He may be referring to financial and manpower resources rather than resources of a computational nature.
Even in that case, we've seen nothing but gains in manpower allocation to STO since the buildup to S7 going live, and CO, NWN, and STO all run on the same game engine. There are transferable benefits from coding work on one game that can be propagated to all three - we've already seen some of this with things like the Foundry.
So, Cryptic has been allocating more manpower to STO, and we're likely to see peripheral benefits to the game engine as a whole with more people dedicated to working on the same engine in NWN. Again, NWN is nothing but beneficial for us. All of Cryptic's games really have a massive amount of overlap, and it's one of the reasons that they designed their game engine and server architecture the way that they did - they can crank out MMOs in fairly short order, and have cross-game benefits from continuing to work on the shared engine with each new game/iteration.
__________________________________________________
Joined January 2010.
OP has a point, a hardware failure, means exactly what?????????? the led broke that tells you the harddrive is being accessed??????? I mean come on, were just asking for some information, not internal secrets on the company.
I love all of the speculation. It makes as much sense as saying the dilithium matrix was miss aligned causing a cascade failure of the...
You get the idea.
In practical terms, Cryptic/PWE is under no obligation to discuss details on the cause of the outage. Their software is not mission-critical; no-one died, businesses were not affected, and no-one lost money other than PWE. If anything, it's embarrassing, and more than a few people likely got chewed out. Shareholders on the other hand, may be more inclined to react if it happens again.
We've learned a lot though about their operations during the incident.
1.) they use a centralized server model, as a distributed model would enable continuous operation;
2.) redundancies in server operations are always budgetary issues, not design flaws;
4.) their business model accepts downtime as a practical occurrence and expense.
And that's acceptable for a F2P system, whether we like it or not.
A 100% uptime isn't possible (practically due to the expense). Focus on content and slowly expand the system to meet demand. That makes more sense for me
OP has a point, a hardware failure, means exactly what?????????? the led broke that tells you the harddrive is being accessed??????? I mean come on, were just asking for some information, not internal secrets on the company.
"Some Information" might expose some incompetance of one form or another on their part, thus the info blackout.
I honestly don't get the calls for specific information on this issue. It's not like Cryptic providing us with the model and part number that failed would do us any good. Also, what MMO ever has discussed the reasons for a service outage in that sort of depth? I've been playing MMOs for a long time, and have played most of the major titles that have come out, and can't think of a single instance in which a company has provided more information than "hardware failure", "networking issue", "ISP issue" or the like.
The sort of detailed information that you're asking for isn't for public consumption and just doesn't get handed out.
__________________________________________________
Joined January 2010.
I love all of the speculation. It makes as much sense as saying the dilithium matrix was miss aligned causing a cascade failure of the...
You get the idea.
In practical terms, Cryptic/PWE is under no obligation to discuss details on the cause of the outage. Their software is not mission-critical; no-one died, businesses were not affected, and no-one lost money other than PWE. If anything, it's embarrassing, and more than a few people likely got chewed out. Shareholders on the other hand, may be more inclined to react if it happens again.
We've learned a lot though about their operations during the incident.
1.) they use a centralized server model, as a distributed model would enable continuous operation;
2.) redundancies in server operations are always budgetary issues, not design flaws;
4.) their business model accepts downtime as a practical occurrence and expense.
And that's acceptable for a F2P system, whether we like it or not.
A 100% uptime isn't possible (practically due to the expense). Focus on content and slowly expand the system to meet demand. That makes more sense for me
My Two bits
Admiral Thrax
Also, this deserves to be highlighted. If you really want the detailed information that you're asking for, become a shareholder with a significant enough investment to be invited to the shareholder meetings. Otherwise, this isn't information that's necessary for John Q. Public (namely, us).
Hey, ddesjardins... 1, 2, 4? You might want to give that another look, unless 3 was meant to read "????" :P
__________________________________________________
Joined January 2010.
