26 minutes of notice for 6 hours of maintenance?Follow

Alright, I was looking and i didn't see a thread about this, but as you may have noticed, Final Fantasy 11 is now down for "Emergency Maintenance" once again for 6 hours MINIMUM of maintenance. The part that really struck me is the emergency maintenance notice was posted on the official site at 8:34 PM and the server went down at 9:00 PM. Am I the only one that thinks that this makes Square-Enix look a little... I don't know what's the word for it... incompetent maybe? Let me know what you think.

Emergancy maintenance suggests an emergancy. Perhaps something went down, or something happened that required unexpected and immediate attention. It doesn't seem incompetent to me. If it had been scheduled maintenance, that would be different...

They're changing the structure of the server cluster, so expect it to take untill at least midday tomorrow and not the 6 hours they stated. I'm sure they planned it to take 6 hours, but these things always take at least 3 times longer than expected.

I'm with you on that one. But they've been having connection problems for a while now. I would have thought that they could accomodate people a little bit better with some notice ahead of time. 26 minutes is not any notice at all, it's pretty much BAM the server's down. Yes, i know it's "emergency" but still. The problems have been occuring for a number of days, you can't tell me that they would have gotten any worse if they gave like an hour or two's notice and done the maintenance later. I don't know, maybe it's because I play a lot so it just seems like a lot of unannounced maintenance, and for disturbing amounts of time.

I'd like to hear from a programmer for mmorpg's one of these days that would maybe be able to tell me why they couldn't be testing fixes on another server so that they could just mirror the update on to all the game servers, and maybe take them down for like an hour? I don't know... maybe that's what they do do now and it just takes a really long time. I'd be interested to find out what specifically about it requires so much raw time though.

Hmm, while I agree that 26 minutes isn't much time, it's not uncommon. I've played EQOA and actually recieved a 15 minute notice one time. The difference is Square is trying to fix the problem right away, whereas Sony often lets problem fester for weeks.

I do some networking myself and I know there can be issues that arise that have to be taken care of, but I can't help noticing that over the 3 months or so I've played the game it seems every time they issue a patch for the game what follows is a series of server repairs from login issues etc. Also seems to be alot of new bugs introduced that didn't exist before. An example is a problem I had after a recent patch where it became very difficult to target items with the mouse such as the home crystal and auction house windows. While this is not a major issue (certainly annoying) and has been fixed in a recent patch it shouldn't have happened and wouldn't have if they tested the patches before just tossing them on a server and having half a million users download them. Another issue I've had recently is a high rate failure in any type of search.. AH items.. player searches etc. None of this happened until the holiday update with the christmas lights.

Again these are small problems but go a long way into showing how well squaresoft tests these patches. Perhaps they took a lesson from Microsoft and their habbit of letting users beta test windows updates. This game has been out over a year now in Japan and alot of the issues I would think should have been solved over this span of time.. Guess not.

Actually some of the new bugs from new patches make sence, well kinda alot of that could be hand slips witch should be not often as they seem to. In puttin in new design flowing down the screen with the key pad and gettin side tracked is easy to foul up something. What i really want is a fuller explanation of what is going on if i'm paying for it I want full rights to know what i'm paying for and what has happend to it..

Congratulation they are trying to fix a problem for several days now . So the ones that pay the price are the the ones paying . Lets not forget this is the 3rd Maintence in 2 days . So everyone is just fine with it . Im begining to wonder if Square just doesnt have peeps post on the more popular sites . Just to down play the problems . So what next ? Blaming the easter bunny for what santa brings you ?


Torent Elvaan
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Leave a million gil with my mog a the coverup will be Silenced ...

BRAVO!

I dont mind the wait if it fixes the problem..
Hey im on east coast too, and this is my normal playing time.

this is getting way out of hand... the servers went down 2 days ago and again today (more appropriately, last night)... I just started playing 5 days ago but I have observed my friends playing and they said that this is one of the first MAJOR downtimes that they have noticed since they started playing. You'd think that a game that has been available overseas for over a year now would have all the bugs worked out and they would be able to seamlessly integrate the rest of the world. The only thing that I can think of is they werent prepared for eveyone else in the world to jump on this game like Wile E. Coyote on a paralyzed Road Runner, but still, you have to think.... why the problems, disgruntled employees perhaps ?

test every aspect of the game? thats not possoble without millions of users.

All I can think of is that it must be incredibly fashionable to defend Squeenix these days. . . I can't understand why people are defending a company that we pay for a service, when they do not provide that service reliably.

I've purchased every SINGLE american product that Square has released since FF1.

That said, I hope my product loyalty doesn't come into question when I say that FFXI has been the worst MMORPG I've ever been a part of in terms of support and reliability. How unfortunate it also is the only one I play or enjoy anymore.

So someone tell me what the problem is. . . They overburn the game CDs for release to save having to pay for an extra disc, causing who knows how many people a huge ammount of aggrevation and delay playing a game they've been expecting for almost 2 years. They have server downtime at a moments notice, (most recently) 3 days in a row - probably half of tomorrow too. Characters (confirmed, btw) dissapear when they try to stop 3rd paty prog users (which I DO NOT support - play the game how it's meant to be played and like it, or play a different game). . .

This is totally rediculous, especially to the people like me, who have handed Square whatever they asked for their next product, regardless of whether it was phenominal, or totally lame. And to boot, we all get to pay them month to month, just so the game can crash for hours out of the blue, or with (25?) minutes warning, go out for at least 6 hours 'emergency maintainance' (when? during the hours that probably way more than 50% of the NA player base has time/desire to play).

This may very well be the first Square game that I simply throw away.

<ends rant>

Unfortunatley it's just a fact. In the IT world it's not a question of if something goes down, it's a question of when. I work network administration in a casino and you should hear th old ladies complain when something is not working right.

I'd have to say it's the good technicians that at least give warning. How many time does a server just crash? Crash means not even running! I get really upset when 50 employees start calling me about a certain server going down and I had no idea.

Let them do their thing. Read the website.... learn about how to pull off a renkai or What spells you really should be casting. Don't tell anyone, but I think i might play another game for a while. :P


Serenitysg
Asura
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