Have you *heard* of the lawsuits against Big Tobacco? I'm not saying, at all, that Cryptic falls into this category but Americans have been brainwashed for over 30 years that "companies" have their customer's best interest at heart which isn't true. Companies have their customers' *money* as their best interest.
Look at "pink slime" or antibiotic-resistant meats produced in this country and tell me again how companies have this fairy tale-esque care for the welfare of their customers.
I personally don't blame them as corporations have a legal obligation to make profit. That's their function but to act as if there is some morality or concern involved doesn't fit the facts of American business in 2013.
Business is business and Cryptic and PWE are a business what people buy in zen and keys is what keeps this game going.
So if you dont like how they do business then it begs the question why are you still playing as i dont see alot of people complaining like you are.
dude you would pissed off if the last 3 day you try to get on and nothing works again and again and again grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Not really. Even as a playing character, I can accept downtime. Why do people expect 100% uptime? It's not only unrealistic, it proves that you have no life outside of a computer game! So they took it down on a Saturday night. Go on a date or something.
I'm afraid you've rather missed my point. Actually both my points.
Allow me to lay them out for you a little more clearly.
Point 1.
The increased load on the shared resources of STO and NW (and lets not forget CO as well) was utterly predictable. As utterly predictable as the idea that, in less than 3 weeks, there's going to be another huge spike in traffic when LoR launches.
It's patently obvious that those shared resources were simply not adequate.
Point 2.
I think Brandflakes should spend a little less time pointing out some posters semantic errors regarding hardware achitecture and a little more time putting Cryptics hands up to a lack of foresight.
As for tonights maintainance, I'm actually rather glad its happening. We've had two evenings with catastrophic failure. To follow that up with a third outage, this time planned and scheduled, in order to fix the issue is encouraging.
However, as I've yet to see anyone at cryptic recognise that the issues of the last few days have been a result of system overload, I'm concerned about the launch of LoR.
May 21st is going to be huge. i want it to be smooth and as problem-free as possible. Because I want this game to succeed and for cryptic, as its developers, to get the recognition they deserve for putting out one of my favourite games of all time.
However, if may 21st is marred by system failures along the lines of those we've been experiencing lately, I'm worried they will burn through too much goodwill and earn a reputation as a company that can't predict the predictable.
Your implication that any problems are strictly caused by increased traffic is flawed. Unless you work in Cryptic's data center, I suggest you put your points forward as hypotheticals instead of facts.
For all we know, Cryptic believed their hardware was rated to handle the kind of traffic that they have seen since NW went open, and then some. But all it takes is one fan failing for all of that to come to a screeching halt, and short of keeping equipment running past its described life cycle, there's utterly no way to tell that a mechanical failure will happen in the future.
From what I can piece together it doesn't matter. Sometimes gear breaks and down times are needed regardless of the time of the time of day. There is a difference between coding bugs and hardware/hardware-configuration issues.
As multiple services are down either a core switching upgrade is going on (very unlikely) or replacement of the load balancer(s) is likely. As more and more things are brought online the systems need to be upgrade to larger gear to handle the load.
Everyone has a different technical background, education, and experiences. Some of the "very technical", are "very technical" on the desktop or soho server environment. When scaling to a SME environment things are different in terms of complexity, scope, cost, and skills required.
Ok. . . If they are going to do maintenance, why can't they do it at a more convenient time like on a weekday, and why does it take so long for it?! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Well, first of all, the regular staff were maxed out on their overtime, so the weekend staff had to do it. That in and of itself isn't a problem. Once they figure out how to unlock the door to the server room, it's just a matter of them figuring out which lights are supposed to be on, which ones are supposed to be off, and which ones are supposed to blink.
The original estimate was four hours......of course they may be doing a Scotty......
cryptic no do miracles, they makes things broked to fix. then they make things go longer. but they want go now. they should enslave geordi. he make things go!
Well, first of all, the regular staff were maxed out on their overtime, so the weekend staff had to do it. That in and of itself isn't a problem. Once they figure out how to unlock the door to the server room, it's just a matter of them figuring out which lights are supposed to be on, which ones are supposed to be off, and which ones are supposed to blink.
