Please just read this.

[Fueler]

Im Playing AO for the fun of it, its a great game and i think its very amusing aswell but lately, (this last 2 weeks) the downtimes has been very overwhelming and im not paying 12.95$ for downtime. Why cant you do anything right and make a working patch before you put the server offline for three or even SIX hours.. this is starting to get annoying.. you should repay the rubi-ka citisens in some way cause this isnt right. No other MMORPG have this much downtimes. Except neocron and thats cause it very new. please fix this.. or youll have 1 MORE unhappy customer.

Regards, Hyjal

[______________Cahlor]

The strange part of it is that you have played for a total of 4 weeks? Doesnt have anything to do with your thread but anyways i agree with you Hyland...

[______________Yazule]

Originally posted by Hyjal
Im Playing AO for the fun of it, its a great game and i think its very amusing aswell but lately, (this last 2 weeks) the downtimes has been very overwhelming and im not paying 12.95$ for downtime. Why cant you do anything right and make a working patch before you put the server offline for three or even SIX hours.. this is starting to get annoying.. you should repay the rubi-ka citisens in some way cause this isnt right. No other MMORPG have this much downtimes. Except neocron and thats cause it very new. please fix this.. or youll have 1 MORE unhappy customer.

Regards, Hyjal

actually UO goes down every day for about 6 hours a pop

[________________Miir]

(this last 2 weeks) the downtimes has been very overwhelming

4 hours previous week (scheduled server maintenance)
4 hours last week (scheduled server maintenance)
6 Hour patch on Friday (+1-2 hours for emergency fixes)
3 Hours today (assuming its a fix/patch)

Thats about 5% downtime.
While I agree that's a little high, you have to understand that Funcom is gearing AO up for Notum Wars and adding a lot of code, items and features.
As a comparison, when Everquest released the first 2 expansions they had almost daily downtime for 2 weeks previous and the week after is was released.


and im not paying 12.95$ for downtime

Nowhere in the user agreement does Funcom guarantee 100% uptime. The usual downtime per month (weekly server maintenece and patches) is usually only 20-25 hours.



No other MMORPG have this much downtimes

EQ has had weeks where there was excessive downtimes (10-15 hour patches and 6 hour emergency patches following). AC frequently had entire days where you could not play. UO downtime is in a league of it's own.



please fix this.. or youll have 1 MORE unhappy customer

MMOGs have downtime.
It's the nature of the beast.
Complaining about it is futile.

[Fueler]

Nice answer.. whatever your name was.. i guess youre right but i dont like it anyway

[___________wrecklass]

Unfortunately, any computer system has to be taken down for maintenance or updates. MMOGs are no exception. I've been playing AO for about two months now, and I have been very happey with the downtimes. They have all been at times when I couldn't play anyway.

I am sure that they look at their daily server loads, and decide on patch times when the fewest people are online. I suspect that you have a work or timezone issue where you have to play when they are most likely to patch, and that would be frustrating.

Hopefully once NW gets launched, the number of downtimes will decrease.

What has made me happy is the fact that unscheduled server downtimes/crashes are very rare in AO compared to other games.

[__________Wraith God]

Originally posted by wrecklass
Unfortunately, any computer system has to be taken down for maintenance or updates.

Not actually true. The telephone network is a good example. When was the last time your phone was down for a switch upgrade? Basically never.

One way to do this is with redundant systems. Say you have two identical systems. You upgrade the software on one system, and new calls use that. When all the calls on the old system are finished, the old system gets upgraded too.

A virtual persistent multiplayer world is different problem however, because the world is shared. So you can't switch over piecemeal as you can with telephone calls. I think redundancy would still work, but here the problem becomes switching everyone over to the upgraded system at the same time.

This would involve getting everyone's status and position and loading them into the upgraded system, as well as switching everyone's connection to the new system at once.

One way to get everyone's position simultaneously without freezing the system is to use mirroring. You have two systems. You upgrade one, and let it run in parellel with the old system for a while. All information going into the old system goes into the new one as well. In a relatively short period of time, the two system would have a common representation of player positions.

To switch over to the new system, the connections would have to be run though an intermediary machine with a software layer that could easily toggle connections between machines. Under normal operation, each player has a single connection established, and runs through that. Under upgrade condtions, each player has a primary and a secondary connection. The primary is a connection to the old system, and the secondary to the new. To switch between systems, all that is required is to change the stream that is giving feedback to the player's client from the old to the new system. As the new system is in sync with the old because of the mirroring, players shouldn't notice any interruption.

Of courxe, problems would arise of the two worlds were significantly different, as then the mirroring could not be consistent. But for most bug fixes, this is not going to be the case.

[aaronb]

It's a game, not some critical banking network or something. The costs associated with the kind of reliability you are suggesting is astronomical and far outweighs the benefits. I'd rather funcom stay in business and focus their efforts on improving the game.

[tinytoon]

Originally posted by aaronb
It's a game.

It is? damnit I knew I had right!

[locomdenom]

Strange, the telco network around here goes down ALL THE FREAKING TIME.

Thankfully, I'm no modem player.

(Icestorms, BTW, are the main reason; lines get replaced a LOT when there are 2-3 icestorms a month that can take them out)