Lakhesis
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Posts posted by Lakhesis
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nevermind.
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As to the whens of maintenence, it's a simple matter of risk assesment based on subscribers and the amount of money the company can make. It's all about how to make the most money for the longest amount of time possible. Profit. Without it, we end up being without product.
The point many people are trying to make is it's not.
There've been unscheduled downtimes to fix relics, augments & all sorts of other minor non-content critical elements. By "content critical" I mean "something that disables a primary PVE/PVP element of the game" rather than "my boots have the wrong stat". Bioware are the only MMO company I've known to routinely do unscheduled maintenance to fix non-content critical stuff. And I only say "routinely" because someone'll probably think up the one occasion someone else did it if I say "ever".
I do not think unscheduled non-content critical maintenances are sensible from any point of view other than a perfectionist's. I point to it as a sign of poor management prioritisation & failure to think like a service provider rather than a developer.
While having their augment slot non-functional on saturday, sunday & monday will have annoyed some people, I'm willing to bet that shutting the servers down on friday to make the augment slot functional for those three days was more likely to cost them subscribers.
Those who were likely to quit over the augments were already offended when the aug slots were broken for the first half of the week, all they succeeded in doing was angering a new group of people (who they've been repeatedly & routinely angering lately).
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These threads Never get old.
Apparently unscheduled maintenance never goes out of fashion, so neither do these threads.
There are only three ways these threads will end:
1) All the people bothered by it quit playing
2) Bioware stops doing it
3) SWTOR shuts down (which is a variation on option 2 really)
The question is which of those options is preferable.
Personally, I want to see the end of my Sith Warrior's class chain & then I'm out of here. It's not worth the ongoing irritation, even if I would very much like to support an MMO with AU/NZ servers.
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I'm fed up with it. I'd dearly love to support the one company that provides localised AU/NZ servers, and I enjoy the game, but there's honestly no point if they're constantly being taken offline.
Bioware is acting like software developers, not service providers. If your focus is pushing out the internal builds as rapidly as possible, in order to get the final release right, that's fine.
But SWTOR is a service. We paid for the software being developed when we bought the game in the first place. What we're paying $15 a month for now is ongoing access to their service.
Lets make it even simpler. Which services does any MMO have more in common with post release? Mass Effect & Bioshock multiplayer, or Farmville & Amazon.com?
IMO the correct answer is Farmville & Amazon.com. They're about providing consistent, reliable, quality service without constant unexpected breaks.
Single & small-multi player games like Mass Effect & Bioshock are much more finished products, without constant ongoing changes as hundreds of thousands of people alter the environment... they can be about one finished product being done right. An MMO is not like this. An MMO has more in common with Amazon.com or Farmville, where an hour's downtime is a broken product and they're constantly fixing the 'engine' while the 'car' is 'driving'.
That Bioware can't wrap their collective heads around this is just another symptom of the non-MMO mindset which the management of the company just can't seem to break free of.
PS. Signs you have a problem: when your customers don't even try to log in first, they just go straight to checking your dev feed because they anticipate yet more unscheduled downtime.
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You quoted me and I live in New Zealand, says so in my sig...
And I am on the side of 'who cares about a night or two off, when the games back online something may be improved which is a good thing.'
It's not "a night or two off" though. If you go back and look through the development posts & patch dates, there's about a 50/50 chance of an unscheduled additional maintenance in any given week.
It's pin-the-tail-on-the-calendar maintenance scheduling, it's ongoing, and it's not getting better.
Bug fixes are meant to improve game stability & performance. A game that's offline for any reason is, by definition, not stable or performing.
But next thursday and/or friday there'll be another 50/50 chance of it happening, because the development & maintenance portion of Bioware is still acting like a single/multi player game software developer & pushing to the convenience of their internal schedule.
They're not acting like an MMO service provider & recognising that clients need consistency and reliability, even if that means a delayed response to non-critical bugs. There are rarely any bugs so content-destroying that fixing them cannot be delayed 3-4 days till a scheduled maintenance.
