Maintenance & Downtime – Monday, April 27, 2009

[Archdeacon]

Hi

Just wondered if something could be clarified. Guk server just had an in-game announcement that the server would be coming down for "a brief update" at 9:00 AM PDT. It refers us to the Server status page which shows projected downtime as 5 hours. Brief?

I have also checked the Official News & Announcement forum and that one says 4 hours?

Now I appreciate these things are difficult to legislate for time  wise, but could you please indicate what the approximate downtime is going to be:

Brief4 hours5 hours

Thanks

[HBP]

Exactly...."Brief"..LMFAO.  And they do it during prime time playing hours.  Grat SoE on your imcompetence once again.  /bows

[leucol]

I've been reading of some suspicions that recent lag and performance issues are being caused by SOE allowing zam.com to access the EQ2 databases so that Zam can provide the types of services people think that EQ2 Players should be providing.

Allowing Zam to acces the databases opens a "back door" to SOE's servers that can (and probably have) been exploited by people with either a hard-on toward SOE or a desire to gain some in-game advantages.  Either way, it's possible that today's downtime is related to server security issues and have required SOE to make some fundamental software and/or hardware modifications.

Large server farms are generally very complex in nature so any modifications made can have unforeseen consequences that cascade throughout the system resulting in some pretty perplexing issues that have to be sorted out before the system can be brought back online.

With this being the case, I'd guess that if the servers are back up before 5PM Eastern time (4 Central, 3 Mountain, 2 Pacific), it would be because SOE's IT guys got lucky.

Of course, I'm partly drunk so who knows.

[TSR-DanielH]

leucol wrote:

I've been reading of some suspicions that recent lag and performance issues are being caused by SOE allowing zam.com to access the EQ2 databases so that Zam can provide the types of services people think that EQ2 Players should be providing.

Allowing Zam to acces the databases opens a "back door" to SOE's servers that can (and probably have) been exploited by people with either a hard-on toward SOE or a desire to gain some in-game advantages.  Either way, it's possible that today's downtime is related to server security issues and have required SOE to make some fundamental software and/or hardware modifications.

Large server farms are generally very complex in nature so any modifications made can have unforeseen consequences that cascade throughout the system resulting in some pretty perplexing issues that have to be sorted out before the system can be brought back online.

With this being the case, I'd guess that if the servers are back up before 5PM Eastern time (4 Central, 3 Mountain, 2 Pacific), it would be because SOE's IT guys got lucky.

Of course, I'm partly drunk so who knows.

Interesting theory, but I haven't heard anything of the sort.  Granted, they don't tell me everything, but I think I would have heard something if that was the case.  According to my information it is simply a scheduled maintenance.  Hopefully it should be up again soon.

[nofish]

If this is thrue and im not surprised , im so out ,

[Aviendhalia]

I'm running out of blogs to read, I sure hope it's up soon!

~Avi

[Daisy Lou]

Well it's past the 1pm PST "estimate", but who really thought SoE would have something done on time?

This is a little absurd really.  The servers are only ever down this long on expansion release days.  I'd appreciate a better explanation for this long of an outage than just "scheduled maintenance".

[Gettof]

Well that's the evening's play completely shot. What's the point in choosing a euro server again?

[Xephier]

HBP wrote:

Exactly...."Brief"..LMFAO.  And they do it during prime time playing hours.  Grat SoE on your imcompetence once again.  /bows

/true that. This company never cieses to amaze me on how little the respect their customers, ok, granted the downtime may in some way be for our benefit, they do not even respect us enough to offer a decent explanation or just assume that we are too stupid to get it.

Also regardless this was a 'schedualled maintenece' why would they schedual it for a prime play time, are they at least going to offer us some form of compensation for the 'inconvenience'?(double xp would be nice, and would cost them nothing to do) I lost an entire morning of playtime to this, now i gotta go to work for 8+ hours where i get to be misserible(and kiss the butt off customers for not a fraction of the money SOE employee's make) and couldnt even spend some time with friends in eq2 before that, this really makes my day.

I may feel some form of gratification if I get home and it's some huge update like an LU or something, but if I get home and see Nothing in the update page and no form of explanation for a 5+ hour downtime, I will not be impressed at all, suppose I like the game too much to cancel my acnts as i'd like to do with any other company that treats it's customers like this, but then that's why i'm posting, not much else i can do.

Oh and on a side note, is that automated character transfer service EVER going to be fixed, you would think half a year would be long enough, gettin a little tired of hearing 'it'll be done when it's done, there's nothing else we can tell you' when i pay 50$ to transfer a single character.

/endrant

[Wingrider01]

leucol wrote:

I've been reading of some suspicions that recent lag and performance issues are being caused by SOE allowing zam.com to access the EQ2 databases so that Zam can provide the types of services people think that EQ2 Players should be providing.

