Antonius Bayle Downtime: Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The Antonius Bayle EverQuest Live Server will be brought offline on Tuesday, January 14, 2013 at 5:00 pm US Pacific*. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 12 hours. Keep an eye on the EverQuest website and the forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.



*Time Zone Converter

Not again....I got today and tomorrow off work

1am - 1 pm GMT 15th Jan - I suppose it could be worse.

I hope my toons are copied to beta by then.

So for me this is 5 pm as I am in Canada.
I am just wondering why so long? That is a big chunk of downtime, as usual something major seems to be wrong on my new home of AB.

AB players could use some compensation for the once per week additional downtime + long period of unplayable server lag.

We're making some physical changes to the AB servers. Unfortunately that extends the downtime quite a bit.

Ultimately the changes in this update are directly related to permanently addressing issues with the AB server, hopefully the additional downtimes should slow after this update.

one of my biggest questions is why if they know a server is to be taken down they wait until that night to say so why can they not post that a few days before?

It's one of those difficult communications problems. If we post too far in advance (for instance the Friday before) many folks forget by the time the patch rolls around. Ideally in this case I wanted to get the post up early on Monday, however I did not post it as early as I would like. We'll try and do better next time.

this is not the first time you guys have done this. you post many time it is not that i think it should be posted 3 or 4 days before but some players take time off from work or even setup a day to play even 24 hours would be helpful. but in 99% of the time you post it at the time it is going down and we get on that day and servers are down and we lost that time.

Communication from SoE to the playerbase has never been a strong point, too few staff spread over many products.

Difficult communication problem?

Post as soon as you know the time, bump thread early Monday or whatever you consider the ideal time(s) to remind people.

Besides that 30 min countdown, there's also something called "Server Message of the Day". May I honestly ask you to use the tools you have?

Also, this maintenance starts tomorrow early morning (2 AM for us Europeans). No reason for most europeans (who sleep at night and work from morning to afternoon) to be mad. Including me.

Not to forget, if that maintenance gets rid of some problems we have regulary - fine .

I think you are exempt from the rules here about posting the same issue twice. I don't see a reason you can't post as soon as it is planned (for example, Friday before) and then post again closer to the time of the patch.

I'm also willing to cut you slack if you post early and the time is changed / canceled, as long as you let us know as soon as it is changed / canceled.

According to the date, the announcement came a year late. 2014 now!

Can you explain what will be updated to the servers? i.e. will you be completly replacing the servers, or just updating some components?

Guess that's a no...

Would have been nice to know what was causing the server problems, and how you were attempting to resolve the issue, instead of just saying that the downtime 'should' fix the lag issues. If it doesn't fix the problems, then you have little to come back on. It would be much better to keep us all in the know, so that we better understand what's been happening and how you've been dealing with it.. Sympathy and respect would be easily earnt that way.

It's a complicated issue. Hardware has been replaced, we have a team out in our EU datacenter right now making some changes. Making sense of what exactly we are doing is difficult without knowing the details of how servers are set up and such. The important thing is we continue to improve AB's performance.

So is it that you're not willing to share details or assume a level of intelligence / familiarity with cluster setups amongst your player base?

Sharing complete details probably isn't a good idea. More importantly I'm probably not as familiar with cluster setups as that part of the player base, and wouldn't be able to communicate on a technical level sufficient to explain it anyways.

Well, from Germany there's no change noticeable in connection speed and latency, so I assume that wasn't an issue. I guess some CPU units, maybe harddisks and other performance-related hardware got changed; we will notice the effects in the future, e.g. faster response to raid request & less lags in zones with heavy action.
Maybe even beamkiter got nerfed because the server can handle now more aggroed NPC ... so 50 mobs are server-rooted, the 51th NPC onerounds the mage .

I don't mean to sound off but I DO pay for a subscription and I DO see Antonius Bayle down far more often than other servers.

I've already sank a large amount of money into this game to just "move servers" and I don't think it is wrong to ask for some closer communication apart from a banner saying you are investigating the issue. I know it's a double edged sword but all servers were brought down - why are we the last to go back on at nearly every turn?

It's taken away the very short time I have to let my (lack of) hair down a couple of hours after my wife and kids have gone to bed.