Regarding the Crashes and Emergency Maintenance Downtimes

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by Accendo, Nov 22, 2021.

  1. Accendo Guest

    Throughout these past few days of servers crashing and the emergency downtimes, we can’t thank all of you enough for your patience as we tirelessly worked to resolve the problems.

    Full transparency: What was happening was extremely technical and difficult to pin down. In the end, we discovered that subscriptions that had lapsed for players who were online and in game was the root cause. Since the emergency maintenance on Saturday, the issue appears to be resolved.
    Ozon, Sancus, Rancid and 13 others like this.
  2. TLP Addict Augur

    I wasn't patient /shakes fist.
    Iven, Shindius, Fenthen and 1 other person like this.
  3. Irongron New Member

    So, lets say if your account was being payed via Kronos,and late in subscribing, and now a character is now gone....

    Possible?
  4. Fenthen aka Rath

    My bard was good to go on Friday night. Gear's great, hitpoints/buffs/songs are all great. Forming raids, pop into the Tantor instance. Continues to die about 34 times. I realize that his gear is now yellow and his sub ran out, but he was not disconnected. I had to pop a krono on the spot and then deal with zero mana/endurance for the rest of the event.

    Having a pop-up message or something, instead of a brutal disconnect or, arguably worse, not disconnecting and repeated deaths, would really go a long way to make this sort of thing right. You already took away the counter in the inventory window. Now it's sort of a guessing game unless folks use sticky notes or Outlook task/calendar reminders, etc.
    Kaenneth, Shindius and tanith like this.
  5. Fanra https://everquest.fanra.info

    Characters are never gone, at least not due to subscription lapse. If you had a character 20 years ago and they were over level 10 (because server merges delete under level 10) and you come back, it should still be there.

    Daybreak does not delete characters in general.

    If yours is gone, bug report / petition it.
    Corwyhn Lionheart and Parkers like this.
  6. Hekaton Augur

    i was in game on sunday raids and it happened to be my renewal day for both my sub and my perks. right in the middle of raid i got a you have been disconnected message and when i came back my perks were disabled. a couple hours later when my sub processed it all came back so who knows if its completely fixxed or not

    /shrug
    im also out 8 raid currency from the missing perks but whatevs
  7. Daystaar New Member

    Thank you guys for all that you do to keep My Happy Place up and running! You rock! :cool:
  8. Enigma Maitreya Augur

    Under no circumstance am I disputing your post. Rather I am adding to both sides an issue regarding server merges.

    I am not seeking any action by Daybreak in regards to recovery. To be 100% honest I would not have a clue as to what was lost.

    I had a presence on Brekt and FV. In terms of Guild house and characters they were mirror images of each other 2 All Access since EQ went live and an added account within the last 5+(?) years. The youngest account had nothing but Heroic Characters fir Buffing and is no big deal (but I will not as in can not attest that all heroic character slots are correct. But I do believe they are/should be).

    Here is the issue. All 3 accounts mirrored each other even (mostly) to the character names (mostly). The guild name (Modest Guild houses) were not the same..

    The requirements for the Purchased Guild houses have a minimum member count (50% of the cause of the problem). The 3rd account was F2P (the other 50% of the cause of the problem).

    After the merge, one guild did NOT meet the requirements to maintain the Modest Guild House and members were removed and the Guild House was ... gone. I believe it was the Brekt Guild house that was gone but as this was all background memory noise I can not attest to that. I just know as a fact one was gone. Well that was a lot of stuff that just went poof .... Got lots of moving crates on various characters but not a single one had more that ... 7(?) items. My guess is that approximately the guild Banker (probably close to max items) items were gone and probably 500 .. 1200 items in Guild Storage gone.

    On the 2 Silver accounts Duplicates were preserved and I was able to sort them out but mostly was not all that happy about deleting older/original characters. This was MY CHOICE because I could not see the value or point of duplicate character types on the same account. *Although I am preserving 1 Necromancer on one of the 2 accounts and 1 Mage on the other account ... Just can't bring myself to part with them*

    Now our intersect. I will NOT attest that the end product of the F2P account is consistent with your assertion of no characters are deleted and honestly I do NOT care if any were lost. What I believe happened is that because I was not subscribed to ALL ACCESS on any of the 3 Accounts the 2 Silver accounts more or less mostly acted in accordance with the rules. Hard to be sure as there was a lot of items missing etc.

