg do them once a month, every time you do a maintenance you break the game and just to make a few fixes. Please for love of Akatosh stop the weekly maintenance.

Wow.. can you be more ignorant

Almost all major mmo's do server maintenance weekly.. and yes server can become unstable and shut done if you do not do the maintenance... even more stable mmos then ESO do it. Maybe you should educate yourself about why and the effects of not doing it before running you mouth off...

Can you be more condescending. yea they do, but they don't Ef their game up so hard that their uses cant play it

Yeah I have played reputable MMO's... you know where they actually tell you whats going on when something happens

This is my biggest complaint with ESO. Communication with their customers is god awful.

Bigevilpeter wrote: »

Omg do them once a month, every time you do a maintenance you break the game and just to make a few fixes. Please for love of Akatosh stop the weekly maintenance.

OMG! No! Who remembers the Christmas of 2014 when they went over a month with out maintenance? The game was almost unplayable!!
[quote="Bigevilpeter;3473139"]Servers won't crash if they don't do maintenaces ok maybe it will after a very long time without maintenance but that's actually what happens when they do, so if its going to crash anyways then at least it will be without the patching downtime and then they can patch when they actually need to, we get double patching time now[/quote]

So, you are a computer coder? An IT tech? ME either. But! Unlike others here on forum, when I dont know what I'm talking about, I educate myself and learn about it. Do you know what "Maintenance actually entails @Bigevilpeter ?
Well here you are...(FYI..Thanks to @Cronopoly for posting this in another thread...)

*"Firewall's: Enterprise systems must use them for protected DMZ's, Demilitarized Zones as they are called which protect all network traffic within (Incoming and outgoing) as having Firewalls controlling data coming in and out by port and protocol to prevent unwarranted traffic & hackers etc... We used separate Firewall Zones for Initiall Web ingress of traffic, Credit Card zone, Database Zone, Application Zones, this way all different types of data was protected separately. So much easier to put rules around it that way, though not simple. I'll skip the talk of State tables, and NAT's getting full...

Most enterprise level Firewalls are configured in pairs with a crossover cable to make sure that if one side fails the other can take the traffic seamlessly without users knowing a failure occured. (redundancy is huge)

Firewalls maintenance windows for vendor updates (security etc) are required unless you want to be hacked sooner than later. this can sometimes take the Firewall team hours as they do one Firewall Pair at a time. Firewalls are most finicky when updating and sometimes require rebooting several times to become stable. And being that a leading vendor is in Israel (Checkpoint) makes this a pain if you have to contact them with timezones involved.

Application Servers / HTTP Servers Many applications can use app servers to host the users session, that in the case of an MMO might hold the states of a users session with the mirrored variables of the users location, stats, all actions etc.

App servers along with getting required security and O'/S patches which can take hours to apply, (shutdown, patching, startup), can be just that servers that get "Dirty" over time especially with the use of code that leverages JVM's (Java) that can get corrupted over time and have frequent memory problems. spelled pain in the butt. Required weekly reboots are common to prevent alot of problems. With an MMO there are many many servers to reboot and double check that they come back up clean, as users are pretty unforgiving if after maintenance something is not fully working...

Network Typically the most stable part of an enterprise once setup correctly, however with more and more exploits targeting Internet facing Routers with new vulnerabilities that you guessed it have to be Security/firmware patched.

ACE/VPN concentrators: Commonly used to provide a secure tunnel of connected users from the Internet to datacenter backend systems. These must always get patched like everything else and care taken to deprecate old protocols that over time always have vulnerabilities pop up. TLS etc...

One network component that does have a higher failure rate (and time fixing them) are Load Balancers / Content Switches. These can take more maintenance as they are typically setup to take a network request targeting a single IP address and rout traffic round robin etc to multiple backend servers. The pain this causes during longer maintenance window due to Network team members not being thorough or overworked cannot be understated. I always cringed when I saw a change control for a CSS (content switch).


Database servers I'll state this simply as I've gone down the wabbit hole too far already considering this is a gaming forum and not "Unpaid consulting hour" Obviously all your data in several databases in an MMO have millions of transactions of reads and writes. Databases need maintenance in order to optimize paths to the disk to shorten read and write times. Database Administrators can run Stats, Reorgs, create new Indexes or refresh index to keep your data access optimal.
Simply put on large databases this can take HOURS. Nothing is free here and it's typically not optional unless you want your system response time to slow to a crawl, and in an MMO that would kill your application for all users...

You have the same level of complexity with other related systems:

Storage Farms: Servers are typically connected to their remote NAS or SAN hard drives (EMC etc) which require periodic maintenance as well.

Backup and Recovery Servers need to be backed up just in case of catastopophic failure which does occur. Many backups need to take place when users are not on the system. This can sometimes take hour(s) depending on how much local storage of the O/S+ Application and Data are on the server. I can see this occuring 1st during a maintenance window.

TL:DR - Running an MMO requires mandatory maintenance to keep everything running and "secure". No free lunch.