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Here is where your so called math will come a cropper my friend. WoW quite regularly goes down for 8 hours, not 4 and not 5, but eight, nearly every week. If they have just done a content patch, then there is a significant chance that they will do extra downtimes, usually somewhere between 4 to 8 hours. Sometimes 12 to 24 hours. I know these to be true as I was playing the game at these times and have personally experienced them. I remember the near 24 hour dowtime in particular.
8 hours from a regular player removes 1 night's play (e.g. 5 hours they could have realistically been playing). Two maintenances of 4 hours from a regular player remove the majority of 2 nights play (e.g. 8 hours). From most normal players they'll probably remove 10 hours play, unless you're the sort of person who hovers over the login screen waiting for servers to come back up.
Hence more maintenances, while equal or potentially better for overall uptime, are actually worse in terms of playable uptime for the community most affected by lost uptime. You could leave the server down for 18 hours on Tuesday and it'd make no difference to the average-worker AEST player I described.
Regarding your comparison to WoW, double maintenances are exceptionally rare nowadays & virtually always involve fundamental server stability. Even if we go back many years to a much less stable version of WoW, I have never heard of them running an emergency maintenance purely to fix a non-game destroying item bug.
And to those others who are obsessed with the legal bits, under Australian law you cannot sign away basic consumer protections. You could sign away anything in an EULA, and still be protected. It'd be no more binding than a slavery contract would be in the US nowadays. It's one of the reasons that Australia is a more expensive place to do business than the US.
Regardless, I should not have bothered pointing that out because - while an interesting side note to a discussion on acceptable service quality - I agree entirely that legal proceedings are typically a waste of time, especially for sums of money in the $15 range.
What needs to happen is for Bioware to get their priorities in order, and learn to operate like a service provider rather than a software developer.
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Now, to add to your point, and deviate slightly with my own little tin foil hat musings. I think it's a possibility there was a miscommunication the day before and that patch (1.3a) was going to be delayed and rolled into last night's. They did say, briefly, that wednesday's downtime was postponed, and then lolno still going down shortly after. Or not, who knows.
Yeah, I suspect you're 100% correct. We can't know what actually happened from the outside, but it certainly presents the impression of rushing to keep it all together & then deciding to drop some elements at the last minute but push on anyway, then next day doubling-up downtimes to push the stuff they'd dropped.
If we're correct, that's total "make it up as we go along" territory & the fact it's a serious possibility really gets to the core of my concerns.
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It doesn't matter if its your hours or just an estimate. THAT ISN'T SERVER MAX POSSIBLE UPTIME. You can't change the metric to suit your liking.
It's not about total server uptime. It's about competent downtime scheduling.
For example, take a restaurant that's open for 5 days a week but is shut on friday and saturday. Their uptime is acceptable, but their schedule is horrible. If the restauranteurs need a break, they'd be better staying shut on monday & tuesday. Or, even better, they should only take one night off (e.g. tuesday) and shut for a couple of weeks at the start of the year when most of their customers are away on holiday.
Their time off would be identical, but their schedule would impact on their service availability to customers substantially less. In all situations the uptime is identical, but it's not uptime that's the business's problem.
I outlined the maximum plausible play time for one of Bioware's average customers in a target market, and attempted to outline why Bioware's approach to scheduling was counter-productive on levels beyond simply raw uptime. That's a very valid (albeit very rough) metric.
Lurching from one quick-fix unscheduled event to the next is not a coherent long term strategy, it's counter-productive to a stable customer environment, and the fact it's still ongoing 6+ months after release demonstrates significant systemic flaws within the company's approach which have yet to be properly addressed.
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Not trying to troll as I get that you are upset about not being able to play because BW only sorta knows what they are doing but... I am surprised you didn't point out the rest of the math:
15 per month. 15/4 is 3.75 per week. And you want 20% of the weekly fee refunded. 3.75 * .2 is .75. So you want them to refund you 0.75? Really?
If someone else already pointed this out...sorry, I didn't read the whole thread.
