A couple of ideas for those complaining about down times.
A. Find a new Genre, this happens with EVERY mmo in their first few months.
Apart from RIFT, the latest comparible released MMO, see post above. People really need to stop thinking that hours on end of down time is acceptable, its not, stop sticking up for companies doing it from sheer lazyness. They need to turn there attention to server development like TRION did.
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A couple of ideas for those complaining about down times.
A. Find a new Genre, this happens with EVERY mmo in their first few months.
Apart from RIFT, the latest comparible released MMO, see post above. People really need to stop thinking that hours on end of down time is acceptable, its not, stop sticking up for companies doing it from sheer lazyness. They need to turn there attention to server development like TRION did.
Actually i do recall several down times during rifts first few weeks that did last a few hours. Rift also has about 1/4 of the content that SWTOR has, also about 1/4 the population at launch. Clearly you have no idea what it takes to maintain and run stable servers for anything, hours of downtime are acceptable.
Originally posted by Hauken Im ok with servers beeing down for maint, But EIGHT hours!!!! No other MMO that i have played have so many hours for downtime. LOTRO only have about 3-4 hrs. Heck even SWG back in the days only had about four hrs downtime for patches.
WoW servers has been down for +12 hours sometimes, they gotta maintain 250+ servers.
I don't mean this sarcastically at all but is this your first MMO?
Most MMO, have a weekly mainetenance. World of Warcraft has had weekly (almost every week) for many, many years. When Everquest 2 first lauched, you actually had a daily mainetnence where they patched the game daily to fix little bugs that popped up and stuff. Things will get better over time. I know how frustrating it is to have the game be down, especially when they take the game down for a 4+ hour maintenance more than once a week. It will get better. Just hang in there.
I started playing MMOs in '99 with EQ. I had never seen a weekly patch like Blizz did with wow. every tuesday, yoy couldnt play half the day, downloaded the patch and reconfigured your add-ons the other half. Its one of many reasons why it was the first MMO I didnt last a year with. I am playing RIFT now, and the patches are quick and painless. I had joked to a friend back when I wasted my time playing wow, that Blizz should comp people for 4 days a month when we basically cant play due to their patching.
when constant patching causes people to miss playing their game, sub fees need to be adjusted. apparently this is happening in swtor as I am seeing this complaing ALOT.
Why are they doing this? Why can't they just let the servers run themselves? Can't they just launch the game and then leave? My god think of all the money they would save if they just would leave the game alone and let it run itself. Why are they bothering to try to fix things?
Another thing, why don't they tell us ahead of time when they are doing this? At least make it THE SAME TIME EVERY WEEK! C'mon BW! Why are you trying to make the game better? Jeez!
Oh yeah why don't they alter the rotation of the Earth so that all maitenance times are early in the morning! That should be priority #1 BW!
Fixing and maintaining the servers... what is BW thinking!
Maybe they simply use the wrong technology. There actually are IT systems which can be patched at runtime with zero downtime. Ask Ericcson and their telecommunications system with a availability of >99%.
Erlang anyone?
Edit: And for the record, such telecommunication systems have a way higher load than our measly MMOs.
You mean like Rift having 99.5%+ uptime, patches/maintenance only last 20-30 min at resonable non peak times (even the one that gave us a 3gb patch). You would have thought that companys with budget several times larger could manage this also. I will expect nothing less from now on from any MMO released in 2012 - there is no excuse.
A couple of ideas for those complaining about down times.
A. Find a new Genre, this happens with EVERY mmo in their first few months.
Apart from RIFT, the latest comparible released MMO, see post above. People really need to stop thinking that hours on end of down time is acceptable, its not, stop sticking up for companies doing it from sheer lazyness. They need to turn there attention to server development like TRION did.
Actually i do recall several down times during rifts first few weeks that did last a few hours. Rift also has about 1/4 of the content that SWTOR has, also about 1/4 the population at launch. Clearly you have no idea what it takes to maintain and run stable servers for anything, hours of downtime are acceptable.
As already pointed out by me and others they are at least unnecessary, numbers are no excuse. The number of SWTOR players are still nothing compared to other systems' load. If they are acceptable solely depends on the customer I'd say. If they're acceptable for you, everything's ok, if not, maybe just leave. Luckily this is all no problem for me. Still, as a software engineer, I would have expected more from such a company in these times (10 or so years after WoW?).