The point being missed here is Resource Allocation.
New Game NWN = Full resources.
Old game STO = whatever is left over.
Blame those supporting NWN for the outages.
Pfft. STO's getting Not Season 8, with the introduction of Romulans, a revamp of the KDF experience, and an upgraded UI for everybody, as well as more ships.
Over in CO, there's... a race. Available only to characters who can fly, or who have spent Zen on buying a vehicle for their superhero. Which rewards you with one of three costume pieces. Oh, and there's one more costume piece, one of the ugliest I've ever seen, being given away with a vehicle purchase (because that's the only way they can pretend anyone would give them money for the Crown of Dicks Helmet).
Also, this deserves to be highlighted. If you really want the detailed information that you're asking for, become a shareholder with a significant enough investment to be invited to the shareholder meetings. Otherwise, this isn't information that's necessary for John Q. Public (namely, us).
Hey, ddesjardins... 1, 2, 4? You might want to give that another look, unless 3 was meant to read "????" :P
I did have a #3 and a few more - but they were speculative and counter productive.
But you are quite right, being a shareholder does have it's advantages
It is a video game it is not a public utility service. If there is a server outage your life isn't hanging on the line. They do not need to give anyone an explanation or guarantees that it wont happen again. Now please bombard me with your a gold player/demands/entitlements whining. Those are my favorite!
It is a video game it is not a public utility service
its a service provided to paying customers
They do not need to give anyone an explanation
they do if they don't want to put paying customers off and make them question whether they should remain paying customers. it doesn't inspire confidence when people get tight lipped about things like this
Now please bombard me with your a gold player/demands/entitlements whining. Those are my favorite!
so now you're throwing around insults. proves you have nothing to say
Pfft. STO's getting Not Season 8, with the introduction of Romulans, a revamp of the KDF experience, and an upgraded UI for everybody, as well as more ships.
I think he means AFTER that is released, and its not like he doesn't have a point. Look at what you yourself said about what CO is getting. STO could easily go that route if development resources are diverted toward the new money maker
Pfft. STO's getting Not Season 8, with the introduction of Romulans, a revamp of the KDF experience, and an upgraded UI for everybody, as well as more ships.
Over in CO, there's... a race. Available only to characters who can fly, or who have spent Zen on buying a vehicle for their superhero. Which rewards you with one of three costume pieces. Oh, and there's one more costume piece, one of the ugliest I've ever seen, being given away with a vehicle purchase (because that's the only way they can pretend anyone would give them money for the Crown of Dicks Helmet).
STO is hardly getting "whatever is left over."
HERE HERE!
Champions is an outstanding game, one of the best ever. The lack of new content generated for it is appalling. That game is a huge missed opportunity. (especially with superheroes being more popular now than ever) Seriously, you guys wanna see bad, review the history of C.O. and it's updates.
STO has gotten FAR MORE than scraps, believe it. Scraps are what is handed to Millennium City.
Is it possible to have some sort of official 'debrief' about these server outages? I usually take these on the chin but 5 over the last 7 or 8 days is a little much.
If it was AFTER LoR I'd understand and just be patient - but this is before and other than some vague assurance that it's nothing to do with NWN (other than the fact that issues started when it went into Beta) we've no idea what's going on.
Can we possibly know what the issues are (broadly speaking) and what's being done to resume service (buying new hardware?)
I think part of the problem, apart form the outages, is the seeming lack of communication instead of the ususal copy and past posts that appear at these times.
Even though most of us may not understand it, if it is very technical, letting us know the cause of the problem and waht is being done to fix it can go a long way to quell some of the discontent.
For example a while back I played LotRO, before it went free to play, and the server I was on went down. Pretty soon all the servers were taken down. A thread appearedon the forums explaining that a piece of new hardware had failed in the server my realm was on and as a precaution they have pulled it from all of the servers. They had ordered new parts and were waiting for them to be curriered in and the server would be up as soon as they had been given a test and were fitted.