Again, I get it, you want to play the game and plan to do so. I would be just as annoyed....but I would find something else to do.
lol - very true.
In reality I have no interest in a refund. I'm happy to pay for a good service, and I like most of what Bioware is trying to do with this game.
I just have very limited time for obvious foolishness & their task prioritisation strikes me as obviously foolish. All points I raise are an attempt to outline & emphasise precisely how absurd it is.
I find it particularly upsetting because these sort of management decisions show a team that isn't sticking to an established, coherent, sensible game plan. When the same mistakes get repeated over & over again (e.g. extra unscheduled problem solving), it's a sign of a bad system and a management team that's not successfully fixing their internal problems.
I see too many companies stuff up because when the going gets tough they shut out the 'messy organisational stuff' & focus on micro-managing today's technical problem, when the real issue they need to fix is the approach that caused today's problem (and yesterday's, and the day before's, etc). "Flexible, time-oriented development scheduling" is another way of saying "making it up as we go along". It's the sign of a team that's overwhelmed & handling it badly - quite possibly refusing to even admit it.
It's extremely depressing & frustrating for me to see a company I'd dearly like to succeed stuff up so badly, obviously & regularly. I want to support them, but I also don't want to witness another organisational train-wreck.
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55ms? that's not very good... I'm in the US and I get 55ms on the EU servers and around 75 on the Oceania ones ... 16ms on the east US servers which are the closest... if your getting 200+ on any of the 3 regions you need a better ISP
Unless you've left out a leading 1, at least some of those latency numbers aren't actually possible. The fastest US<->AU connection that's theoretically possible based on the limitations of the speed of light down a fiber optic cable is about 140ms. In practice, about 180ms is about as good as you can possibly get with the pacific ocean in the way.
They might be accurate to (e.g.) Blizzard's "oceanic" servers, but those servers are physically located in the US anyway (10pts to Bioware for the genuine localised servers).
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OMG you couldn't play from 7 pm to 8:30 pm.... what a traumatic experience it must have been...
Apparently nowhere near as traumatic as some augment slots from old crit crafted gear not being fully swappable until tuesday.
Thank god that greater problem was solved.
And now on to solving world peace. I vote we confiscate all butter knives. Those things can be dangerous if someone's emotionally unstable and are clearly a major potential problem in maintaining peace. Bioware'll probably be with me, sounds on par with their priority system - who else agrees?
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Hey buddy.
You can't take YOUR total hours available and make it the maximum uptime. That's...incorrect. You can't take 41 hours and say thats the max uptime as server max uptime is considered 24 hour a day, 7 days a week.
So first, your math is wrong. I don't care if that's your "available play hours".
The truth is the server in a month is usually up around 96% of the time if not more. That's industry standard. Get over it. You are just a paying customer like the rest of us and Bioware hasn't done anything wrong here. If they had, I would be on your side.
Those are not my available hours. I work shift.
Those are an attempt at a reasonable estimate of potential playtime for someone who works 9-5 AEST (e.g. an average of an Asia region customer). NZ or Singaporean hours will be slightly different. Daytime EU & late night US players will be slightly different. But the primary timezone of the "average worker" in the Asia region servers is the simplest general approximation to underline my point. Late night US players actually have it the worst.. it's not like they can do much else but play games at that time of night.
3 maintenances in a week is too much & has an exaggerated effect on many player schedules, even if it is only a small number of hours in any given day/week/month/year. "When?" is just as significant a question as "how long?"
If Bioware randomly hauls down the servers for extra unscheduled maintenances for reasons as absurd as tonight's, then Bioware's management priorities are absolutely at fault. An augment fix? seriously? that couldn't have been done last night or, better yet, left till tuesday?
Stop, read tonight's patch notes, remember that tonight's patch started at 7pm on Friday night in (eastern) Australia and weigh it up the priorities those facts demonstrate.
If you're honest about what constitutes a reasonable standard of service & genuinely consider the matter, then I expect that you would absolutely be on "my side".