But yes, unscheduled downtimes shortly after launch are to be expected, I suppose.
today is the planned maintenance so you planned your gametime wrong today......i had the same feeling last saturday.
they are losing subs bcause of their server down times tough.......alot me thinks.
The self centered and 'world revolves around me' are quitting because company is fixing nad updating a newly released MMO? is anyone even going to miss these people?
"You" might - when they start having to merge servers and EA reduce the number of developers (so less new content, less fixes and so on). And sadly a lot of what they have been patching so far should have been in on day 1 or picked up by testing. But heh - they probably expected some people to actively defend them; right?
The norm, today, is to have EU and NA maintenance. Not perfect, there are other time zones in the world and - as has been mentioned - there are ways of patching servers that rarely require them being taken down. Other, far smaller companies can do it but not, it seems, EA Bioware. It is a step backward as far as customer service goes. And it may already be to late to recover from the damage done.
Carry on deluding yourself that a healthy subscription base doesn't matter for the long term success of an mmo. It does,
Good call mundus, I Should have said that differently. Down times are acceptable to me and IMO should also be acceptable to anyone who truly enjoys said game, I mean who doesn't want their game of choice improved.
However numbers do matter to an extent it's going to take longer to patch 100 servers than 10
A couple of ideas for those complaining about down times.
A. Find a new Genre, this happens with EVERY mmo in their first few months.
B. Find another hobby, You mean to tell me all you do is play mmos? you have no laundry or cleaning or even a book to read? You dont play ANY other games? go on a run, bike ride, skateboard, throw a football i mean cmon people how pathetic, do you not have a friend to just call up, hang out with, ya know in real life.
C. Get a girlfriend, if there is sooooo much server down time they will never have a reason to complain that your ignoring them to play video games.
Most people these days quit <<whatever they are playing>> and play a different game. They might come back if / when they deem it worthwhile. Much more choice these days and always lots of new games coming out - even a new SW game coming out soon from LucasArts. And it doesn't need to be 'good' because its Star Wars, right?
A couple of ideas for those complaining about down times.
A. Find a new Genre, this happens with EVERY mmo in their first few months.
Apart from RIFT, the latest comparible released MMO, see post above. People really need to stop thinking that hours on end of down time is acceptable, its not, stop sticking up for companies doing it from sheer lazyness. They need to turn there attention to server development like TRION did.
Actually i do recall several down times during rifts first few weeks that did last a few hours. Rift also has about 1/4 of the content that SWTOR has, also about 1/4 the population at launch. Clearly you have no idea what it takes to maintain and run stable servers for anything, hours of downtime are acceptable.
Please enlighten us of these several downtimes that lasted several hours.
Can I just LOL at this, I have put in 1900hours on rift and barley scratched the surface, and my space bar is still intact.
Does population matter, do all these extra people play on the same server, each roughly have the same load, doesnt atter how many there is the same process will be run on each! - but I am sure you will re-read your post and wonder why you wrote this in the first place.
Only because this is what you are used to - TRION has set a new standard and as soon as people like you realise that hours of downtime is NOT needed, developers will stop being so lazy about it.
Though building the Trion platform was an essential step in becoming a publisher of next generation, dynamic MMOs, the tech itself is not our primary focus. Yet, we needed a new approach to the delivery, service and maintenance of online games to provide the revolutionary player experiences that Trion wanted to publish. We believe great online games should be dynamic and highly social services - living worlds, so to speak - not static products. If that is the case, then why are most MMOs still delivered as if they were packaged goods refreshed only by sporadic major upgrades?
This is the bar now, I want nothing less because we know its achievable.
Alot of the content can be changed on the fly, things enabled/disabled at will. This is why RIFT can push out unpresidented ammounts of content on there patches as the majority of any issues can be sorted asap without downtime.
Sorry to get /RANT but when will people see that SWTOR platform is subpar for 2011/2012....
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Sorry to get /RANT but when will people see that SWTOR platform is subpar for 2011/2012....
I don't think the entire game is.
Areas of it? Yes.
Some mechanics used? Yes
Some decisions made for launch? Yes
But overall they did a good job in some areas and things as well. Not going to go into detail for it again because at this point I've brought it up a silly amount of times already.