Now instead of people complaining, which is a valid thing to do, about the servers going down so unedexpectedly as happens in other games when this happens, people were thanking Turbine for keeping us informed of what happened.
Communication is a key to keeping people calm, even if they don't fully understand what is being described.
I love all of the speculation. It makes as much sense as saying the dilithium matrix was miss aligned causing a cascade failure of the...
You get the idea.
In practical terms, Cryptic/PWE is under no obligation to discuss details on the cause of the outage. Their software is not mission-critical; no-one died, businesses were not affected, and no-one lost money other than PWE. If anything, it's embarrassing, and more than a few people likely got chewed out. Shareholders on the other hand, may be more inclined to react if it happens again.
We've learned a lot though about their operations during the incident.
1.) they use a centralized server model, as a distributed model would enable continuous operation;
2.) redundancies in server operations are always budgetary issues, not design flaws;
4.) their business model accepts downtime as a practical occurrence and expense.
And that's acceptable for a F2P system, whether we like it or not.
A 100% uptime isn't possible (practically due to the expense). Focus on content and slowly expand the system to meet demand. That makes more sense for me
My Two bits
Admiral Thrax
I'd figured that the problems stemmed from having at least a partly centralised system. Though I am of the opinion that the only thing causing trouble was the proxy layer, rather than the actual game servers themselves. Running 3 different games on one "server" would be idiotic in the extreme, having a shared proxy layer on the other hand does not seem so ridiculous. Until you get to the point we are at now, where that proxy layer can no longer handle the sheer volume of data passing in to it.
Recently there has been a spate of both scheduled and unscheduled downtime.
It appears pretty obvious that a major cause of this is the inability of parts of Cryptics hardware to cope with spikes in demand.
The launch of the NW beta resulted in days of growing instability followed a number of catastrophic crashes.
Just today, as the beta test of tribble became open, we again had a huge problem with connectivity.
Some months ago, a thing that became known as the Valentines Day Massacre patch happened.
It resulted in d'Stahl himself coming to these fora and making a series of statements, culminating in one that can be paraphrased as 'we made a booboo, sorry about that. This is exactly what we did wrong and this is what we're doing to fix it'.
In my view, we are getting close to needing a similar statement.
I appreciate the illustrious, yodelling Branflake as an excellent spokesman. However, there are clear and obvious limits to what he is allowed to say.
I would like d'stahl to make a staement on these fora, addressing the recent outages, explaining something of the cause and, crucially, detailing what is being done to ensure that the launch of LoR doesn't become the cause of a total server meltdown.
This is the second time today... Two hours ago the same thing happened. Which really has me worried for the condition of the servers when Legacy of Romulus goes Live. I mean if they can't handle Open Beta without these types of malfunctions what will happen then? (BTW I'm just trying to play on the Holodeck...)
Just got kicked out myself. So I come on here and the entire first page of GD is full of new threads, all of them about crashing servers and login problems. Never seen that here before.
It's obviously not intentional but you would think they would plan ahead for whenever they are going to run events that are guaranteed to stress their network connections.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
I think its time someone said to Mr PWE that the present infrastructure cannot handle the load and to invest in a new line into the servers or whatever you call it. If the servers are not falling over its got to be the infrastructure in and out that's giving up.
Whatever it is, its obvious SOMETHING cannot take the load its been asked to take and it needs to be fixed, or you will lose customers. Its that simple. Invest or lose.
This is the second time today... Two hours ago the same thing happened. Which really has me worried for the condition of the servers when Legacy of Romulus goes Live. I mean if they can't handle Open Beta without these types of malfunctions what will happen then? (BTW I'm just trying to play on the Holodeck...)
This is the really concerning issue.
Too many outages, clearly linked to predictable spikes in demand on the network.
And if they think these spikes have been bigger than expected, wait until LoR goes live.