Hehe... *lol*.
Beta, LTA, CE, Multiple preorder Versions, all Addon Packs except AoY, nearly all KDF/Rom and ~50% of all Fedships, over 25 LockboxShips, Endurer of Atari's "Year of Hell", but...
If Anything Should Be Done For The Player Base Cause Of All This Server TRIBBLE Is Would Be...give Everyone Some Free Zen....to Make Up For Alll The Time And Effort Lost By This Stupid TRIBBLE...perfect World Has Made $$$ Off Us All That Play...and Especially All The Lifers That Paid In...yet We Seem To Get Nothing But A Whoops Or "sorry" That Is Really Meaningless In The Long Run...
Put Up Or Shut Up Perfect World...
You Claim To Care About Your Players That Feed You Money And Keep You In Business...but Simply Saying Cheap Words...and Doing Something That Shows You Care...those Are 2 Different Things Entirely...
Businesses do not compensate for minor issues like this; that's not how things work. And it's 'amazing' how arrogant someone can be to expect compensation for little things like this in the first place...
My two cents.
Was named Trek17.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
Maintenance is always progressing well it seems. Just wish it didn't have to happen four or five times a week. How well can it be progressing when it happens 4 times a week? Why does Brandon never come on and say this maintenance is going by terribly and is gonna take FOREVER. Everyone should stop believing every single thing they're told. Enough for me tho, I'd rather play something else. Gnite all.
I pity the people who are too busy, sleeping, whatever to even notice the down time...they don't notice what great fun we're having in the forums.
Heh
MazeRunner
"Reason notwithstanding, the Universe continues unabated."
Your implication that any problems are strictly caused by increased traffic is flawed. Unless you work in Cryptic's data center, I suggest you put your points forward as hypotheticals instead of facts.
For all we know, Cryptic believed their hardware was rated to handle the kind of traffic that they have seen since NW went open, and then some. But all it takes is one fan failing for all of that to come to a screeching halt, and short of keeping equipment running past its described life cycle, there's utterly no way to tell that a mechanical failure will happen in the future.
His assumption does have some validity if one considers the recent anniversary event (witch oddly enough had a massive increase to unique log-ins) and its week long series of rolling blackouts as a data point.
Well, first of all, the regular staff were maxed out on their overtime, so the weekend staff had to do it. That in and of itself isn't a problem. Once they figure out how to unlock the door to the server room, it's just a matter of them figuring out which lights are supposed to be on, which ones are supposed to be off, and which ones are supposed to blink.
And trying to trace all the GOTO and GOSUB commands in 18 trillion lines of undocumented code.
"The hell, I changed the cooldown on Eng Team 1 and now all the Cardassians are pink! Who the %&*( wrote this %&(*&!!?"
You know you're talking to GAMERS right? (j/k I know there's actually folks with lives who also game these days lol Alas... I'm not one of them, or rather I can't hit up the bar cus I have to work at 6:30am *pouts*)
Much to do, let's not forget season seven, much to do for them to pull it off, If it means shuting down every now and then to get things right, who are you or anyone elts to complain. I for one apreate their efforts to provide a good quality gameing enviorment.
No problem to turn off the server (or servers, for unknow reason, all crypt games are off at same time, too frequent...) and improve them or make all necessary repair.
But the weekeed is a delicate moment to make this kind of repair, even if in emergency, since the weekend is one of the few moments to play freely for a lot of people.
But is not anything related to server security or account service?
Even if stability theoretically should have waited until Wednesday or any weekday. To turn off the server, in all or most games crypt must have been something really serious or emergency.
More because this is no one pontual moment, but two or more.
Wow how nasty does it get when this happens? One of the big points for STO for me, is all the players on here in forums and in game have been mature (majority -belive me on other games its not so) and friendly.
People having a go at others because "they do not go out on Saturday nights" or calling other people "nerds"
Seriously your playing the same game! What hypocrisy!
