Maintenance: October 24th, 2017

[AscendingSky]

This statement pretty much translates to:

 

"We set the house on fire to see if you would call the fire department."

 

"Immediately after we set the house on fire, we told you that we could not see any fire ourselves. We only later admitted the house was on fire after the fire department showed up. We then told you that if you would give us two weeks of time to sort things out, we could take care of the fire ourselves, and the fire department wouldn't be needed. We know that's not true, but we told you that anyways because we think you're ignorant of how fire works."

[teclado]

Turns out my ping only doubled (roughly - 60ms to 110ms). I was expecting worse.

 

My biggest gripe is this: what's the point of Satele Shan...er NA server #2 now? If you give us cheap transfers again, I'm just gonna move over to whichever one has the larger pvp population. That's all I ever wanted, and that's what I thought we were getting with United Forces. If you don't give us cheap transfers and I'm on the server with the smaller population, I'm just gonna quit the game again.

[HKtheindomitable]

(facepalm)

 

It seems the higher ups over there think of much of your playerbase as whiny, raging, spoiled millennials whose opinions don't matter and who can't possibly have anything of value to add to their omniscient, always-right, epic gaming-business knowledge. And that the rest of the base is crack-addicted, abused, battered fans who will continue to tolerate increasing levels of abuse and maltreatment because some Star Wars RPG is better than nothing. So I won't bother trying to offer any business "advice" here - just let me say, as a business owner myself - this is just bad, bad, bad.

 

But for the sake of basic decency, even if you all think we're all just addicted fiends and/or morons, please still try to treat us with some respect and STOP offering up comments like above. It's so obviously untrue that is seems like you're intentionally mocking us. This is what's hardest to stomach for me.

 

Give us the truth or tell us you can't give us the truth. But please stop with the mockery. I think that's a fair request...

 

The fact that you and many others are insisting that they are lying and being deceitful makes your assumption about how people here are viewed true. You do it to yourself by QQing over small things.

[orangenee]

P.S. In the time we were telling you about the fire and how fire works even though you already knew how fire works, we kind of forgot about the actual fire and it kind of spread and got out of our control.

 

Fortunately it spread in the direction of the Pacific region so we don't care.

 

XXX,

BW Clusterfondle Division.

[HKtheindomitable]

Turns out my ping only doubled (roughly - 60ms to 110ms). I was expecting worse.

 

My biggest gripe is this: what's the point of Satele Shan...er NA server #2 now? If you give us cheap transfers again, I'm just gonna move over to whichever one has the larger pvp population. That's all I ever wanted, and that's what I thought we were getting with United Forces. If you don't give us cheap transfers and I'm on the server with the smaller population, I'm just gonna quit the game again.

 

From what I remember, there will still be East and West coast servers. I have a feeling that the consolidation will allow the transfers to happen faster. Though if your going from server A to A and B to B It wouldn't be necessary to do that. The infrastructure would be one reason to do it. Otherwise it would cost way more to have a single server big enough to hold all of it.

[MikeTheDuke]

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

This disappointments me further, beyond the fact that we in Asia Pacific were mainly the ones who were going to be affected. Was this because you knew of populations that would be affected would be a lot smaller and thus did it anyway. Gather feedback, how, report in game on the forums. I logged in last night, saw my average ping go from 170-180 to 270-280, before spikes would go up to 500-600ms, now spikes are up to 700-800ms. I logged on during the peak time, so everyone getting home from work and this was when the majority of spikes were prevalent, logged on at 11pm AEDT and was able to get a stable ping of 280-290ms really didn't deviate much from this.

 

I utilised an application called Battleping and it was able to reduce the ping to a very stable, 274ms, albeit this was at about 11pm timeslot. But I shouldn't have to pay extra money when before I would get regular pings below 200ms during peak times.

