7 hour shutdown

[Elishah]

Speaking as someone who has worked in reliability engineering for Google for most of the past decade...

 

Expected uptime depends on the criticality of the service. Generally speaking, 99.999% uptime is expected for a critical, revenue-generating service. Uptime can reasonably go as low as 99.9% for a minor, poorly designed service that you don't particularly care about.

 

For some reason, Bioware seems to consider it acceptable to run the service that is core to their entire business at less than 96% uptime. This is the approximate level of reliability that one would expect from the pet project of a child who has to wait on responding to outages until elementary school lets out.

[Valethar]

Except that Google isn't an MMO it is a large array of thousands upon thousands of servers with multiple redundancies in place that allow them to do constant maintenance by only pulling one or two down at a time.

 

 

Depends on how the system is set up.

 

This one does not allow phased maintenance. Period. The system that is in place for SWTOR requires all servers to come down at once, rather than in groups.

 

Reference:

 

http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-march-2nd-2012

 

Rtwozero - Any plans to implement region by region maintenance times?

 

Blaine Christine (Sr. Producer, Live Services): At this time there are no plans to implement separate maintenance times by region. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a global service with no restrictions on a player’s server choice.

 

Unfortunately the trade-off is that we have to maintain a single service environment, which leads to global maintenance periods. We are very sensitive to the fact that we are limiting play time once per week with a global scheduled maintenance.

 

We have carefully examined global peak times and the number of players affected by our planned downtime. Those of you that have been with us since launch may have noticed that the first few patches were scheduled at 4 AM CST; we very quickly adjusted to 2 AM CST. The reason for this adjustment was an analysis of the peak time play patterns by region that resulted in the current start time.

 

We understand that this is especially concerning to players in the European and newly opened Asia/Pacific server regions. We will always do our best to minimize the downtime, but it is the only way that we can perform critical service updates on the game client and on the game’s network infrastructure, underlying platform systems and so on.

 

Thank you for bringing your concerns to us – we will always listen and do our best to make adjustments when possible, but at this time, we have to move forward with a single global maintenance period.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Valethar

[kottonmouth]

Actually, several of the ones you deleted WERE on topic.

 

A post of mine on the test forums asking about pvp sentinels efficacy in 1.2 was removed for being off topic. Mod said all posts were to be about patch 1.2... I'm pretty sure it was the same mod.

[Sparklehorse]

Seems everyone has forgotten that last week required no downtime at all.

[Grayseven]

Why do you guys need to know what they do? Just be happy that they do it, the money you pay to subscribe to this game is what enables those people who do those 'mystery tasks' to do so and keep the game running.

 

I don't get what makes people think they deserve to know every little detail of what happens, if they did not do shutdowns to fix things the game would end up a lot worse for bugs than it is, then there would be an array of posts crying about how buggy the game is and wondering why they don't shut down and fix it from time to time.

 

Shut up, deal with it.

 

You need to chill...

 

If people REALLY have an idea on how things work, and how MMO servers are different from Search Engine servers, and why maintenance has to be done and why it is done weekly, then maybe they'll shut up about it and stop whining every week when downtimes are announced.

 

Maintenance has to be done. Period. It involves more than just turning everything off and back on again and until people learn the reason why it is done and has to be done we will be inundated with post after post whining about weekly shutdown.

 

I can sit here and describe what I've learned about the subject, but I'm just a User and anything I (and anyone else being a self-described expert but then says something ignorant to prove their statement false) say is just gas in the wind.

 

If an agent of Bioware describes the basics without getting into proprietary information or techno-talk that laymen wouldn't understand it would go a long way towards quieting the masses.

[Shaz]

Seems everyone has forgotten that last week required no downtime at all.

 

To be fair, last week they'd already brought it down for maintenance... on the Friday before that Tuesday. It's not surprising that they'd already done their downtime-required maintenance then. Friday's downtime instigated enough rage as it was. Tuesday's lack of downtime was an attempt at preventing the torches and pitchforks from coming out.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Shaz

[Bhaers]

We will now be performing scheduled maintenance for seven hours on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 from 2AM CDT until 9AM CDT (Central US Daylight Savings Time)[/Quote]

 

To expand Bobiefatt's fine post a little for those not au fait with timezones:

 

4/3/12 00:00 PDT to 07:00 PDT - (Starts Midnight) Pacific Daylight Time (Los Angeles etc)