How can you try split hairs and delude yourself like that?
I want them to have this game all ready for May 21st -waited a long time-so please let them fix it and not flame other players over it.
Not sure if anyone really notices or not by STO is a game played world-wide. When is a good time? A good time for you is a crappy time for someone else.
IMO patches are one thing but anything involving hardware-related issues I would take when I can call support if something goes south in a really bad way and actually get someone who speaks my native language on the other end.
So essentially I must find something else to do for three hours.....you know how hard that is to do these days? With all the wifi and phones ande internet.
Your implication that any problems are strictly caused by increased traffic is flawed. Unless you work in Cryptic's data center, I suggest you put your points forward as hypotheticals instead of facts.
You make a fair point. However, in my defence, I'd point to the increased instability that began when NW launched, culminating in the last two evenings failures.
Occams razor points to increased traffic, if not as a proximate cause, then as the reason why a component failed.
For all we know, Cryptic believed their hardware was rated to handle the kind of traffic that they have seen since NW went open, and then some. But all it takes is one fan failing for all of that to come to a screeching halt, and short of keeping equipment running past its described life cycle, there's utterly no way to tell that a mechanical failure will happen in the future.
If one fan failing is the problem, then I'd suggest that there is insufficient redundancy built in.
Seperating the hardware that runs all the games, and i mean wholly seperating it.....no shared resources at all......would ensure that if the one fan (one fan to find them and in the darkness bind them) fails then they'd not lose all their games.
Ok... so maybe MOST companies aren't "out to get" their customers lol... I'm fairly certain that in this specific case Cryptic execs didn't sit in a boardroom somewhere and say "Hey... it's Saturday evening... I'm thinking we should kick our user base on all our games in the nads just for kicks. Who's with me on this?"
Don't get me wrong, i'm not jumping on any band-wagon blaming Cryptic. I have noted that, as a 3 years player, I've noticed these "issues" becoming more frequent, not less but as you've said, things do in fact happen, lol.
It's not either/or, though. I agree, Cryptic isn't sitting around finding purposeful ways to "hurt" their customers, not at all. I'm just not buying the "care", either. They are fixing what they have to when they feel they have to. What we the customer thinks, good or bad, is irrelevant to the "bottom line" and I'm saying it is irrelevant to them as well from that perspective.
My point is, just to be real, the problem, whatever it is, is being fixed because money is at stake. They aren't making any repairs as some kind of ethical statesmanship towards their customers. keep in mind, I'm not saying this as some slight just as a fact of modern Capitalism.
Business, any business, is *amoral*. They aren't good or evil. They have one specific function and that is to make profit. As with my examples earlier, *what* they do to make a profit is what ends up being judged.
If I may add some of my experience to this conversation... we have a 9 million dollar data center at my job, not including the equipment in it, and our latest toy is an SSD SAN capable for 400k IOps... We are going to load it with VM's for our parallel processing environment and we are hoping to get tripple the GB/hr to justify the cost....
Now, everyone keeps busting on Cryptic engineers about their speed and when they chose to conduct maintenance. You should know that most hardware such as SANs, tape devices, networking equipment, etc, etc are on contract. Most times it's the vendor that is the doing hardware repair and maintenance. Most likely Cryptic doesn't even touch their SAN or network hardware. Their vendor brings it in, sets it up and Cryptic just configures it to their needs.
For example, 3par, they brought in an SSD SAN for us to mess with. None of our guys lifted a finger, same with Kaminaro, and we have a 3rd we are going to mess with. This is common practice even when not evaluating equipment. We had a tape drive go bad in our IBM tape system. Same thing, we waited for the vendor to show up and make the repair. The vendor came with the wrong part, so we waited some more. Of course during the unplanned outage, we had something come up where we had to investigate archived data and the client had to wait for their answer.
Like cosmic1 said, their hand has been forced.
join Date: Sep 2009 - I want my changeling lava lamp!
