parmenion

12hrs downtime. Most companies that rely on keeping their service running in order to make their money, whether it's a TV channel, amazon.com an online store for a supermarket or whatever, would never go offline for 12hours. Most companies have solutions in place to simply ensure 12hours downtime never happens, there are plenty of very large databases with front-ends that never go offline for any reason so it's perfectly possible.

I wonder if having our money already via subscriptions allows SoE to be quite lazy about what level of uptime they provide, because they already have our money and by and large they know we'll swallow downtime with just some grumbling.

Might the increase in revenue streams from micropurchasing actually be sometimes in the consumers favour, i.e. if SoE are actually losing significant money by blacking out for 12 hours, maybe they would invest in solutions to move the servers 1 by 1 to backup hardware, work on the database then reincorporate the small volume of new changes from the live backup making the process transparent to the users who wouldn't experience downtime, or at least a very short downtime and not of every server at once.

Ajjantis

While 12 hours are fucking long, it might be worth it. If they seriously fix those server lags for example, i wouldnt mind a whole day downtime to either maintain the database or change the hardware. Im curious to see if this maintain actually improved anything or was worth shit.

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Originally Posted by Laume
I understood that LFG had admitted that he was formerly an addict, which isn't something anyone should be insulted for.

Oakmiser

Totally agree with this. I bet it's database changes to make race changing possible though.

Argyuile

Whenever you run a system with lots of live data the bottom line is sometimes when you need to make changes to it, you can't have people changing the data in it every second.

The only difference between this and most companies is that most companies do it in the middle of the night and it doesn't take 12 hours.

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alvarez

i think anybody flailing around about the omg 12hr downtime needs to get a fucking grip. while its vaguely annoying to me too, they didnt give you a fucking sla for your 15 bucks a month you pay to play a video game.

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Aerofae

It's suppose to be all SOE services downtime so i doubt a minor gameplay from one of their game will shut down the whole system.

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aniathor

Ne one know if any changes are going live today, or is this just in preparation for gu53?

Pink Poodle

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Diknak

I don't think it has anything to do with racial respecs. If that were the case, it would just be hitting EQ2, but it is hitting all games, the station store, forums, etc.

What is your solution? Create a business model that is pay depending on how long you play? I don't see that as a very popular option and I can ensure you that I would be canceling if they ever went that route. Your short sighted mind doesn't really comprehend what that would mean. Higher place holder spawn %, lower quest rate update %, removal of instant travel, etc. Pay by the minute = a shit load of time sinks.

parmenion

The costs per hour for modem dialup when I first started playing UO is not something I'd want to see a return to, I actually think the price of EQ2 & other MMO's is really good value for money for the amount of leisure time it offers versus cost, think about how much a movie costs, or how little time most single player games last for etc.

I was just musing that companies that rely on uptime for their revenue stream find good solutions to have really good uptime, take google for example, they have massive amounts of data constantly changing, Email alone must represent huge volumes, yet they have good uptime ratios. SoE's attitude has always seemed a bit more "you can play when we're goddam ready and thank us for bringing your servers up at all" and that's even by the standards of MMO's in general. EVE for example has 1 single cluster of servers that everyone is on, and yet that single massive database only requires typically 30-40mins of downtime of their scheduled 1hrtimes.

I think it's a shame that better uptime isn't a higher priority for SoE, but I'm not sure I'd prefer them to cut any content for it though. I do wonder if the micropurchase model that is evolving into MMO's will naturally lead to higher uptimes, and higher expectations of uptime from customers.