Is this acceptable?

[JackFree]

Originally Posted by Cani Ostro

Anybody that knows a bit about nowadays server maintenance will ask the same.

Isn't this ridiculous for a multi-million-dollar company having a 500.000+ customerbase?

To me it is.

They claim multi-million-turnovers, sell licences for BS for 400.000+ USD, but they don't have some EUROs (if thats what Swedish people get paid) to have someone look after the servers?

And its not the case nowadays that you have to sit next to them anymore.

(insert the f word *1k times here)

So, what do you think. Plain and simple, is such behaviour regarding maintenance acceptable or not?

Server maintenance is a normal process that every IT company goes through once in a while. The larger the infrastructure, the more work it is to keep everything up and running smoothly. Ask any server admin if their systems are running 100% 24/7 with never a hiccup, if any one of them tries to tell you that, they are lying.

It is the nature of IT systems wether large server farms of your home pc, once in a while something will go wrong no matter how much you maintain it and how many people are watching over it.

Pretending otherwise is not very realistic.

Cheers

[McCormick]

@Cani Ostro

Each online world has maintenance. Too bad you didnt know about that, else you would not have posted this.

If you wont accept that...play offline ;p

Also choosing an abstract thread title like "Is this acceptable?" always speaks for itself...

[Pol]

Yes its acceptable. Every organisation has server down time for maintenance and once a week isn't unreasonable.

The only problem I have is that they say an hour when they know its more likely to be 2-3 hours.

If they kept us informed I think the speculation would reduce dramatically. As for the bitching, well u can't please everyone all of the time lol

[Jimmy B]

Well I popped out to the Pub when the servers went down so I don't know how long it was off for but:

Yes, obviously scheduled maintenance is fine and has to occur. But what happened today presumably wasn't scheduled maintenance, more a hiccup of some sort. But that's also to be expected. Things go wrong, it happens and will always happen. It happens on any other gaming site too. I remember once being furious because a poker site went down in the midst of a game. It was a 400 person, 4 hour long job and the site went down when we got to the final table. Stacks were relatively level, but I was in 10th out of ten remaining when it crashed and the positions were paid as they stood. And well, the difference between a definate 10th and a potential 1st was a four-figure £ sum.

Didn't like it too much, but it happens. At the end of the day when EU occasionally goes down, no-one loses a huge amount of cash (with possibly the exception of expiring auctions....simple way round that - put in a start-bid you'd be happy for it to sell for).

[Ayla Anisan]

One thing we are sure about computers is that they WILL crash, the one thing we dont know is WHEN

No problem for me that is, these things happen. Would be nice of MA to post on their website under support news section that there is a "problem. Maybe with a ETA if thats possible. So everyone is informed. But then again. No big deal for me.

[neomaven]

The EU downtime could have also been caused by something out of MindArk's control, such as a major internet outage to the hosting provider, a DOS attack, etc.

I find it unfair to start pointing fingers and bashing MA until more information is available.

Regardless of any PEDs you lost from mobs that didn't loot, wasted ammo or other odd behavior caused during this outage (or the simple inconvenience of being unable to enjoy EU on a Sunday afternoon), I can assure you that it cost MA much, much more in terms of lost revenue from decay.

I can imagine that they are also quite unhappy with this unexpected outage, and I suspect they will take steps to avoid such problems in the future.

[Midori Fairlona]

Is the server maintenace acceptable from a modern point of view? i.e. YEAR2007, not 1k years BC.

That last part really amuses me. What would be the equivalent level of disaster to the recent server outage when taken in the context of 1000 BC?

• Agamemnon finding that the thousand ships he is taking to Troy have all sprung a leak?
• David staring up at Goliath with a broken sling in his hand?
• Or perhaps the stone tablet holding the first Phoenician alphabet shattering because someone was using the wrong tools for the carving?

[Mandragon]

Scheduled maintanance is to be expected, and unscheduled maintanence, frustrating though it is, should also be expected. No matter how well maintained all systems will eventually break down, it's one of those unfortunate facts of life!
I personally think MA do a pretty good job when it comes to server maintanance, I could be wrong of course! But I think the frequently required re-logs and lag are more frustrating! No doubt these are also unavoidable
However whining about it will not fix anything, if you find it unacceptable I suggest you stop playing, as it will be a feature of online gaming for the forseeable future!
So in answer to your question, is it acceptable....Yes it is! :P

[Rayne Jade]

Originally Posted by Etopia

I would think other way ... seems suedish spend at least half of their working time to post on game forum....

Too funny!!

Originally Posted by aridash

thats fair comment, somtimes you just cant fix the problem straight away even at 11am on a weekday with evryone in the office. but they should take the servers completly offline and post a servers down message on the CL. people react negativly to a vacuum of knowledge.

I think this is the issue... not knowing was the worst part of it really. I had expiring auction items like many others and I lost potential loot from trox I was hunting, but to just up and die without anything said was frustrating. Like sitting in a plane wondering "Are we gonna take off today or what?" without any message from the pilot.

[Dich]

A huge LOL at Cani Ostro.

its clear that it has no idea what running a large content provider service online means...

i would really love to see Cani Ostro create a huge distributed system like MA's, which has akamai-style server farms all over the bloody globe (thay have that, right? heh), handles literally millions of requests per second, has god-knows-what-total-bandwidth and redundancy, and *NEVER* needs to be maintained. Oh, and it also has to have backups and transaction logs and have a HUUUUUGE database backend, which must handle throughoutput that makes me dizzy... prolly more then 1 Gbps....

and then consider sync issues between clients and individual servers, database corruption, securing the systems against tampering by employees, and all kinds of weird crap you probably never heard of...

ITS NOT POSSIBLE to have all that and expect the system to always be online, not at the cost the client is provided at *wink*