 

I can understand that you guys could help reduce the spiking the game has from time to time when it is produced by the game servers, the data centre, etc.. but the physical distance, as many APAC players know already we are already disadvantaged just looking at the statistics for number of activations per minute which turn into DPS not surprisingly, how do you plan to overcome this physical distance, or do you feel there is a level of acceptable ping and you figure the APAC community falls into that level of acceptable. I emplore you, to come to Australia, and just see what an impact this can have on gameplay.

 

Like I have said, I am so very disappopinted by this choice and further more the choice not to tell the players just to see if they would notice the ping, seriously when we used to have 3 bars and it dips to 2 to 1 bar, but now only see 2 bars and it can drop into the red frequently.Just disappointed.

[Kaizersan]

Hey folks,

 

As many of you know, on Tuesday Keith explained that in preparation for United Forces we moved all current west coast servers into our Virginia data center. Here’s some of the key questions we have received about the North American datacenter change:

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

My ping has gone up since the change and it is affecting my gameplay, what options do I have?

Please continue to report it! As Keith mentioned in his forum post this is something we are actively tracking and working with our network partners to address where possible. We will be working through this especially over the next two weeks as we ramp up to United Forces.

 

Could there be one data center in the Central US so that pings are more even for each coast?

Creating an entirely new datacenter is a daunting task, even above and beyond the substantial changes we have already made this year. This just isn’t something that was viable in the scope of the changes we made for United Forces.

 

Since all of NA is in one datacenter, shouldn’t we just have one server?

Moving all of NA together would create a very heavily populated server. This would introduce several challenges: 1) Players would likely experience queues accessing the server and 2) It would increase the chances for server instability and downtime. There are also a variety of other issues, but a key concern was combining all of North America would result in substantially more character name collisions.

 

We hope this answers some of your questions and lets you know what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks. Please remember, on November 8th we will move all players to their new servers during an extended maintenance (currently looking like 12 hours). We are also discussing starting a few hours earlier than usual (e.g., 2 or 3am CT), but will let you know a few days beforehand.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

How about just doing the smarter thing and not doing it at all as you clearly knew it would impact players and still chose to do so anyways without any care to your players in the APAC region.

[ScottishDrunk]

Translated

 

"We don't give a **** if you spent money moving things or your games broken, what's done is done. Suck it up"

[Trogusaurus]

So you people know what took place because you work there, were present at the time, and personally know all employees?

 

What part of your reply was meant to be relevant? I don't need to know anyone from Bioware (or EA, for that matter) to know that the quality of the product no longer justifies the money I spent for it, and judging by the replies here, many people agree. Gameplay experience has actually managed to decline since last year, and this news only adds to the trend.

 

Frankly, I don't care who made the decision, or how it was made. At some point along the chain, this was decided, and someone somewhere deliberately chose to hamstring us all by releasing such important information after the fact. That is poor business practice, and I hope for Bioware's sake that this was the Austin branch's doing. Because if it wasn't, then one can reasonably expect that this type of piss poor treatment of paying customers will be repeated in future titles.

 

The fact that you and many others are insisting that they are lying and being deceitful makes your assumption about how people here are viewed true. You do it to yourself by QQing over small things.

 

"The United Forces update expands your connection to a galactic-sized community of players. We will be integrating our existing seventeen servers to five new servers, one for each existing region and language." ---10/2 UF Roadmap update

 

I wonder what kind of mental gymnastics you'll twist through to defend the devs on this one. They lied, and you know it.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Trogusaurus

[DanNV]

Frankly, I don't care who made the decision, or how it was made. At some point along the chain, this was decided, and someone somewhere deliberately chose to hamstring us all by releasing such important information after the fact. That is poor business practice, and I hope for Bioware's sake that this was the Austin branch's doing. Because if it wasn't, then one can reasonably expect that this type of piss poor treatment of paying customers will be repeated in future titles.

/QUOTE]

 

What would make anyone think it won't be repeated? It's typical of how EA does business.

[Christie_Swift]

Hey folks,

 

As many of you know, on Tuesday Keith explained that in preparation for United Forces we moved all current west coast servers into our Virginia data center. Here’s some of the key questions we have received about the North American datacenter change:

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

My ping has gone up since the change and it is affecting my gameplay, what options do I have?