Allowing Zam to acces the databases opens a "back door" to SOE's servers that can (and probably have) been exploited by people with either a hard-on toward SOE or a desire to gain some in-game advantages.  Either way, it's possible that today's downtime is related to server security issues and have required SOE to make some fundamental software and/or hardware modifications.

Large server farms are generally very complex in nature so any modifications made can have unforeseen consequences that cascade throughout the system resulting in some pretty perplexing issues that have to be sorted out before the system can be brought back online.

With this being the case, I'd guess that if the servers are back up before 5PM Eastern time (4 Central, 3 Mountain, 2 Pacific), it would be because SOE's IT guys got lucky.

Of course, I'm partly drunk so who knows.

If you have reviewed the thread you would have seen an explination from SOE red name that they read from a offline database not the one that is running the game items at the moment.

[TSR-DanielH]

It looks like everything is back online.  Please let us know if you are still receiving the timeout message.

[ans765]

TSR-DanielH wrote:

It looks like everything is back online.  Please let us know if you are still receiving the timeout message.

Yeah so you say the servers are up but i got the time out message so i tried to reopen it and im still getting it HELP.

[TSR-DanielH]

ans765 wrote:

TSR-DanielH wrote:

It looks like everything is back online.  Please let us know if you are still receiving the timeout message.

Yeah so you say the servers are up but i got the time out message so i tried to reopen it and im still getting it HELP.

If you haven't already, please restart your computer and run the patcher again.  In many cases that will be required after server maintenance.

[Xephier]

So the servers are back up, i got myself a whopin 35 mins before i have to go to work, i'm not as ticked now but still not impressed, was there ever an explanation posted as to why they went down in the first place or why such a horrid time was picked for them to be down? Or well, any form of customer satisfaction due to missing the better part of a morning, rather then 'oops, we sorry for the inconvenience'

[ans765]

restared my computer and did the patcher and still getting the timed out message if this is something with me account would be great to get it fixed im going to EQ2 withdrawals here

[TSR-DanielH]

Xephier@Guk wrote:

So the servers are back up, i got myself a whopin 35 mins before i have to go to work, i'm not as ticked now but still not impressed, was there ever an explanation posted as to why they went down in the first place or why such a horrid time was picked for them to be down? Or well, any form of customer satisfaction due to missing the better part of a morning, rather then 'oops, we sorry for the inconvenience'

While I didn't receive an official reason, I know there was an unexpected downtime on Friday of last week.  I would assume that the current maintenance is aimed at preventing that from happening again.

[TSR-DanielH]

ans765 wrote:

restared my computer and did the patcher and still getting the timed out message if this is something with me account would be great to get it fixed im going to EQ2 withdrawals here

Try logging in to the EQ2players website with your name and password.  Link here:

http://eq2players.station.sony.com/

If you get are able to log into that site then it might be a firewall/router issue.  Reset your modem and router so that they can reconnect.  If the problem still persists at that point then we'll probably need to readd the exception for your firewall.

[ans765]

and now im not seeing any of your replys god this is so frusterating i just give up

[ans765]

I have reset my modem and router and i still am getting this message. And i am fairly certain we dont have a firewall on either of them as it slows the game down at this time im thinking this maintenance thing screwed my account and i just cant get through.

[ganjookie]

ans765 wrote:

I have reset my modem and router and i still am getting this message. And i am fairly certain we dont have a firewall on either of them as it slows the game down at this time im thinking this maintenance thing screwed my account and i just cant get through.

Yes

You sound like the sort of person that has enough technical experiance to say that the maintainence messed up your account.  Can you helps solve a DirextX issue as well please?

[ans765]

Me know anything about tech stuff no not at all i just know i cant log in and i have no fire wall and have tried everything told so far sigh i am so frusterated i want to play

[TSR-DanielH]

ans765 wrote:

restared my computer and did the patcher and still getting the timed out message if this is something with me account would be great to get it fixed im going to EQ2 withdrawals here

Do you have any kind of firewall on that computer?  If so, please open the firewall's exception list and delete anything with EQ2, Everquest 2, or launchpad.  Once you do that, restart your computer again.  Then the next time you try to run the program it should ask you to allow or deny the game.  Select allow and hopefully that should correct the problem.

[ans765]

i am in the game now had nothing to do with my firewall i checked it and it wasnt that. i just couldnt log in im in now tho thanks

[MysticmorganRo]

I just restarted my computer and did the launcher, yet when I click subscribe to resub EQ2, I get that there is still scheduled downtime going on.  Any suggestions???????  I can't even access ANY of my account information.

[Ayonar]

Yea i just got SO expansion and wanted to register it and it still says station.com is under scheduled maitenance but only when i try to go to my account. What gives??

[crookedchris]

Im experiencing the same issue with account pages...it would be nice if someone would fill us in on this.

[TSR-DanielH]

The account pages should be up and operational at this point.  Please let me know if you are still experiencing any issues.