Little redundancy is needed for some of you to think b 4 leaping with your mouth.lol But what you know bout networks and logistics of the whole quantum of things, is get a network and servers for dummies book, or sign up for my online classes. let the ppl do their work and o yeah your diapers and binky is ready when your stop crien over a game being down for a bit. so what you have to endure the real world for a bit. Game on.
I personally have no issues with them taking it down whenever they darn well please with the intention to address issues. The problem from my point of view is if they do so without addressing whatever single point source of failure allows all Cryptic games to crash in symphony. I don't care how much hardware you throw at it, a single point of failure is still a single point of failure no matter how beefy.
I tend to agree, however there's a certain point where it becomes an impossibility to split every game.
The games are definitely linked at the account level. This is a weakness for sure, if the account/login server breaks down it'll effect everyone. Splitting that up means you need far more resources and redundancy systems to avoid mistakes for little benefit.
What I also got from Brandons post, is that they mostly work from one central data center. This isn't unusual unless you run more server racks than you can fit into one. It's far more cost effective to run the racks from a single location. Data centers are horribly expensive to run. For every additional data center you need 100% more crew to run them. That isn't cheap either.
That data center will have redundancy systems but that can only go so far. The back-up systems won't ever be as good as the main systems, again cost is a factor.
I'm not defending them blindly though. I'm sure there are areas that can be improved. But don't blame the engineers, system admins or even general cryptic crew. Blame the people at the board of directors, the managers. They're a business constricted by demands for profit by an even bigger business. Which is sad, but that's how it works. I'm sure the data center crew wants more funds for better hardware/software.
Comments
Business is business and Cryptic and PWE are a business what people buy in zen and keys is what keeps this game going.
So if you dont like how they do business then it begs the question why are you still playing as i dont see alot of people complaining like you are.
Not really. Even as a playing character, I can accept downtime. Why do people expect 100% uptime? It's not only unrealistic, it proves that you have no life outside of a computer game! So they took it down on a Saturday night. Go on a date or something.
Your implication that any problems are strictly caused by increased traffic is flawed. Unless you work in Cryptic's data center, I suggest you put your points forward as hypotheticals instead of facts.
For all we know, Cryptic believed their hardware was rated to handle the kind of traffic that they have seen since NW went open, and then some. But all it takes is one fan failing for all of that to come to a screeching halt, and short of keeping equipment running past its described life cycle, there's utterly no way to tell that a mechanical failure will happen in the future.
As multiple services are down either a core switching upgrade is going on (very unlikely) or replacement of the load balancer(s) is likely. As more and more things are brought online the systems need to be upgrade to larger gear to handle the load.
Everyone has a different technical background, education, and experiences. Some of the "very technical", are "very technical" on the desktop or soho server environment. When scaling to a SME environment things are different in terms of complexity, scope, cost, and skills required.
Well, first of all, the regular staff were maxed out on their overtime, so the weekend staff had to do it. That in and of itself isn't a problem. Once they figure out how to unlock the door to the server room, it's just a matter of them figuring out which lights are supposed to be on, which ones are supposed to be off, and which ones are supposed to blink.
cryptic no do miracles, they makes things broked to fix. then they make things go longer. but they want go now. they should enslave geordi. he make things go!
Hehe... *lol*.
My two cents.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
I pity the people who are too busy, sleeping, whatever to even notice the down time...they don't notice what great fun we're having in the forums.
Heh
"Reason notwithstanding, the Universe continues unabated."
His assumption does have some validity if one considers the recent anniversary event (witch oddly enough had a massive increase to unique log-ins) and its week long series of rolling blackouts as a data point.
And trying to trace all the GOTO and GOSUB commands in 18 trillion lines of undocumented code.
"The hell, I changed the cooldown on Eng Team 1 and now all the Cardassians are pink! Who the %&*( wrote this %&(*&!!?"
But the weekeed is a delicate moment to make this kind of repair, even if in emergency, since the weekend is one of the few moments to play freely for a lot of people.
But is not anything related to server security or account service?
Even if stability theoretically should have waited until Wednesday or any weekday. To turn off the server, in all or most games crypt must have been something really serious or emergency.