Please continue to report it! As Keith mentioned in his forum post this is something we are actively tracking and working with our network partners to address where possible. We will be working through this especially over the next two weeks as we ramp up to United Forces.

 

Could there be one data center in the Central US so that pings are more even for each coast?

Creating an entirely new datacenter is a daunting task, even above and beyond the substantial changes we have already made this year. This just isn’t something that was viable in the scope of the changes we made for United Forces.

 

Since all of NA is in one datacenter, shouldn’t we just have one server?

Moving all of NA together would create a very heavily populated server. This would introduce several challenges: 1) Players would likely experience queues accessing the server and 2) It would increase the chances for server instability and downtime. There are also a variety of other issues, but a key concern was combining all of North America would result in substantially more character name collisions.

 

We hope this answers some of your questions and lets you know what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks. Please remember, on November 8th we will move all players to their new servers during an extended maintenance (currently looking like 12 hours). We are also discussing starting a few hours earlier than usual (e.g., 2 or 3am CT), but will let you know a few days beforehand.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

Does this mean that there won't be anymore room for 2 separate servers in NA in Nov? Whatever happened to:

Star Forge: (North America)

Satele Shan: (North America)

 

Are these now basically in a single data canter and will be in same East Coast area as is now?

[Joonbeams]

The fact that you and many others are insisting that they are lying and being deceitful makes your assumption about how people here are viewed true. You do it to yourself by QQing over small things.

 

Look, I can't help you if you are unwilling under any circumstances to call a spade a spade. This is what's very wrong with our society where people can just lie and be deceitful and have it go totally unchallenged.

 

This statement below REEKS of deceit. You're right, I cannot say for sure that it's a lie - so I will ADMIT that charge may be over the line. But as I tried to intimate in my earlier post, that almost doesn't matter. It's a pure mockery of the playerbase REGARDLESS:

 

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question).

-eric

 

" [W]e wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience."?? Really? Does this make ANY sense? Telling us ahead of time would have prevented this how? How does one preclude the other? Just read it, and please tell me how you can make sense of this? As I've said, I can't know for sure if this reasoning is true, but if it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then the packaging needs to be much better so as to not seem as mocking and insulting as this comes across.

 

And one person's 'small things'...lemme just say "to each his own" as to what's big or small, so no point quibbling there.

 

I'm as much of a committed fan as anyone else here. And I'm not asking for anything I don't do myself. But BW isn't even helping their "white knights." They're handing poisoned-tipped spears and javelins to the "enemy" spearmen instead with comments like these.

[K_osss]

Hey folks,

 

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

How does choosing not to tell us give us the ability to login and determine the impact to our gameplay experience. That doesn't make sense. We would still have had that ability and would have been MORE aware of what to look for had you told us in advance. Not a good choice on your part. Especially when you're actively trying to foster more transparency. Keep up the transparency and don't repeat mistakes from the past like not cluing players in and giving them crap excuses.

[Kaizersan]

" [W]e wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience."?? Really? Does this make ANY sense? Telling us ahead of time would have prevented this how? How does one preclude the other? Just read it, and please tell me how you can make sense of this? As I've said, I can't know for sure if this reasoning is true, but if it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then the packaging needs to be much better so as to not seem as mocking and insulting as this comes across.

 

And one person's 'small things'...lemme just say "to each his own" as to what's big or small, so no point quibbling there.

 

I'm as much of a committed fan as anyone else here. And I'm not asking for anything I don't do myself. But BW isn't even helping their "white knights." They're handing poisoned-tipped spears and javelins to the "enemy" spearmen instead with comments like these.

 

funny thing is when FFFXIV moved their NA data centers they told the players ahead of time so they could provide before and after evidence so they could better study the impact on players based on location.

[Trogusaurus]

Look, I can't help you if you are unwilling under any circumstances to call a spade a spade. This is what's very wrong with our society where people can just lie and be deceitful and have it go totally unchallenged.