I certainly think subpar is a fair assessment of some of the aspects of this game but not the product in its entirety.
To me, that is as unfair as to say this game is groundbreaking or what should be the expectation of a game launched in 2012 bar none.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Can I just LOL at this, I have put in 1900hours on rift and barley scratched the surface, and my space bar is still intact.
I come here for the LOL but this has to be the biggest exageration ever on MMORPG. Rift from 1 to 50 in 15 hours played and with a game world the equivalent in size to one SWTOR planet (Hoth) . And somehow after 1900 hours you have barely scratched the surface ROTFLOL.
Can I just LOL at this, I have put in 1900hours on rift and barley scratched the surface, and my space bar is still intact.
I come here for the LOL but this has to be the biggest exageration ever on MMORPG. Rift from 1 to 50 in 15 hours played and with a game world the equivalent in size to one SWTOR planet (Hoth) . And somehow after 1900 hours you have barely scratched the surface ROTFLOL.
So you rate how much there is to do based on the world size?? Yes everythign that RIFT has is a grind like every other game, but there are lots of types of different things to grind for, . Im onl about 1/3rd of the way though the achievements which is a fair accessment of what I have completed in the game. I have not even started T2 raiding.
But this is now off topic, back to server downtime...
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Good call mundus, I Should have said that differently. Down times are acceptable to me and IMO should also be acceptable to anyone who truly enjoys said game, I mean who doesn't want their game of choice improved.
However numbers do matter to an extent it's going to take longer to patch 100 servers than 10
Only using the method that has been adopted for the last 10 years, its time to move on
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Sorry to get /RANT but when will people see that SWTOR platform is subpar for 2011/2012....
I don't think the entire game is.
Areas of it? Yes.
Some mechanics used? Yes
Some decisions made for launch? Yes
But overall they did a good job in some areas and things as well. Not going to go into detail for it again because at this point I've brought it up a silly amount of times already.
I certainly think subpar is a fair assessment of some of the aspects of this game but not the product in its entirety.
To me, that is as unfair as to say this game is groundbreaking or what should be the expectation of a game launched in 2012 bar none.
Sorry my point is not about any of the gameplay or contents, just that the techology (servers) under it subpar, which lead to long down times.
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didnt say its not controlled but its not easy. and i didnt talk anyhting else about gw2 than what you can obtain there due doing gw1. i think you need to back playing your lightsaber fights and forget this since its not gona go anywhere dude
I am very happy playing lightsabers but i am also sick of GW rabid fanboys who just can not resist turning every topic of SWTOR into SWTOR vs GW2. GW was as easy as it gets but had options for those who want hard content. Same goes for SWTOR, options are there.
For someone who only plays GW and dreams about GW2, pardon me if i don't take anything you say seriously.
GW1 a game much older - servers never went down, maintaince was done in the background and if it was a major change, it would just ask you to restart client.
SUPER DOOPER NEXT GEN MMO - servers down almost all the time twice a week and range from 4-10 downtime.
Sorry for this comparsion but I have this downtime complaint with all other MMOs also. Except for rift
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
This is how they should be in the future, its a proven method. And imo this is were some of BW's massive £300 million? should have gone....sticking some shiney stickers on things doesnt change what it is underneath.
Trion servers are broken down by function, unlike other games in which servers are devoted to particular locations in the game. For example, they use a set of servers to handle non-player character functions in the world, a different set of servers to handle encounters with "bosses," and another set that handles functions directly involving the players' characters.
Hartsman said by dividing the servers by functions, processes can be started and stopped more quickly and easily, causing less lag and other glitches in gameplay.
I really hope that games being released in 2012 come close to this.
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You can build a system that requires less or no downtime. 3, 4 even 5 nines are achievable if you are willing to put the effort and dollars into it. But it does cost. It requires better planning, more redundancy, better training, smarter people and all that means more money. WoW and TOR have extended downtime because they know they can get away with it and it it cheaper and easier to simply plan for weekly downtime. There are lots of companies with financial systems that run on mainframe hardware that have had no significant downtime in YEARS despite both regular software and even hardware updates. It can be done. It is done all the time. The question it, is it worth being done. The systems were are concerned with do run games after all, not financial systems. And yet, they do make a ton of cash, so lack of funding is not really an excuse either.
