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Morning Outage, 5/11
trailturtle
Posts: 5,496 Perfect World Employee
We had a mass-disconnect earlier today that led to a number of players not able to log in for a while. We've identified the issue, and while the symptoms are similar to the recent outages, it, quote, "was not clearly related to any other recent event."
I don't have a lot of information right now, but I do know that the team is confident enough that they're counting the servers as fully open. The engineers have taken some steps to make it easier and faster to fix issues like this if they recur.
I know that this is impacting your CO experience, and I'm sorry for that. I want to thank you all for your patience as we work these issues out.
-TrailTurtle
I don't have a lot of information right now, but I do know that the team is confident enough that they're counting the servers as fully open. The engineers have taken some steps to make it easier and faster to fix issues like this if they recur.
I know that this is impacting your CO experience, and I'm sorry for that. I want to thank you all for your patience as we work these issues out.
-TrailTurtle
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Better yet: Have an actual "We're Sorry" Z-Store sale. That'd be a sign of goodwill toward Silver players who still like to spend money, too.
Please switch Neverwinter and other games to separate servers. I seem to be alright until America wakes up and then bam, server overload
I was actually wondering about that. I'm paying a subscription fee to play the game, but I'm not getting to play the game with all the outages and downtime. I'd like to continue paying my subscription to play as a gold member, but if I'm not able to play... you know?
I still cannot get past the loader.
This serious degradation of service is disheartening as I haven't it this bad in the 3 years or so I have been playing CO.
Not to say that you guys have to be 100% up-time but each time I am kicked out means I am just going to eventually stop playing and go to another game that has their infrastructure in order.
I keep coming back because of the game play and customization.
These kind of events make it very hard to rationalize to keep coming back afterwards.
Just my two cents.
Edit: For the record the other game I would have played was NWN... but now I have to find a completely different company to give my time. I like cryptic work and I want to keep supporting it.
Also, guys, really, threatening, even obliquely, to yank your accounts? That's not gonna make anyone feel terribly sympathetic to your position. I'm pretty sure they already KNOW you're not happy, and are working to make it right.
And Gradii, I am fairly certain they did deliberately break the hardware so you would have more trouble fixing things with your friend, because, as we all know, game operators are not only evil and vicious people, but they're omniscient and malevolent and can read your mind so they can personally inconvenience you. But I might be wrong.
I appreciate that your new product is in open beta. So I don't complain about its features not being perfect or the bugs I've been impacted by, at all.
But I have.. (check your ledgers) given you a minimum of 65 US dollars a month for CO since September 2012. Maybe nothing for some- but it's more than my internet, phone and satellite combined. But I pretty much live on here.
[Before some slag hollers (as they always do) 'get a real life-' I'm ancient. I've lived my life. My grand kids may be older than you.]
So when your open beta goes down, I'd like to be able to default to my favorite game ever, CO.
That's not happening, as you surely know. Please fix it. I won't be able to play any of my 25 characters if I have to cancel my subscription. That would suck.
Thanks guys, for making great games. Please look at changing your systems to support the popularity they enjoy.
(No players need respond to this, really. It's posted on the off chance that someone from Cryptic might actually read it. Waste your time posting a jerko-response if you must. I promise, you won't be wasting mine.)
-Sprawl
Oh man, I'm so glad you were here to fix everything with your tech-savvy advice.
Anyway, people are wondering if they're going to receive any compensation for the the inconvenience of these recent issues because they are paying money to play. That's not unreasonable and trying to call them out on it is just silly so let's try to move on to more constructive responses. If you'd like to discuss the point further, I'm sure we can get in contact so as to not clutter up this thread.
Also, hopefully this gets fixed soon. -.-
Glad to see I'm not the only person playing CO with scads of toons who is over 40... :biggrin:
And yes, I have a life too
BTW...does anybody know? STO and NW and CO all on ONE server?!?!? really? What is it, a Packard Bell?