 

This statement below REEKS of deceit. You're right, I cannot say for sure that it's a lie - so I will ADMIT that charge may be over the line. But as I tried to intimate in my earlier post, that almost doesn't matter. It's a pure mockery of the playerbase REGARDLESS:

 

Yes, you can claim with certainty that it was a lie, because they specifically said in the 10/2 Roadmap update that they were rolling all of the servers into "one for each existing region and language". Last time I checked, the server list always had distinct East/West Coast designations for NA servers. So unless they want to retroactively redefine the word "region", this wasn't even a lie of omission, it was just a lie.

 

You are in no way spouting hyperbole. Don't let this dishonest apologist try to convince you, or anyone else, otherwise.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Trogusaurus

[ZeroTypeR]

(just subbing for the companion)

 

I've had my guard up and trust nothing said by BW/EA since 4.0 (and need for speed world), so I'm not surprised by this latest 'bad idea' in regards to this game. I feel very bad for west coast and APAC players...

[Deewe]

My ping has gone up since the change and it is affecting my gameplay, ...we are actively tracking and working with our network partners to address where possible. We will be working through this especially over the next two weeks

Honestly, What The Heck can you do to reduce the latency over two weeks, when I saw top notch network engineers requiring months of efforts and huge budgets to improve it for trade market feeds*?

 

Please enlighten us, cause for now feels like misinformation.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Deewe

[Mdgshorty]

Hey folks,

 

As many of you know, on Tuesday Keith explained that in preparation for United Forces we moved all current west coast servers into our Virginia data center. Here’s some of the key questions we have received about the North American datacenter change:

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

My ping has gone up since the change and it is affecting my gameplay, what options do I have?

Please continue to report it! As Keith mentioned in his forum post this is something we are actively tracking and working with our network partners to address where possible. We will be working through this especially over the next two weeks as we ramp up to United Forces.

 

Could there be one data center in the Central US so that pings are more even for each coast?

Creating an entirely new datacenter is a daunting task, even above and beyond the substantial changes we have already made this year. This just isn’t something that was viable in the scope of the changes we made for United Forces.

 

Since all of NA is in one datacenter, shouldn’t we just have one server?

Moving all of NA together would create a very heavily populated server. This would introduce several challenges: 1) Players would likely experience queues accessing the server and 2) It would increase the chances for server instability and downtime. There are also a variety of other issues, but a key concern was combining all of North America would result in substantially more character name collisions.

 

We hope this answers some of your questions and lets you know what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks. Please remember, on November 8th we will move all players to their new servers during an extended maintenance (currently looking like 12 hours). We are also discussing starting a few hours earlier than usual (e.g., 2 or 3am CT), but will let you know a few days beforehand.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

Eric,

 

You guys really should have let everyone know ahead of time what was going on. I get why, but you are loosing credability every time you decide to do something like this. When you reopen up transfers, please make them 90CC. You owe people that much because if they had the information beforehand, they would have made an informed decision as to which server they want to be on.

 

If you had let everyone know ahead of time, they will still be upset like this but at least you were up front about it.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Mdgshorty

[Lakemine]

How does choosing not to tell us give us the ability to login and determine the impact to our gameplay experience. That doesn't make sense. We would still have had that ability and would have been MORE aware of what to look for had you told us in advance. Not a good choice on your part. Especially when you're actively trying to foster more transparency. Keep up the transparency and don't repeat mistakes from the past like not cluing players in and giving them crap excuses.

 

I think because if they said ahead of time, then more then average, or more people then were "actually" having the problem, would send in tickets. With not saying anything ahead of time, only the people who send tickets in during the first 24-36 hours were the "true" people having issues.

 

Right..........still is wrong for not communicating Bioware/EA/devs really really REALLY wrong. You explain and/or withhold information about exploits because "We don't want people gate rushing to do it before its removed." or "We wanted to get this out there so people know so they don't accidentally do it. Remember, do not do this exploit, you will be banned." So why not for technical issues that gamers have no control over? In game control of their character and where to go is for the player to control. (Within the context of the game) But why not communicate things outside of the player control? Just sad.