4/3/12 03:00 EDT to 10:00 EDT - Eastern Daylight Time (New York City, etc)

3/4/12 08:00 BST to 15:00 BST - (Ends 3PM) British Summer Time (London etc)

3/4/12 09:00 CEST/MESZ to 16:00 CEST/MESZ - (Ends 4PM) Central Europe Summer Time (Paris etc)

3/4/12 15:00 AWST to 22:00 AWST (Starts 3PM ends 10PM) Australian Western Standard Time (Perth)

3/4/12 17:00 AEST to 4/4/12 00:00 AEST - (Starts 5PM ends Midnight Wednesday) Australian Eastern Standard Time (Sydney, Melbourne etc)

3/4/12 19:00 NZST to 4/4/12 02:00 NZST - (Starts 7PM ends 2AM Wednesday) New Zealand Standard Time (Auckland, Christchurch)

 

Note that I have the dates in the format of the timezone America is backwards to the rest of the English speaking world.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Bhaers

[skinthinner]

What i'd like to stress out for those who are saying "it's better they told us it's gonna take 7 hours than say it's gonna take 3"

 

well, here you go pal.

 

"We will now be performing scheduled maintenance for seven hours on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 from 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/8AM BST/9AM CEST/5PM AEST) until 9AM CDT (7AM PDT/10AM EDT/3PM BST/4PM CEST/12AM AEST). All game servers and SWTOR.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than seven hours, but could be extended."

 

This maintenance could take a full day if they felt like it, and by "felt like it" i mean, they screw something up and patch it few hours or minutes later. But hey, it's not like they have public test servers to test those things out do they now?

 

And those saying "maintenances take some time", i'd like to see google or even battlelog (which has more players a day than swtor had on day 1) going through maintenance for seven hours. omg those heads would roll.. da horror..

 

you are funny.

 

you do know that google and other places have FARMS of servers they can roll over too and keep things going while they change some then roll over and change the rest.... like a bazzillion more threads available than on tor... sheesh

 

second... like others have said... other companies don't bother to even give the long term range... they just spring it on folks...bw seems to give the longest time and works back from there... even with a caveat of longer if needed.

 

so my goodness, so much clatter on your end to cause confusion and derision... think about the topic and posts before you respond.

[DieAlteHexe]

To be fair, last week they'd already brought it down for maintenance... on the Friday before that Tuesday. It's not surprising that they'd already done their downtime-required maintenance then. Friday's downtime instigated enough rage as it was. Tuesday's lack of downtime was an attempt at preventing the torches and pitchforks from coming out.

 

I don't think that was a maint. shutdown, pretty sure it was a fix for the code used during the upcoming weekend pass/trial whatchamacallit.

 

And...if BW think they can avoid the pitchfork and torch bunch, they're naive. It's impossible. One can find something to get "outraged" about if one looks hard enough and that lot have verrrry good "eyesight".

[Banicks]

Seems everyone has forgotten that last week required no downtime at all.

 

Actually Master Dar'Nala experienced two isolated periods of downtime lasting longer than 30 minutes on both occaisions over the past 7 days.

 

Coupled with 3 lots of outage the week beforehand (Tuesday patch, "Emergency" patch on Friday night and then the isolated incidents of the following Tuesday's "live patch" - which disconnected myself and other guildees for a period exceeding 30 minutes), you will find we've actually had more downtime during peak Australian/Oceanic playing time in the past fortnight than any other time thus far.

 

To boot, we now have this patch brought forward to 5:00pm, ensuring no one in Australia can play today until late night at the best.

 

Pretty poor effort and zero consideration.

 

If BW value anything besides an American player they need to look into staggering these outages for not just Oceanic players but also European players. It is a complete sham that will take it's toll eventually losing them subscribers.

[ConradLionhart]

I am confused with figuring out all these weird time zones can anyone tell me in hours when the server maintenance is going to start from now. Tyvm

 

They should use GMT which is the universal time zone. Why did they put in BST? BST is GMT+1 I think.

[samueljeg]

They should use GMT which is the universal time zone. Why did they put in BST? BST is GMT+1 I think.

 

Failing GMT and/or Zulu how bout New Zealand Standard time.

P.S i have Zulu/gmt on my watch

______________________________________________________________________

 

Lvl 19 Jedi Guardian

Edited April 12, 2012 by samueljeg