Anyone know what this Emergancy Maintance is about?Follow

From the official site:



The servers have been acting all fooked up last few days... lag, d/c's and such. Assume its about resolving that.

I was able to log into the server about 12 minutes ago 9:05 PM wondering why it was taking so long to log into the lobby server. Anyways when I get in King Ranaphers Tomb I do a search seeing a note saying my character data may be lost or damaged for an improper logout. But I notice that I only saw Lv 70-75 players in the area. One even had a San d'Orian rank of 10. Kind of odd seeing a large crowd like that in the area search of the tomb. It was all Lv 8-30 before. Maybe its something else, or maybe im paranoid. Just found it kind of weird...

Yup its about 6 hours out of my playing time and no refund in site .....

Unfortunately I was fishing and the bites were getting better and better :(

The previous day the moon was 7% and there was no fishing action (when I was playing) ...

Seems like at lest 2-3 times per month there's some sort of maintenance that keeps everyone out. Perhaps for the next iteration they'll have servers on stanbye that they can roll to while they apply their fixes then switch to those (to keep downtime to a minimum).

If the reason for the emergency update is to be found in the game itself then a backup server wouldn't be of much use as the fault would be on that server too.

In case of an hardware fault then yes, a backup server would be neat.

Actually there has been a case where a MMORGP gave a "refund" to players. I think it was EQ (might be wrong) Was a long time ago, they gave all the players a free month. But then, that time the servers went down for about 2 weeks =)

Never said they were obligated. But to not do so is definatly bad PR, I sure as hell wouldnt want 500k+ pissed off gamers breathing down my neck.

For 6 hours?! Someone needs to get out and get some fresh air.

The compensation is more of like a way the get people to come back rather than going to another MMORPG. They aren't required to do it, but if they want to keep most of their users, its a good idea.

For six hours? Most of their users understand that servers have to go down every so often to be patched, fixed, maintained, or otherwise worked over. From a business perspective, you probably want the lose the customers that demand recompense for six hours of downtime, since it'll likely cost you more to retain those customers than you're charging them.

As they say, "fire your bad clients." ;)

I wasn't talking to you.

;)

doesn't matter

if the servers are Identical ... the problem would exist on "both" (perhaps they have a cluster of servers per server ... fix one, take the world off line for the 5-10min it takes to bring the other online, then fix the other.

This is assuming that the worlds are running off a semi intelligent db program with some support for load balancing and or clustering ... or something along these lines

Assuming 1500 users (this is actually at one time not overall) per server x 12$ per month = 18000$ a month revenue per server (not including development costs but this is a rough estimate, there are mules that add to this and so on). If you have a single server running something that generates over 216,000$ in revenue and you don't have failover/backups/clustering, well that's just silly

And don't take my calculations as accurate i know there are salaries and other things to factor in, just to value equipment ...

Edited, Wed Jan 21 12:05:58 2004 by Levish

Oh and as far as the taking a break for the 6 hours ... I can only speak for myself so here's my view. I work full time and i also have side work, my time to play is limited ... any time i do get to play is valuble to me (yes i can find other things to do but I like FFXI).

Edited, Wed Jan 21 12:08:39 2004 by Levish

yeah 12 cents. that's about right. if you are so hard-up for 12 cents, give me your address. i'll mail you a Quarter.. keep the change !

by the way, the user agreement states no refunds for downtime, you may wanna read up on it :)


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