    Now the F2P had 2 rule sets. One the reduction of max characters to 6(?) characters. I do believe that each had 10(?) each. The outcome was 6 characters survived. My belief is that the F2P went F2P and 4 characters on each server were in that there but not really state. If that is the case then the merge may not have looked at them in terms of inclusion. My belief is that the F2P went F2P and 4 characters on each server were in that there but not really state. If that is the case then the merge may not have looked at them in terms of inclusion. Leaving 6 characters on each account theMerge would had had 12 characters on the merged F2P account that has a max 10(?) Characters so ... the rest is all blanks as I am not sure what the rules are to Merged F2P accounts

    Again, I am in agreement with your statement .... I am just not sure it is absolute in the context of all the possible combinations.
  9. Nightmares Augur

    If your account goes under All access, and therefore loses filled character slots, the characters are not gone. they just will not show up in character select until you either: a.) resub and buy the character slots back, b.) buy doll of character from loyalist merchant or The Cash shop( 3 each) which will bring the characters back in view, or c.) delete existing characters so the hidden characters reappear. ( At least this is how they have stated how they handle this type of issue, for years).
    I don't know if the mechanic still works like this though, as it's been years since I had any need to change the sub / account types of any of my accounts.
  10. Enigma Maitreya Augur

    I came back to correct the 10 Max to the real value of 12 Max on the F2P.

    That F2P character has been reactivated to ALL ACCESS since the Halloween Event. *Shrug* there are only 6 characters on it.

    Again to be clear for all, I am not saying Daybreak needs to do anything based on my experience as it has 0 impact to me. I am simply pointing out an anomaly.

    The Max Character Slots has survived and I could if I wanted to create 6 more characters. I have 8 available Heroic Counts on F2P with 6/12 Characters.

    I am simply not sure what happened and honestly if Daybreak came back and said we investigated this and all is as it should be .... I would accept that on that account I may mixed it up with Zek, Xogeny(?) Saryn(?) as I have a footprint on all those servers as well.

    That F2P account is always the same Level 85 Buffers. No character on it really gets played.
  11. Xanadas Augur


    You should have just left it how it used to be -- let people stay online even once lapsed. What's the harm in people getting a few extra hours of playtime? Yes I know people were staying on for days at a time. They'll eventually log out. I don't think the couple-dozen days of lost billable time over thousands of subs was going to move the budget and, as a result of being overly strict, bugs were introduced that negatively affected thousands and probably stole more billable hours of playtime than was "saved" on your side.
  12. Iven Antonius Bayle

    Time to get rid of the subscription model ?! Micro payment ftw !
  13. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    F that!
  14. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    I will sub EQ in Doge Coin!
  15. mordsith Journeyman

    [quote="Xanadas, post: 4083273, member: 5381"]You should have just left it how it used to be -- let people stay online even once lapsed. What's the harm in people getting a few extra hours of playtime? Yes I know people were staying on for days at a time. They'll eventually log out. I don't think the couple-dozen days of lost billable time over thousands of subs was going to move the budget and, as a result of being overly strict, bugs were introduced that negatively affected thousands and probably stole more billable hours of playtime than was "saved" on your side.[/quote]

    Sounds like this issue caused a subtle but very serious error in the game engine to occur (C++ never did like null pointers!!). This was not a planned outage to say the least. The harm in this cause to try allow this condition to persist would of been trying to make code changes extremely quickly slowing down the restarting of the game for others and perhaps introducing other bugs to found later.
  16. Nuri1 New Member

    It was nice in the old days when you saw a date when your sub was going to run out... would be nice to have that back....
    Kaenneth, Raludar and CatsPaws like this.
  17. carilious New Member

    Maybe it is time to return the Days left counter on to the inventory. Not sure why this was removed in the 1st place.
    Raludar and CatsPaws like this.
  18. Riou EQResource


    It was not always accurate and caused issues when it wasn't (such as increased complaints, petitions, confusion, etc)
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  19. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    Days or weeks of extra game time for free every time they use one krono or sub for one month. No I get them fixing that.

    And personally since I am either always subbed or always Live I dont have a problem with everyone some downtime so that everyone else pays their full share.

    I would never have urged them to fix it but since they did I have zero problem with the cause or fix other then it would have been nice to never have the issue.
  20. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    Would be nice if they added it back but said "ESTIMATED SUBSCRIPTION END DATE - SEE ACCT online for accurate date) but yeah that won't happen for the reasons you listed I suspect.
    CatsPaws likes this.