Also, guys, really, threatening, even obliquely, to yank your accounts? That's not gonna make anyone feel terribly sympathetic to your position. I'm pretty sure they already KNOW you're not happy, and are working to make it right. <snip>
[/QUOTE]
Replying to the sentiment, not the person, no disrespect is intended:
Not threatening anything. It's a simple fact. I do not pay for services not (or inadequately) rendered. They may in fact be working to make it right- it's hard to imagine that they aren't. How troublesome is it to explain that in some meaningful way?
Can't speak for anyone but myself, but that's all I'm looking for. I need a fix, or a reasonable expectation of a fix and a time frame within to expect same. It is certainly not asking too much.
Because the posts on the forums of the games I use are all pretty vague.
Of course they can't read minds. That would require Telepathy... :P
Problem is, can Cryptic afford 3 servers?
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Logic would dictate for a corporation not to host what they can't afford.
That said, TrailTurtle. Come on, get out here. Give us some updates. Because this is bulls#$t to happen on a weekend and after the alleged 'fixes', compensation for customers -really- does seem in order.
There you go.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
Now this post here is full of win. Its the kind of post I'd like to see a common place setting on the forums here.
But we all know why that can't happen.
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Huzzah
#TelepathyNOW
The inconvenience of the constant outages and server asplosions rather than the actual down-time is the key issue here. That's what deserves compensation. It could easily be awarded to just gold subscribers and LTS members, however it's unlikely that this will happen.
For those at Cryptic and PWE who will doubtlessly understand this; Huogu ziji zai youxi zhong de ren.
Seriously.
Ni zhengzai shanghai ni de xingxiang he chengxin.
This fix your engineers referred to. I do not theenk eet feexes what zay theenk eet feexes..
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Perfect World decide to add a runway, train track, cycle lane and football field onto the highway.... Boom!
Err outages, shutdowns but its not our fault state Perfect World...the Highway was there before we came along and should still manage just as well with all the extra traffic.
Innocent commuter cannot join the highway and sits patiently hoping one day and extra lane will be added.
The mayor promises to look into the problem but cannot fix it as all the funds have gone on shiny new signs for the runway, train track, and cycle lane leaving the highway to fall into a state of disrepair.
Eventually all the towns folk move towns due to the fact the cant even travel when they want to.
Section 1(1) of 1965 report - How to keep a customer happy
Personally, as a relatively new player and subscriber of 2 months (so far), I'd settle for some kind of official acknowledgement of ongoing problems, and of course a stable game server going forward. Too optimistic?
BTW the only 'tech savvy' part of my comment was to provide a note to the Cryptic guys that I couldn't reach a related service, and that had nothing to do with my subsequent subtle scold to people who think that companies respond to people threatening to pull their subscriptions to a game that's got a free-to-play model. Then again I should remember that scolding people for bad manners is in itself bad manners, so I shouldn't be surprised. And I do agree that Cryptic would be well advised to provide some sort of apology compensation to those of us who are being inconvenienced on ALL the servers, because the actual loss is to time and to their customers' good-will, which has been shrinking visibly.
I'm sure, though, that they're aware of the '10 to 1' rule about complaints, and the '8 to 1' rule on praise, where for every complaint there are at least ten who have the same but didn't say it, and a dozen who will hear about it from each of them, and for every praise, there will be at most eight people who will hear it from them. This is well understood in marketing, and I'm pretty sure that most of the folks at the marketing side of this business have their degrees, which would ensure that they know those rules.
I'm also pretty sure that they haven't been following the 'delight your customers' approach very well, but that's not necessarily something we can take out on Trail, who is apparently the spokesperson who reads what we say.
There are several of us who are older than dirt playing the game, d0csteel and sprawlfx (who may even be older than me, since I'm still doing the job thing and will be until forever thanks to the Great Recession eating my savings).
gradii and thatothernemo... yeah, the 'sarcasm' tag has never worked on the nets, or that part of my reply would've been seen as 'a response in kind' to the wry humor... and yes, the telepathy power-set is still rather broken, but I think they'd have to use the version that's on internal test, because it's all unbalanced, and evil game providers are all about using the secret, unbalanced versions to torment players. (Note, this would constitute another response in kind.)