In the end, they have downtime because they can get away with it and they don't really value the customer's experience as much as they value their bottom line.
In the end, they have downtime because they can get away with it and they don't really value the customer's experience as much as they value there bottom line.
+1
Exactly what I was trying to say.
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wow gets away with it but the eu server downtime is 3am to 11am whereas swtor we will see in 6 months and the 8am to 4pm downtime is a big kick in the nuts to any paying customer, but i think most people tolerate wow's downtime as the rest of the game runs so smoothly and swtor seems to be causing people quite a bit of hassle and this is just one extra problem.
Sorry my point is not about any of the gameplay or contents, just that the techology (servers) under it subpar, which lead to long down times.
Well okay then. Far as that goes....yeah, I have no clue.
Lol, not going to comment on something I know so little about. Could very well be far as I know.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
So if tonight Bioware announce that the game will be down 7 days in February from noon CST to midnight CST that will be OK because 'they announced it in advance'? How about 14 days? Still Ok. What about 28?
There are better techs available - BigWorld is another that springs to mind. And failing that simply doing the minimum that other companies do these days would be an improvement.
Comments
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Actually i do recall several down times during rifts first few weeks that did last a few hours. Rift also has about 1/4 of the content that SWTOR has, also about 1/4 the population at launch. Clearly you have no idea what it takes to maintain and run stable servers for anything, hours of downtime are acceptable.
C
I started playing MMOs in '99 with EQ. I had never seen a weekly patch like Blizz did with wow. every tuesday, yoy couldnt play half the day, downloaded the patch and reconfigured your add-ons the other half. Its one of many reasons why it was the first MMO I didnt last a year with. I am playing RIFT now, and the patches are quick and painless. I had joked to a friend back when I wasted my time playing wow, that Blizz should comp people for 4 days a month when we basically cant play due to their patching.
when constant patching causes people to miss playing their game, sub fees need to be adjusted. apparently this is happening in swtor as I am seeing this complaing ALOT.
+1.
As already pointed out by me and others they are at least unnecessary, numbers are no excuse. The number of SWTOR players are still nothing compared to other systems' load. If they are acceptable solely depends on the customer I'd say. If they're acceptable for you, everything's ok, if not, maybe just leave. Luckily this is all no problem for me. Still, as a software engineer, I would have expected more from such a company in these times (10 or so years after WoW?).
But yes, unscheduled downtimes shortly after launch are to be expected, I suppose.
"You" might - when they start having to merge servers and EA reduce the number of developers (so less new content, less fixes and so on). And sadly a lot of what they have been patching so far should have been in on day 1 or picked up by testing. But heh - they probably expected some people to actively defend them; right?
The norm, today, is to have EU and NA maintenance. Not perfect, there are other time zones in the world and - as has been mentioned - there are ways of patching servers that rarely require them being taken down. Other, far smaller companies can do it but not, it seems, EA Bioware. It is a step backward as far as customer service goes. And it may already be to late to recover from the damage done.
Carry on deluding yourself that a healthy subscription base doesn't matter for the long term success of an mmo. It does,
However numbers do matter to an extent it's going to take longer to patch 100 servers than 10
C
Most people these days quit <<whatever they are playing>> and play a different game. They might come back if / when they deem it worthwhile. Much more choice these days and always lots of new games coming out - even a new SW game coming out soon from LucasArts. And it doesn't need to be 'good' because its Star Wars, right?
Please enlighten us of these several downtimes that lasted several hours.
Can I just LOL at this, I have put in 1900hours on rift and barley scratched the surface, and my space bar is still intact.
Does population matter, do all these extra people play on the same server, each roughly have the same load, doesnt atter how many there is the same process will be run on each! - but I am sure you will re-read your post and wonder why you wrote this in the first place.
Only because this is what you are used to - TRION has set a new standard and as soon as people like you realise that hours of downtime is NOT needed, developers will stop being so lazy about it.
Though building the Trion platform was an essential step in becoming a publisher of next generation, dynamic MMOs, the tech itself is not our primary focus. Yet, we needed a new approach to the delivery, service and maintenance of online games to provide the revolutionary player experiences that Trion wanted to publish. We believe great online games should be dynamic and highly social services - living worlds, so to speak - not static products. If that is the case, then why are most MMOs still delivered as if they were packaged goods refreshed only by sporadic major upgrades?
