Prime Time Server Maintenance?

Why do you know that?

because people pay thousands of USD for them

Midnight CT over/under bets anyone?

I'm betting that it'll be over, always is for us in CT.

The server issue for Everquest took over 12 hours to fix.

This one began what...3-4 hours ago?

I suggest no longer planning to play DBG games for 24 hours after patches.

I work in a similar world, so I understand some of what they (DBG) must be going through, but I guarantee the real problems are not in the dev/engineer area, or in the immediate mgmt thereof, but higher.

Staffing, Purchasing, Scope Control, Strategic Planning.

Pretty much.

nah, I'm in IT, and you test and test patches out, plan for every problem you can think of, but it's just not possible to completely duplicate all the variables in the production environment. Most of the time you get it right, and things go off fine, but there's also plenty of times that it just doesn't go the way you planned and you get hit by the 1 thing you didn't think of. Just the way computers are.

While I agree with you (and genuinely sympathize with those who have to do the work), downtime this long, so routinely, is usually a result of policy/people more than it is the software/hardware.

What I am seeing at DBG is a bad trend where servers go down far more often and for far longer than they have in years past.

In this instance, I don't really fault DBG. They needed to fix some longstanding server issues, and their "fix" broke things 2 weeks ago. They've been extremely busy with their test server this entire time and doing a stellar job interacting with the community to troubleshoot the problem. It sucks that the solution fell on primetime Friday, but that's just when the solution happened to materialize. They did verify this latest fix through lots of hard work on the test server, so this time they seem to be doing things by the book and hopefully it pays off. All I can say is that I hope future "fixes" go through equal scrutiny on the test server before they wreck live.

Daybreak has NEVER and I mean NEVER patched servers in the time they estimated. Ever since Daybreak bought out the game server patch time was 3-5 times the stated downtime in their announcements.

My issue is their implementation of said process. Most of the time when we roll out patches or updates we do it during the fewer traffic hours sometimes pull double shift to completing our task. We would start rolling out our patch around 12am or 1 am not during our prime ours during the day or evening. I do understand things may not go your way but doing it in off-hour is less stressful on you and on your end users XD

Yeah they're putting all us on the Crappy ones... and saving the good ones for that massive failure H1Z1 and some stupid Mobile Games that realistically never need good SQL or Latency either but they do it anyway b/c it just sounds good to their dumb Shareholders

fair enough, I'm normally not on when there's maintenance, so I rarely see how long it lasts.. I will add if my team had downtime this long they would at the very least be communicating the status, not a generic "we're still working on it" and at least every 30 minutes with an eta, even if that eta is just a guess. I also agree with doing maintenance in off hours, which I don't understand here, I would think off hours for them would be their business hours and that should make it much easier on them. Plus it's typically easier to fix issues if 90% of your staff hasn't gone home for the day. Only reason I can think of to do it now is so they don't interrupt the dev team from working, but that's why you have a separate test and dev system

That is good to hear.