And now to speculate on a telepathy power that WASN'T broken: unfortunately it would do things like making your mouse tracking wobbly, and changing the appearance of your enemies so you couldn't target them, and cause you to hurt yourself with your attacks, and shuffle around your power icons so that you would accidentally hit the wrong ones.
But that would be overpowered, too.
Probably not. They spent all of CO's gamble box money on NWO! :P
/sigh
I think a break from this game is in order. Time to let my account lapse for a little bit and go play some other game that isn't bogged down on server with 2 other games.
Same here in Maryland in the U.S. Soon as it should be getting my character list, it can't connect to log-in server.
...
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
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Oh, but look, the Neverwinter servers were brought back up 3 minutes ago. I guess STO is next and then, if there is time, our servers here at CO. :mad:
It all makes perfect sense now.
@Maekada in-game
Formerly MaekadaFolay on the forums.
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Folks, my suspicion is that CO runs as a collection of virtual servers on a bank of servers, and that it expands and contracts within boundaries preset by their contract with the company that provides them the hardware platform, or (if they own the servers themselves) within the boundaries set by their market predictions. These would be 'instance servers'. The number of physical machines in such a setup can be varied by the demands of the programs being run. In this case, I would guess that CO runs on a 12 blade rack, using 3-4 processor blades, and with the 3-4 processors being no more than quad cores. STO would be similar, as would NW, though NW might be up to 26 blades if it's still hugely gravid with beta.
The interfaces to the instance servers would go through an account server, and there may or may not be more than one virtual account server running at a time, but again it's most likely a virtual server because that provides superior control over the user account data.
The login server or servers would be fronted by a web server, and based on the behavior of CO, this is managed as a session under that web server, and authentication is handled by an exchange between an https connection from your PC client, which is actually a tiny web browser or even an add-in, and the login operation of the login server. Since there's a single port that forwards to a finite set of other ports, and this is managing resources, it may end up queuing, as it did on SWTOR in their beta. In any case, once it's happy that you are you, the secure socket is handed off from the web service to a connection service, and that connection service handles keeping your client and the game talking, and hands off between instance servers. And the instance servers send you the context info your PC uses to draw what you see and play what you hear. All that is resident on your PC.
The chat servers are a separate service instance, which means they have their own pipe.
The amount of data that has to be sent back and forth is fairly small. CO seems to have added a second pipe that carries update info while you are running, a nifty idea.
Meanwhile, although the data exchanged is small, it increases linearly with the number of people in an instance, and it has to be packed and sent to everyone in the instance.
This is why only 100 people fit in an instance on CO.
The problems we're seeing with NW and STO impacting CO are PROBABLY due to issues with the data transmission part of the servers - and that's handled by network cards which have a truly astonishing capacity for handling and routing data. Nevertheless, since the physical servers may be in the same chassis or local net, and since the problems that take down one seem to take them all, it's not going to be something that they CAN give us an ETA on, until it's so close to fixed that it may well already BE fixed before Trail finds out about it. The hardware failure we had before was one that they could give a time-frame for because of that - this may or may not be similar.
So they can't give an ETA while still diagnosing the cause.
Yes, there are ways to keep this from happening, but they're really expensive and hard to justify; we don't want to pay them the money to keep a fully three-way redundant hardware-voting system operating for a game.
You do realize that statistics aren't actually relevant here, right?
There is, apparently, at least two different issues causing massive downtimes during peak hours (times when both European and American players would be on in substantial numbers). Frequent peak hour downtimes are not offset by statistical uptimes, effective downtimes for the majority players (who can only play when they're not at work/school/whatever) skyrocket if server downtimes are always during peak hours.
That's bad, and should warrant some form of goodwill gesture. If it does not, it speaks volumes about the company.
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I find it interesting the three or so days I decide not to log into CO as Mentella(or any of my chars)..everything goes to hell...lol
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