The assumption by the people that are defending total outage of a system for maintenance is grounded in the notion that programming will not allow updates to happen when the game is live.

This is false.

Instead, a MICROSERVICE approach allows complex systems to generally remain running because instead of having to deploy a large, monolithic code base, deployments can occur whilst the system is running because smaller components can be turned on or swapped out without having to take down the entire infrastructure.

Like other major online systems (e.g. Netflix), Zenimax needs to move towards a Microservices model so we can make these stupid server downtime experiences a thing of the past.

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

Bigevilpeter wrote: »

Omg do them once a month, every time you do a maintenance you break the game and just to make a few fixes. Please for love of Akatosh stop the weekly maintenance.

OMG! No! Who remembers the Christmas of 2014 when they went over a month with out maintenance? The game was almost unplayable!!
[quote="Bigevilpeter;3473139"]Servers won't crash if they don't do maintenaces ok maybe it will after a very long time without maintenance but that's actually what happens when they do, so if its going to crash anyways then at least it will be without the patching downtime and then they can patch when they actually need to, we get double patching time now

So, you are a computer coder? An IT tech? ME either. But! Unlike others here on forum, when I dont know what I'm talking about, I educate myself and learn about it. Do you know what "Maintenance actually entails @Bigevilpeter ?
Well here you are...(FYI..Thanks to @Cronopoly for posting this in another thread...)

*"Firewall's: Enterprise systems must use them for protected DMZ's, Demilitarized Zones as they are called which protect all network traffic within (Incoming and outgoing) as having Firewalls controlling data coming in and out by port and protocol to prevent unwarranted traffic & hackers etc... We used separate Firewall Zones for Initiall Web ingress of traffic, Credit Card zone, Database Zone, Application Zones, this way all different types of data was protected separately. So much easier to put rules around it that way, though not simple. I'll skip the talk of State tables, and NAT's getting full...

Most enterprise level Firewalls are configured in pairs with a crossover cable to make sure that if one side fails the other can take the traffic seamlessly without users knowing a failure occured. (redundancy is huge)

Firewalls maintenance windows for vendor updates (security etc) are required unless you want to be hacked sooner than later. this can sometimes take the Firewall team hours as they do one Firewall Pair at a time. Firewalls are most finicky when updating and sometimes require rebooting several times to become stable. And being that a leading vendor is in Israel (Checkpoint) makes this a pain if you have to contact them with timezones involved.

Application Servers / HTTP Servers Many applications can use app servers to host the users session, that in the case of an MMO might hold the states of a users session with the mirrored variables of the users location, stats, all actions etc.

App servers along with getting required security and O'/S patches which can take hours to apply, (shutdown, patching, startup), can be just that servers that get "Dirty" over time especially with the use of code that leverages JVM's (Java) that can get corrupted over time and have frequent memory problems. spelled pain in the butt. Required weekly reboots are common to prevent alot of problems. With an MMO there are many many servers to reboot and double check that they come back up clean, as users are pretty unforgiving if after maintenance something is not fully working...

Network Typically the most stable part of an enterprise once setup correctly, however with more and more exploits targeting Internet facing Routers with new vulnerabilities that you guessed it have to be Security/firmware patched.

ACE/VPN concentrators: Commonly used to provide a secure tunnel of connected users from the Internet to datacenter backend systems. These must always get patched like everything else and care taken to deprecate old protocols that over time always have vulnerabilities pop up. TLS etc...

One network component that does have a higher failure rate (and time fixing them) are Load Balancers / Content Switches. These can take more maintenance as they are typically setup to take a network request targeting a single IP address and rout traffic round robin etc to multiple backend servers. The pain this causes during longer maintenance window due to Network team members not being thorough or overworked cannot be understated. I always cringed when I saw a change control for a CSS (content switch).


Database servers I'll state this simply as I've gone down the wabbit hole too far already considering this is a gaming forum and not "Unpaid consulting hour" Obviously all your data in several databases in an MMO have millions of transactions of reads and writes. Databases need maintenance in order to optimize paths to the disk to shorten read and write times. Database Administrators can run Stats, Reorgs, create new Indexes or refresh index to keep your data access optimal.
Simply put on large databases this can take HOURS. Nothing is free here and it's typically not optional unless you want your system response time to slow to a crawl, and in an MMO that would kill your application for all users...

You have the same level of complexity with other related systems:

Storage Farms: Servers are typically connected to their remote NAS or SAN hard drives (EMC etc) which require periodic maintenance as well.

Backup and Recovery Servers need to be backed up just in case of catastopophic failure which does occur. Many backups need to take place when users are not on the system. This can sometimes take hour(s) depending on how much local storage of the O/S+ Application and Data are on the server. I can see this occuring 1st during a maintenance window.

TL:DR - Running an MMO requires mandatory maintenance to keep everything running and "secure". No free lunch.
[/quote]

Well that was interesting, but it doesn't excuse the long downtimes and the downtimes because of the downtimes