PPPPPPP - Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Says it all really. 1 day patch extended to nearly 2. New patch this evening to fix the previous f**kup. This is seriously embarrasing. 1. NEVER EVER do such a huge change to a system without doing it ALL in a lab prior to working on live systems. If lab setup has problems - you DO IT AGAIN in the lab. Repeat until you are certain you got all the problems out of the way. THEN and ONLY THEN do you plan for a live change. 2. Its blatently clear that this was NEVER tested in a lab prior to pushing it live. 3. When patches and changes to the system are rolled out there shouldnt ever be any "oops" or suprises. EVER! If there are, you f*cked up the planning part - see 1. 4. Im an ISP tech and if i f*cked up this hard id get fired for sure. 5. Hitting the submit button and sticking your head in the sand hoping for the best is NOT the way to do such things. 6. With proper preparations you SHOULD have been able to estimate the actual downtime to within 30 minutes and HIT THE MARK. Sorry for my language. I tried to use * as much as possible. If this offends anyone other than DBG i am also sorry, not my intention. Just airing my frustration over lack of competence and outright disrespect for a few thousand paying customers.
I will start off by saying that I believe you are correct. There are way too many bugs that are not caught before they reach live servers. That being said, I have a couple of comments. 1. I believe they Dreamweaver posted that server merges cannot be tested before going live because they have the proper test environment to test it. I don't know the cost of a server, but I don't see why they couldn't use two servers and merge them as a trial. They have a beta test server they could have theoretically used for a second test server to feed into the normal test server. 2. I imagine the developers are extremely overworked. I often see mistakes in patches or on the forums that suggests that they have a lot to deal with.
Proper preparation in that CAN BE EXPECTED based on the profit margin and code of a 21 year old game that is no longer top of the heap. I think we do quite well just not being sunset and still getting expansions. But please dream on and imagine all many ways Daybreak could prepare for things like this if they had the budget you imagine they do.
Ahh yeah moaning about it more will sure make them crack the whip to do it better next time! Its easy to sit there in your chair and pontificate the ideal way things should be operated. It's frustrating, sure. Are they going to work everyday planning on screwing things up? I doubt it. Are they doing the best they can? I'm sure they are. Go get some fresh air.
Why merge the servers and not just take beky offline logging the 100 accounts in, and/w FV and mass click transferring all toons like they paid for a token? Might take a several hours with assess to the accounts and stuff a player could do it? hours then take server offline, clean the machine and reuse it? Come to think of it, give active players a week before hand to get the hell out of dodge by flagging it to cut down on the few hours? Never occurred? I'd do it for 10 mill plat, if the idea of giving out account info was not ridiculous.
While they have test and the beta server as I understand it the beta server is always testing new stuff, no doubt they have started on stuff for next expansion and maybe other new stuff that could be coming inbetween. Also we are currently going through difficult times, bear in mind they are still working from home, so communications aren't as easy as they usually are, I was personally impressed with Dreamweaver getting as much information out to us as much as they did. They had problems with the last merge which is why they haven't done any for years, they fixed some tech to be able to do mergers again, they didn't go as smoothly as we all would have liked but they have no doubt learned a lot. We also need to remember how many systems have been added to the game since the last mergers. The more the game grows the more there is to go wrong. I'm happy they are fixing broken stuff. But that is just my opinion and little bits of info I have picked up from reading the boards.
I have a new business plan going forward: Fix account -> account transfers Use that utterly insane, world-breaking revenue to invest in better infrastructure I'd be ok with 2-3 days of downtime if it meant I could rejoin poor old Aaenwein with his friends again.
the amount of revenue from this alone could be huge for eq, but all eq revenue should go to eq. I myself would pay for atleast 2 transfers between accounts even at 100$ each
While the OP has a right to air their frustrations, these threads are turning into players trolling each other quickly. The thread is locked.