PS. Although frankly I'd like to think I don't have a side. I like this game. I'd like to play this game, I wouldn't be unhappy otherwise. What I'd like is for Bioware to acknowledge that their scheduling & prioritisation is making them look incompetent & negligent, and then I'd like them to sort themselves out & get onto a regular maintenance schedule which embodies better quality control & fewer rushed solutions.
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All urgent maintenances are pain in the ***, but everybody knows its needed if you fing a bug in game. Problem is, that maitenance is done in primary time for Asia/Pacific region. So what? In other case European or American players will be affected, it is impossible to fnd a time that will suit everybody...
Select items weren't showing up in a search in the AH for months. Some class quests were bugged for months. There's a thread full of faults, many of them more significant than what was fixed tonight. And that's unstandable. The natural state of an MMO is to be a little bit broken at all times, and that's why there are regular scheduled maintenances.
Yet none of those get emergency maintenances, whereas a minor augment bug warrants the third shutdown in a week?
I mean jeez, did it even occur to them that they might be able to roll last night & tonight's maintenance into one? It'd still be bloody annoying, and probably unwarranted, but it'd at least look halfway like the company wasn't being run by people who got flunked out of clown college.
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It actually took less than 2 hours.
Well that makes it all better then.
5 minutes of unscheduled maintenance for a bug of that mind-blowing enormity would be 5 minutes too long. If that couldn't wait until scheduled tuesday maintenance, then there is no bug that's unworthy of emergency maintenance.
Frankly, after that, I want an apology from Bioware.
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Items
•Augment slots in items crafted before 1.3 that have not been manually upgraded by players are now the appropriate tier based on the level of the item (if no augments are installed) or the level of the augment that is currently installed in the augment slot.
Wow, with all the threads complaining about this, I can see why they took servers down last night/this morning. Oh wait, there was one thread about it that managed to just break 2 pages.
Total and utter mismanagement.
Whoever handles their job prioritisation must be fishing for overtime when this is the sort of rubbish that can't wait 3-4 days till a regular scheduled maintenance.
This is not game-breaking by anyone's definition. Whoever authorised this downtime should cop an earful from their boss.
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Maintenance is a necessary evil and they have to do it sometime...no matter when that time is someone will be upset since they have players around the world.
Maintenance is indeed a necessary evil.
But three maintenances a week is either a screaming total system failure, chronic mismanagement, or both.
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I'm actually guessing that there is no balance. "It's 5 o'clock somewhere." I'm thinking this game has players in almost every time zone on the planet. So there's no "miracle cure." If you can figure it out, great, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. But staggering the maintenance times would be nice.
You don't even have to do it every week. I can handle the game being down from Noon to Four, Five , or Six once a week. I can deal with that. But three days in one week? Seriously? How does anyone think that's okay.
Yeah, the time isn't great but until they realise that one size doesn't fit all & do region-specific maintenances, someone does have to lose out.
The frequency is the real problem.
Bug fixes sound great, but fixes are meant to improve gameplay quality. A game which is down for maintenance doesn't have any gameplay, so it is fundamentally broken no matter how good it might be later.
If you really wanted to argue "more bugfixes, it improves quality", then surely they should shut down the server every night at the global offpeak time until all bugs are fixed. It'll permanently shut them out of whichever region loses out globally (at present, all late night US, daytime Euro & prime time Asia), but hey, game quality is better right? right?
There has to be a stability trade-off somewhere. More maintenance windows do not fundamentally improve stability. What they need is less maintenance, but maintenance of a higher quality standard.
No more last minute rush jobs, where they don't even know if they'll have it ready in time for their maintenance window until the last minute.
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First world problems...
Yeah, no one should ever be bothered by anything unless they're starving, surrounded by disease & being shot at by anti-government rebels. Unless those are your concerns, your concerns are irrelevant & clear indications that you're spoilt.
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Which also suggests they're desperately rushing to get things done & won't have things quite ready to go until 2 hours later than they'd initially planned.
So presumably there's absolutely no risk whatsoever of this being another rush job which hasn't been fully tested.