Something is badly wrong with the hardware at Cryptics end.
I suspect that there is a bottleneck in the system channeling all the player data or requests through a singe gate of some sort. While probably not the proximate cause, that component is behaving in such a way, at such times, as to cause other components to fail.
I genuinely believe we are past the point where Branflakes can make reassuring noises and its all forgiven.
This is the time D'Stahl has to rouse himself, come to the playerbase and explain whats been going wrong and how they intend to fix it.
Comments
Even in that case, we've seen nothing but gains in manpower allocation to STO since the buildup to S7 going live, and CO, NWN, and STO all run on the same game engine. There are transferable benefits from coding work on one game that can be propagated to all three - we've already seen some of this with things like the Foundry.
So, Cryptic has been allocating more manpower to STO, and we're likely to see peripheral benefits to the game engine as a whole with more people dedicated to working on the same engine in NWN. Again, NWN is nothing but beneficial for us. All of Cryptic's games really have a massive amount of overlap, and it's one of the reasons that they designed their game engine and server architecture the way that they did - they can crank out MMOs in fairly short order, and have cross-game benefits from continuing to work on the shared engine with each new game/iteration.
Joined January 2010.
In regard to hating Star Trek 2009:
You get the idea.
In practical terms, Cryptic/PWE is under no obligation to discuss details on the cause of the outage. Their software is not mission-critical; no-one died, businesses were not affected, and no-one lost money other than PWE. If anything, it's embarrassing, and more than a few people likely got chewed out. Shareholders on the other hand, may be more inclined to react if it happens again.
We've learned a lot though about their operations during the incident.
1.) they use a centralized server model, as a distributed model would enable continuous operation;
2.) redundancies in server operations are always budgetary issues, not design flaws;
4.) their business model accepts downtime as a practical occurrence and expense.
And that's acceptable for a F2P system, whether we like it or not.
A 100% uptime isn't possible (practically due to the expense). Focus on content and slowly expand the system to meet demand. That makes more sense for me
My Two bits
Admiral Thrax
I honestly don't get the calls for specific information on this issue. It's not like Cryptic providing us with the model and part number that failed would do us any good. Also, what MMO ever has discussed the reasons for a service outage in that sort of depth? I've been playing MMOs for a long time, and have played most of the major titles that have come out, and can't think of a single instance in which a company has provided more information than "hardware failure", "networking issue", "ISP issue" or the like.
The sort of detailed information that you're asking for isn't for public consumption and just doesn't get handed out.
Joined January 2010.
In regard to hating Star Trek 2009:
Also, this deserves to be highlighted. If you really want the detailed information that you're asking for, become a shareholder with a significant enough investment to be invited to the shareholder meetings. Otherwise, this isn't information that's necessary for John Q. Public (namely, us).
Hey, ddesjardins... 1, 2, 4? You might want to give that another look, unless 3 was meant to read "????" :P
Joined January 2010.
In regard to hating Star Trek 2009:
Over in CO, there's... a race. Available only to characters who can fly, or who have spent Zen on buying a vehicle for their superhero. Which rewards you with one of three costume pieces. Oh, and there's one more costume piece, one of the ugliest I've ever seen, being given away with a vehicle purchase (because that's the only way they can pretend anyone would give them money for the Crown of Dicks Helmet).
STO is hardly getting "whatever is left over."
I did have a #3 and a few more - but they were speculative and counter productive.
But you are quite right, being a shareholder does have it's advantages
its a service provided to paying customers
they do if they don't want to put paying customers off and make them question whether they should remain paying customers. it doesn't inspire confidence when people get tight lipped about things like this
so now you're throwing around insults. proves you have nothing to say
I think he means AFTER that is released, and its not like he doesn't have a point. Look at what you yourself said about what CO is getting. STO could easily go that route if development resources are diverted toward the new money maker
HERE HERE!