This is the bar now, I want nothing less because we know its achievable.
Alot of the content can be changed on the fly, things enabled/disabled at will. This is why RIFT can push out unpresidented ammounts of content on there patches as the majority of any issues can be sorted asap without downtime.
Sorry to get /RANT but when will people see that SWTOR platform is subpar for 2011/2012....
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I don't think the entire game is.
Areas of it? Yes.
Some mechanics used? Yes
Some decisions made for launch? Yes
But overall they did a good job in some areas and things as well. Not going to go into detail for it again because at this point I've brought it up a silly amount of times already.
I certainly think subpar is a fair assessment of some of the aspects of this game but not the product in its entirety.
To me, that is as unfair as to say this game is groundbreaking or what should be the expectation of a game launched in 2012 bar none.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Holy bleeding eyes, batman! Could have easily referenced certain parts of his post without causing our eyes to bleed....
I come here for the LOL but this has to be the biggest exageration ever on MMORPG. Rift from 1 to 50 in 15 hours played and with a game world the equivalent in size to one SWTOR planet (Hoth) . And somehow after 1900 hours you have barely scratched the surface ROTFLOL.
So you rate how much there is to do based on the world size?? Yes everythign that RIFT has is a grind like every other game, but there are lots of types of different things to grind for, . Im onl about 1/3rd of the way though the achievements which is a fair accessment of what I have completed in the game. I have not even started T2 raiding.
But this is now off topic, back to server downtime...
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But you have to say it had a impact right
lol
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Only using the method that has been adopted for the last 10 years, its time to move on
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Sorry my point is not about any of the gameplay or contents, just that the techology (servers) under it subpar, which lead to long down times.
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GW1 a game much older - servers never went down, maintaince was done in the background and if it was a major change, it would just ask you to restart client.
SUPER DOOPER NEXT GEN MMO - servers down almost all the time twice a week and range from 4-10 downtime.
Sorry for this comparsion but I have this downtime complaint with all other MMOs also. Except for rift
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
Carl Sagan-
This is how they should be in the future, its a proven method. And imo this is were some of BW's massive £300 million? should have gone....sticking some shiney stickers on things doesnt change what it is underneath.
Trion servers are broken down by function, unlike other games in which servers are devoted to particular locations in the game. For example, they use a set of servers to handle non-player character functions in the world, a different set of servers to handle encounters with "bosses," and another set that handles functions directly involving the players' characters.
Hartsman said by dividing the servers by functions, processes can be started and stopped more quickly and easily, causing less lag and other glitches in gameplay.
I really hope that games being released in 2012 come close to this.
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You can build a system that requires less or no downtime. 3, 4 even 5 nines are achievable if you are willing to put the effort and dollars into it. But it does cost. It requires better planning, more redundancy, better training, smarter people and all that means more money. WoW and TOR have extended downtime because they know they can get away with it and it it cheaper and easier to simply plan for weekly downtime. There are lots of companies with financial systems that run on mainframe hardware that have had no significant downtime in YEARS despite both regular software and even hardware updates. It can be done. It is done all the time. The question it, is it worth being done. The systems were are concerned with do run games after all, not financial systems. And yet, they do make a ton of cash, so lack of funding is not really an excuse either.
In the end, they have downtime because they can get away with it and they don't really value the customer's experience as much as they value their bottom line.
All die, so die well.
+1
Exactly what I was trying to say.
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wow gets away with it but the eu server downtime is 3am to 11am whereas swtor we will see in 6 months and the 8am to 4pm downtime is a big kick in the nuts to any paying customer, but i think most people tolerate wow's downtime as the rest of the game runs so smoothly and swtor seems to be causing people quite a bit of hassle and this is just one extra problem.
I know downtime sucks but didn't they announce both Saturdays and Todays downtime a good deal ahead of time?
Well okay then. Far as that goes....yeah, I have no clue.
Lol, not going to comment on something I know so little about. Could very well be far as I know.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
So if tonight Bioware announce that the game will be down 7 days in February from noon CST to midnight CST that will be OK because 'they announced it in advance'? How about 14 days? Still Ok. What about 28?
There are better techs available - BigWorld is another that springs to mind. And failing that simply doing the minimum that other companies do these days would be an improvement.