Major Network Outage ~ October 13th (COMPLETED!)

sylenthunder
sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
edited October 2015 in General Discussion
I got this email today, and you probably have as well. Just in case you didn't, here's what it says.
This email is to notify you that all of our PC games and the Arc platform will be offline for an extended period of time on October 13th, 2015 in order to implement critical network improvements. We estimate that the downtime will be between 6AM PDT to 7PM PDT.

For updates during the downtime, please visit our social pages at:
https://twitter.com/PlayArcGames
or https://www.facebook.com/ArcGames

We appreciate your understanding.

Best Regards, Perfect World Entertainment

Also note, even though Arc will be down, you may very likely still be able to visit the Vanilla forums directly though http://forum.arcgames.com/pwi/

UPDATE!

They've made an Official News Post on it now.
On October 13, our teams will be performing an extended maintenance to make networking improvements on our servers. This maintenance will affect our Arc platform as well as all pages on our arcgames.com domain and games hosted from our servers that are launched from Arc and other platforms. The following games and services will be inaccessible during maintenance:
  • Arc Games forums
  • Arc Games main website, product pages and news pages
  • Arc Games platform including billing and messaging
  • Arc Games support websites
  • Battle of the Immortals
  • Blacklight Retribution (launched from Arc Games)
  • Champions Online
  • Forsaken World
  • Fortuna
  • Jade Dynasty
  • Neverwinter (PC & Xbox One)
  • PWI
  • Star Trek Online
  • Swordsman
  • War of the Immortals
  • Additional games launched from Arc Games

We anticipate this maintenance to run from October 13 starting at 6:00 am PT and running to 6:00 pm PT. We will be providing updates via our Arc Twitter page and Facebook page as well as social channels for each of our titles.

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve our platform.

Arc Team
​​
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Support Email: customerservice@perfectworld.com
​​
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Post edited by sylenthunder on
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Comments

  • barber
    barber Posts: 86 Arc User
    edited October 2015
    being as the 13th is my birthday I can go out and get drunk and party with the wild women and not miss a thing B)

    edit: dont expect much on the 14th either o:)
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  • ayejay101
    ayejay101 Posts: 238 Arc User
    I kinda hope that while they're performing their network updates, we hopefully get a content update to go along with it? :D​​
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  • iamluckingfoco
    iamluckingfoco Posts: 158 Arc User
    It will be a good day for people to see the outside world. Then again I'm sure the forum will be filled with a lot of complaints from people with the lack of reading skills.
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  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    Updated thread with the Official news post that has more detailed information.​​
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  • heerohex#3018
    heerohex#3018 Posts: 4,885 Community Moderator
    Last time we could play pwi still.

    It says accessed from arc as well so possible the bypass may work.
  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    Last time it was just the websites, and specific connections to STO and BOI. (Internal load balancing) From what I understand, this is occurring with the interface to their ISP, so pretty much anything hosted at PWE's sites will be completely inaccessible.

    Still, I guess we'll see. samurai-25.gif​​
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  • heerohex#3018
    heerohex#3018 Posts: 4,885 Community Moderator
    Hum I'm just working on info they usually give and whats happened in the past.

    Well yer who knows.
  • zoner112012
    zoner112012 Posts: 943 Arc User
    Wow this could actually be something good for once. XD
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  • aeternusdoleo
    aeternusdoleo Posts: 180 Arc User
    If it's their local connections to the Net, it shouldn't affect the Euro server(s). Wouldn't surprise me if Dawnglory stayed up and running...
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  • eirghan
    eirghan Posts: 1,912 Arc User
    edited October 2015
    @sylenthunder do you have any idea what kind of update this will be and how we will benefit? Will this assist those that claim server lag after the merge?null
  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    eirghan wrote: »
    @sylenthunder do you have any idea what kind of update this will be and how we will benefit? Will this assist those that claim server lag after the merge?null
    The information I have is little more than they've given, but my take on it is this...

    The major network update is most likely an upgrade of the core backbone equipment to allow handling a larger data load, and to improve load balancing. It should benefit those that occasionally DC from the larger events like NW, but overall we won't see a lot of change inside the game. Where we're going to see the most difference is in the response times with Arc and the websites. (Oh, and STO, they always seem to have some network bottleneck there)

    Those that are claiming lag after the merge either got shipped off to Europe, and the extra lag is from the distance; or a bad node between them and the server. The majority of them haven't provided anything to hunt down the issue, and I suspect it's something similar. Hell, I'm in Michigan and my ping to Morai averages about 150, and in-game is under 300. Plenty good enough so that I don't get skill lag, and could even PvP/TW reasonably. (In-game ping measures round-trip time, not direct)
    In every single case where I have been given information, I have been able to find the issue either on their PC, or on a regional hub before they ever hit PWE's ISP.​​
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  • xskysoldier
    xskysoldier Posts: 128 Arc User
    Will this also help with Territory Wars? Ever since the merge a lot of people have had bad Fps..even with graphics super low it's still impossible to move. Honestly, the Devs should have thought about all of these problems that would happen before they decided to merge servers ijs.