 

And yes....have you guys seen the PR for ME:A? ROFL:D

 

Wonder what "issues" Anthem is going to have.......oh the theories......

[obek_kwae]

Hey folks,

 

As many of you know, on Tuesday Keith explained that in preparation for United Forces we moved all current west coast servers into our Virginia data center. Here’s some of the key questions we have received about the North American datacenter change:

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

My ping has gone up since the change and it is affecting my gameplay, what options do I have?

Please continue to report it! As Keith mentioned in his forum post this is something we are actively tracking and working with our network partners to address where possible. We will be working through this especially over the next two weeks as we ramp up to United Forces.

 

Could there be one data center in the Central US so that pings are more even for each coast?

Creating an entirely new datacenter is a daunting task, even above and beyond the substantial changes we have already made this year. This just isn’t something that was viable in the scope of the changes we made for United Forces.

 

Since all of NA is in one datacenter, shouldn’t we just have one server?

Moving all of NA together would create a very heavily populated server. This would introduce several challenges: 1) Players would likely experience queues accessing the server and 2) It would increase the chances for server instability and downtime. There are also a variety of other issues, but a key concern was combining all of North America would result in substantially more character name collisions.

 

We hope this answers some of your questions and lets you know what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks. Please remember, on November 8th we will move all players to their new servers during an extended maintenance (currently looking like 12 hours). We are also discussing starting a few hours earlier than usual (e.g., 2 or 3am CT), but will let you know a few days beforehand.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

As an APAC player who just came back for a look at the game a couple of weeks ago and had actually started to enjoy it again (and stupidly spent a bit of money i'll add), I'm done. Ping is worse tired of Eric and EA's BS/LIES. Cancelled my sub and will move on. EA/Bio can see what i spent since i came back to the game and if they'r willing to toss that aside, so be it. I'll give them the same courtesy they show me - that is NONE.

[Darth-Gorog]

It's hard to relate to all this outrage, since I have played with high ping since launch. Even now i notice little to no difference in my ping when I play the game, so is it really just a minor ping increase that has got everyone's knickers in a twist?

[Eli_Porter]

If they knew about it ahead of time, why not move the datacenter to the west instead of the east? USEast players can handle the extra ping, APAC players clearly cannot.

[Asmodesu]

It's hard to relate to all this outrage, since I have played with high ping since launch. Even now i notice little to no difference in my ping when I play the game, so is it really just a minor ping increase that has got everyone's knickers in a twist?

 

for some of us the ping either doubled or tripled, some even more then that. once you go from being used to 250ms for years, and then suddenly dealing with 500ms or more and knowing it cannot go lower now... yeah that is going to make an impact in affected people's gameplay and it will understandably upset them since it rules out, for them, many aspects of the game as they won't be able to perform or play in those (PvP, operations, some flashpoints).

[KittyKat_Karrot]

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game

 

Nice word salad lol. How dumb do you think people are- besides being dumb enough to not expect shady stuff like this?

 

The real reason is that EA has you guys on skeleton crew status and wanted to cut costs by shutting down a data center. You didn't wanna start a panic about a downsizing that's inexorably going to negatively impact a large fraction of your playerbase (not me, I'm east coast), so you just slid it in there low key, hoping people wouldn't complain too much.

Edited October 26, 2017 by KittyKat_Karrot

[Tahana]

Does this mean that there won't be anymore room for 2 separate servers in NA in Nov? Whatever happened to:

Star Forge: (North America)

Satele Shan: (North America)

 

Are these now basically in a single data canter and will be in same East Coast area as is now?

 

That hasn't changed or at least they haven't said it changed. In fact in Eric's post he said they weren't going to do one big server for 'reasons'..

 

That being said, the servers could and will most probably be physically located in the same cabinet.