Champions is an outstanding game, one of the best ever. The lack of new content generated for it is appalling. That game is a huge missed opportunity. (especially with superheroes being more popular now than ever) Seriously, you guys wanna see bad, review the history of C.O. and it's updates.
STO has gotten FAR MORE than scraps, believe it. Scraps are what is handed to Millennium City.
...#LLAP...
Is it possible to have some sort of official 'debrief' about these server outages? I usually take these on the chin but 5 over the last 7 or 8 days is a little much.
If it was AFTER LoR I'd understand and just be patient - but this is before and other than some vague assurance that it's nothing to do with NWN (other than the fact that issues started when it went into Beta) we've no idea what's going on.
Can we possibly know what the issues are (broadly speaking) and what's being done to resume service (buying new hardware?)
Many thanks
Jo
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
(Yeah, I'm old. So?)
Even though most of us may not understand it, if it is very technical, letting us know the cause of the problem and waht is being done to fix it can go a long way to quell some of the discontent.
For example a while back I played LotRO, before it went free to play, and the server I was on went down. Pretty soon all the servers were taken down. A thread appearedon the forums explaining that a piece of new hardware had failed in the server my realm was on and as a precaution they have pulled it from all of the servers. They had ordered new parts and were waiting for them to be curriered in and the server would be up as soon as they had been given a test and were fitted.
Now instead of people complaining, which is a valid thing to do, about the servers going down so unedexpectedly as happens in other games when this happens, people were thanking Turbine for keeping us informed of what happened.
Communication is a key to keeping people calm, even if they don't fully understand what is being described.
I'd figured that the problems stemmed from having at least a partly centralised system. Though I am of the opinion that the only thing causing trouble was the proxy layer, rather than the actual game servers themselves. Running 3 different games on one "server" would be idiotic in the extreme, having a shared proxy layer on the other hand does not seem so ridiculous. Until you get to the point we are at now, where that proxy layer can no longer handle the sheer volume of data passing in to it.
Sig by my better half.
It appears pretty obvious that a major cause of this is the inability of parts of Cryptics hardware to cope with spikes in demand.
The launch of the NW beta resulted in days of growing instability followed a number of catastrophic crashes.
Just today, as the beta test of tribble became open, we again had a huge problem with connectivity.
Some months ago, a thing that became known as the Valentines Day Massacre patch happened.
It resulted in d'Stahl himself coming to these fora and making a series of statements, culminating in one that can be paraphrased as 'we made a booboo, sorry about that. This is exactly what we did wrong and this is what we're doing to fix it'.
In my view, we are getting close to needing a similar statement.
I appreciate the illustrious, yodelling Branflake as an excellent spokesman. However, there are clear and obvious limits to what he is allowed to say.
I would like d'stahl to make a staement on these fora, addressing the recent outages, explaining something of the cause and, crucially, detailing what is being done to ensure that the launch of LoR doesn't become the cause of a total server meltdown.
He's dead Jim... who's Jim?
Twice today. Do you guys need to actually recruit people who know what they are doing?
While the downtime is frustrating, it's not intentional. Nobody at Cryptic wants the games to be unavailable.
i think its against the rules to start a thread for server donations lol
Whatever it is, its obvious SOMETHING cannot take the load its been asked to take and it needs to be fixed, or you will lose customers. Its that simple. Invest or lose.
This is the really concerning issue.
Too many outages, clearly linked to predictable spikes in demand on the network.
And if they think these spikes have been bigger than expected, wait until LoR goes live.
Something is badly wrong with the hardware at Cryptics end.
I suspect that there is a bottleneck in the system channeling all the player data or requests through a singe gate of some sort. While probably not the proximate cause, that component is behaving in such a way, at such times, as to cause other components to fail.
I genuinely believe we are past the point where Branflakes can make reassuring noises and its all forgiven.
This is the time D'Stahl has to rouse himself, come to the playerbase and explain whats been going wrong and how they intend to fix it.