Nope, nothing at all rushed & half-baked about this one at all. Not like those two prior ones.
And if there are any problems, they'll be sure to fix it in a shutdown tomorrow.
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I applaud them.. I am glad they are fixing issues as soon as they crop up.. More power to them.. If you folks have issues with that.. Then you simply have issues..
Heck, your right. Bug fixing should be their highest priority.
Lets just haul the servers down & keep them down until all the currently known bugs are fixed.
Bug fixes are clearly more important than server uptime & stability of service, so it's the only logical solution.
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If you are going to compare, then you have the compare the games at the same point in it's lifespan.
LOTRO was down for 2 or 3 days straight (during the American Thanksgiving holiday even...talk about being short staffed!) on top of normal maintenance/patches/updates their first year.
Not really to be honest. I agree it'd be "fairer", but frankly you need to compare them with what the competition are doing now.
If you wanted to balance it against something a bit fairer, you could compare SWTORs patch release week with Blizzard or Trion's patch release weeks from this year.
In which case, SWTOR is still losing out. Blizzard goes longer but avoids multiple WoW maintenances like the plague (although D3 has been just as bad as SWTOR), while Trion seems to go for the opposite approach of twice-as-quick & frequent.
Bioware's trying to use a slightly quicker version of Blizzard's approach, but their rushed & haphazard management approach is ending up with Blizzard length maintenances with Trion's frequency. The worst of both worlds.
This is a management issue. They're bending their own rules in the name of speed & it's biting back at them.
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find me a MMO that gives you more playtime.
I'll save you some time, there IS NONE
Wow's maintenance takes out 1 night, so lets call that 5 hours (sometimes only 4 hours of one night, but lets bias this against WoW).
5 / 41 = 12.2% - so the moment SWTOR runs 2 maintenances (commonplace), they're worse than WoW for any maintenance timezone player & substantially worse for the casual players cos it's 2 nights versus 1.
I'm unfamiliar with Rift, been a long time since I've played it, but I'm told that 2-3 30 minute maintenances are routine. Lets bias it against Rift and call it 4x 30 for simplicity's sake:
2 / 41 = 4.9% - so, if those downtimes are accurate, Rift is always better than SWTOR.
So the moment SWTOR does an extra maintenance a week, they just became the worst of the 3 big names on the market. If they could actually stick to their schedule, they'd be in the right ballpark.
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They just need to roll out a cleaner patch and not rush to meet subscription deadlines.
That's the really disappointing bit about it all. These are systemic issues which cascade.
Rushed out a patch to try & make people happy? It's got flaws cos it's rushed.
So now people are unhappy because of the flaws, so now you're rushing another patch to fix the new flaws... Catch-22.
This is constant. The code isn't the fundamental problem, the code flaws are only the symptom - it's Bioware's operational practices that are actually creating the problems.
Less focus on speed would probably end up getting things done faster, because they wouldn't have to be constantly backtracking to fix things.
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They have to do it to someone, so they pick the fewest number of people. Either accept it and continue to pay for the game, or if you find it unacceptable you can stop paying them. Or you can hire a lawer and sue them for your $1 of play time that you lost.
The point is they don't have to do unscheduled maintenances to someone. They can stick to scheduled maintenances.
Just to reiterate: I have no problem with regular maintenance. I have a problem with the extra maintenances.
They've done extra maintenances to fix a relic 3-4 days prior to the scheduled maintenance. They have no sense of priorities. Their first reaction to any problem is "how quick can we fix it?", not "how well can we fix it?" and "does this really need to be fixed right this instant, or can it wait till our regular downtime?". They rush solutions & come out with half-cocked solutions because of it.
Metaphorically speaking, they'd shut down all the traffic in a city because there's been an accident on one road.
Another way to put an item in the chat??? (no shift click)
in General Discussion
Posted
Could be completely incorrect but I strongly suspect there isn't.
In my experience that sort of thing is normally done via a scripting/macro system in other MMOs (calling up data via item id).