More because this is no one pontual moment, but two or more.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
People having a go at others because "they do not go out on Saturday nights" or calling other people "nerds"
Seriously your playing the same game! What hypocrisy!
How can you try split hairs and delude yourself like that?
I want them to have this game all ready for May 21st -waited a long time-so please let them fix it and not flame other players over it.
IMO patches are one thing but anything involving hardware-related issues I would take when I can call support if something goes south in a really bad way and actually get someone who speaks my native language on the other end.
You make a fair point. However, in my defence, I'd point to the increased instability that began when NW launched, culminating in the last two evenings failures.
Occams razor points to increased traffic, if not as a proximate cause, then as the reason why a component failed.
If one fan failing is the problem, then I'd suggest that there is insufficient redundancy built in.
Seperating the hardware that runs all the games, and i mean wholly seperating it.....no shared resources at all......would ensure that if the one fan (one fan to find them and in the darkness bind them) fails then they'd not lose all their games.
"Star Trek Offline" I love it.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not jumping on any band-wagon blaming Cryptic. I have noted that, as a 3 years player, I've noticed these "issues" becoming more frequent, not less but as you've said, things do in fact happen, lol.
It's not either/or, though. I agree, Cryptic isn't sitting around finding purposeful ways to "hurt" their customers, not at all. I'm just not buying the "care", either. They are fixing what they have to when they feel they have to. What we the customer thinks, good or bad, is irrelevant to the "bottom line" and I'm saying it is irrelevant to them as well from that perspective.
My point is, just to be real, the problem, whatever it is, is being fixed because money is at stake. They aren't making any repairs as some kind of ethical statesmanship towards their customers. keep in mind, I'm not saying this as some slight just as a fact of modern Capitalism.
Business, any business, is *amoral*. They aren't good or evil. They have one specific function and that is to make profit. As with my examples earlier, *what* they do to make a profit is what ends up being judged.
... you've got to be G@% $&^n kidding me.
Oh boy, I can't wait for the 21st. That should be "epic."
There, I feel somewhat better.
"Star Trek Not Responding"
Now, everyone keeps busting on Cryptic engineers about their speed and when they chose to conduct maintenance. You should know that most hardware such as SANs, tape devices, networking equipment, etc, etc are on contract. Most times it's the vendor that is the doing hardware repair and maintenance. Most likely Cryptic doesn't even touch their SAN or network hardware. Their vendor brings it in, sets it up and Cryptic just configures it to their needs.
For example, 3par, they brought in an SSD SAN for us to mess with. None of our guys lifted a finger, same with Kaminaro, and we have a 3rd we are going to mess with. This is common practice even when not evaluating equipment. We had a tape drive go bad in our IBM tape system. Same thing, we waited for the vendor to show up and make the repair. The vendor came with the wrong part, so we waited some more. Of course during the unplanned outage, we had something come up where we had to investigate archived data and the client had to wait for their answer.
Like cosmic1 said, their hand has been forced.
I tend to agree, however there's a certain point where it becomes an impossibility to split every game.
The games are definitely linked at the account level. This is a weakness for sure, if the account/login server breaks down it'll effect everyone. Splitting that up means you need far more resources and redundancy systems to avoid mistakes for little benefit.
What I also got from Brandons post, is that they mostly work from one central data center. This isn't unusual unless you run more server racks than you can fit into one. It's far more cost effective to run the racks from a single location. Data centers are horribly expensive to run. For every additional data center you need 100% more crew to run them. That isn't cheap either.
That data center will have redundancy systems but that can only go so far. The back-up systems won't ever be as good as the main systems, again cost is a factor.
I'm not defending them blindly though. I'm sure there are areas that can be improved. But don't blame the engineers, system admins or even general cryptic crew. Blame the people at the board of directors, the managers. They're a business constricted by demands for profit by an even bigger business. Which is sad, but that's how it works. I'm sure the data center crew wants more funds for better hardware/software.
sig
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/5451/om71.jpg
It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
This is what happens when you get guys who learned how to program in Commodore BASIC 1.1 to debug C++.