  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    Will this also help with Territory Wars? Ever since the merge a lot of people have had bad Fps..even with graphics super low it's still impossible to move. Honestly, the Devs should have thought about all of these problems that would happen before they decided to merge servers ijs.

    No, because FPS has absolutely nothing to do with latency on the internet. That's entirely on the system it's being played on. The only affect merging the servers would have had on that would be more people participating in your battle, causing more graphics, which causes a much higher load on your CPU.​​
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  • johndoe#4146
    johndoe#4146 Posts: 98 Arc User
    not a troll post but why is "PWI" not "Perfect World International" ? LOL they dont bother with the game at all anymore that they cant take the 10 seconds to type out the actual name like every other game mentioned?

    inb4 "server not found" after network maint complete​​
  • ritaf
    ritaf Posts: 28 Arc User
    Question?
    If we can't log in for sign in for Event calender will they do it for us?
  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    ritaf wrote: »
    Question?
    If we can't log in for sign in for Event calender will they do it for us?
    If PWE were a real company, I would expect them to mail everyone an absence note for compensation. This is PWE though. Don't expect anything.​​
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  • heerohex#3018
    heerohex#3018 Posts: 4,885 Community Moderator



    ritaf wrote: »

    Question?

    If we can't log in for sign in for Event calender will they do it for us?

    If PWE were a real company, I would expect them to mail everyone an absence note for compensation. This is PWE though. Don't expect anything.​​

    Maybe worth getting our new CM on this for a code.
  • ayejay101
    ayejay101 Posts: 238 Arc User
    Uhh so question, I was too lazy to read any of the above so not sure if this was mentioned...

    In the email ARC sent, they said that maintenance would last from 6AM to 7PM...
    While in the news post on PWI's homepage claims that it's 6AM to 6PM... regardless of that hour difference, it matters a bit to some... so which is correct?

    Also is it not possible to do our regular maintenance during this time? rather than take an additional 3 hours only 4-5 hours after a major down time?
    ​​
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  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    No, they cannot update the servers while the network is down. PWE can't touch the data on the servers, it's done entirely by Wanmei in China. Active network interfaces are required for that to function, so they cannot start it until the maintenance window is complete.
    PWE is just a publisher, Wanmei is the actual developer and provider of content.​​
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  • ayejay101
    ayejay101 Posts: 238 Arc User
    I see, I figured they could update their servers if they're at their physical location without the need for a network.

    Welp... *tosses and hope I can make it within that time frame*
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  • kittyempressa
    kittyempressa Posts: 268 Arc User
    edited October 2015
    Oh well, since servers will be down today (it's already the morning of outage day in Europe), at least Kitty finally haz time to edit her videos. There will most likely be 5-6 new FWS pav videos today now that's Kitty's 95% done recording them. Check her thread in "Dungeons and Tactics"-section to find the newest (or alternatively Kitty's youtube channel )

    (Kitty's sorry about dirty advertisement, but at least it's PWI-related and might be a bit educating...)
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    Kitty's gone. She gave up on PWI. And she's a black metal Kitty naow.

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  • teatew
    teatew Posts: 2 Arc User
    I hope I get a "free" day added to my VIP membership since I was unable to login at all today and claim my "free key" :)
  • reichishio1
    reichishio1 Posts: 6 Arc User
    tried to log in at 10 pm ATL or 6pm PDT and could not get in, has it extended another hour or so? Wondering if we will be allowed to do anything before the scheduled maintence at 11pm PDT?
  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    Network is up, not all servers are up yet. Just wait a bit.​​
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  • ftwomg
    ftwomg Posts: 10 Arc User
    I just want to point out the fact that the email they sent out states 7pm but yet everything they posted says 6pm.
  • arcanaman17#3138
    arcanaman17#3138 Posts: 1 Arc User
    @SylenThunder - Lost City Omg Thank you for letting us know! I can finally sleep on it now! xD
  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    Just sharing this update from Domino on the other thread...
    Its supposed to be live now. We're investigating why no one can get in. This seems to be affecting Arc, as well as ALL the bejing/shanghai games
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  • patsybanger
    patsybanger Posts: 74 Arc User
    You didn't think they could fix something without breaking 2 did you?
  • sylenthunder
    sylenthunder Posts: 3,061 Community Moderator
    Everything is back up!​​
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  • thenamesdomino
    thenamesdomino Posts: 545 Perfect World Employee
    ^ go go go