Turbine Scheduled Maintenance Monday Oct. 7, 5AM – 12PM Eastern (-4 GMT)

[Soulfurnace]

We don't care about you

signed
The USA

Your country is about as messed up as it gets.

Signed,
Australia. (Fear our spiders.)

[Charononus]

Your country is about as messed up as it gets.

Signed,
Australia. (Fear our spiders.)

Yup and we will eventually bring all of you down to our level. Give it a few weeks we'll f up everyone elses economy too.

[Soulfurnace]

Yup and we will eventually bring all of you down to our level. Give it a few weeks we'll f up everyone elses economy too.

Yes, but we still have better beer - and we know how to get drunk better. I'll work on that now.

(Source? Some guy in the US military whom will not be named.)

[Eternal_Newbie]

We don't care about you

signed
The USA

Haha, This statement is absolutely false !

We all know that the scheduled downtimes are done to allow the maintenance of the NSA spywares embedded in the game in order to analyse DDO chats contents !

The controls are especially reinforced since some are able to take charges away from the undermines...

signed:

The out of USA ppls

[westyofoz]

They do shift the times around to some extent. I've seen shutdowns at 5, 7, 9 and other times. Usually it's mostly in the morning US time, but there are solid business reasons for this, whether people want to accept them or not.

When you use a service based in another country, this is just something you have to deal with. I've had to myself in many cases. It's not ideal, but it's not the end of the world.

And this isn't a financial service.

You are right it isn't the end of the world, but for some strange reason, when I deal with a business, I expect the same service as everyone else. Evil I know. I am within my rights to complain when I feel short changed. So I have. It will probably be ignored but at least I have passed on my dissatisfaction.

[theaddler55]

No, it happens on Monday about once a month. Not EVERY Monday. That would be rather unnecessary unless Turbine servers are completely overwhelmed, which is hardly the case.

Just since the OP of this comment got blasted for his 'its just Monday maintenance' post, I thought I would point out we have had 9 'scheduled' down times in the last 9 weeks. That's as far as I went back looking.. but he seems to be close enough. He wasn't even bagging on turbine, just saying its maintenance....

[Qaliya]

You are right it isn't the end of the world, but for some strange reason, when I deal with a business, I expect the same service as everyone else. Evil I know. I am within my rights to complain when I feel short changed. So I have. It will probably be ignored but at least I have passed on my dissatisfaction.

I perfectly understand how you feel. Not trying to tell you to not be happy or not express your views. Just trying to explain why they do this and why they're not likely to change it...

[gravisrs]

I bet there are zillions of bottlenecks in Turbine's maintenance procedures.

I was working with lot of huge online services and can't imagine situation where you can't avoid such long service suspensions.

[Katana_user]

The answer is simple: they do maintenance at a time that's both convenient for them and the majority of users. That sucks for the minority but it's not realistic to expect people to come into work at 11 pm to do routine maintenance just to prevent a few people from losing a few hours' worth of play time.

Nonsense. That is what all IT is paid and paid well FOR. To avoid impact to CUSTOMERS. It requires Turbine ppl responsible to schedule for the absolute minimum of outage, the best time to perform the incident correction, and achieve the absolute maximum of positive impact. Simply put, if that isn't occurring it's Turbines' choice to let it occur where it disrupts a larger segment of our population.

[Grosbeak07]

I bet there are zillions of bottlenecks in Turbine's maintenance procedures.

I was working with lot of huge online services and can't imagine situation where you can't avoid such long service suspensions.

Especially since this downtime also includes Lotro as well.

[Cyndder]

I bet there are zillions of bottlenecks in Turbine's maintenance procedures.

I was working with lot of huge online services and can't imagine situation where you can't avoid such long service suspensions.

Well as mentioned earlier this is not just a DDO outage by all of Turbine. So this would lend one to believe--speculation here...but with some background in the field--that they are potentially making maint. updates to the authentication servers which potentially require updates to the underlying commercial software. For example moving from oracle 10 to oracle 11 in order to update XXX service to version 9 and avoid this unspecified potential security compromise. IF the authentication servers are shared across the product base (DDO, LOTR, website, etc) then the only real way of dealing with the change is to go with a complete outage...even with clustered systems.

[Qaliya]

Nonsense. That is what all IT is paid and paid well FOR. To avoid impact to CUSTOMERS. It requires Turbine ppl responsible to schedule for the absolute minimum of outage, the best time to perform the incident correction, and achieve the absolute maximum of positive impact. Simply put, if that isn't occurring it's Turbines' choice to let it occur where it disrupts a larger segment of our population.

There is no way to avoid impacting "CUSTOMERS!" when you do maintenance. So you do it in such a way as to not impact as many "CUSTOMERS!" as possible. Doing it in the morning US time means they are both doing it when their people are supposed to be working and when 95% of their likely "CUSTOMERS!" are not playing. So deal with it.

[Bloodrow]

At some point Turbin might consider runing a copy of the servers and doing updates on them, then replacing those servers and updating the others, this would not be to hard just costley at one point, the inital point of adding the same amount of servers to the system.

[Cyndder]

I work in a financial services company..

we have to stagger our downtime's and maintenance's not matter how critical or simple.. to spread out the impact, not constantly hit the same client/clients with downtime every single time... or else, they would indeed move to another institution for business..

you should treat all people with the same respect regardless of if they are a mass or a minority... shifting the maintenance 2 hours earlier or later would flex the times, and not kill entire nights of play for those of us not in the US... fair is fair no?

and yea, I know.. the US is the majority, the US rules all... and crushes anyone else... yada yada... But I am drinking my milk.. and one day..

love the game... thank you for the devs for the love and effort they put in the game... but do us all a favor not in the great US of A.. just slide the downtimes a bit... to allow us NOT in the us... to not be impacted by the maintenances throughout all eternity... kindly...

Financial institutions and on-line games are two different beasts (apples and oranges). First off Financial institutions will tend to have multiple points of presence so if an upgrade has to be done say in Boston the servers in London are still up and the traffic is re-routed. Also they tend to group access based upon the closest point of presence for speed of service. On-line games don't typically have a distributed installation--they are all in the same building so single points of failure are abound; power outage in the city...game is down. As I've stated in the past large maintenance activities like this is usually an all hands on deck and as they want fewer mistakes they want those people rested so those start times are at the beginning of the day...so when $hit hits the fan and the outage is extended you don't have half your crew trying to pick up kids from daycare or make that date with a significant other interfering with your customer base (too much). Financial institutions designs are (if they are smart) setup with a lot of redundancy--especially if they are international companies.

[Ashlayna]

Your country is about as messed up as it gets.

Signed,
Australia. (Fear our spiders.)

No! But I will fear your salt water crocs.

I bet there are zillions of bottlenecks in Turbine's maintenance procedures.

I was working with lot of huge online services and can't imagine situation where you can't avoid such long service suspensions.

It's funny you say this, since every MMO I've ever played, regardless of who was running it from where had downtimes like this for maintenance on a regular basis. I guess no gaming companies know how to run networks?

[BOgre]

Nonsense. That is what all IT is paid and paid well FOR. To avoid impact to CUSTOMERS. It requires Turbine ppl responsible to schedule for the absolute minimum of outage, the best time to perform the incident correction, and achieve the absolute maximum of positive impact. Simply put, if that isn't occurring it's Turbines' choice to let it occur where it disrupts a larger segment of our population.

IT paid Well. hah. Good one.

[Rynehawk]

So, yeah, are servers supposed to be up? I got on but it's awful lonely......hesitant to go do anything for fear of just getting booted again.

[Cyndder]

At some point Turbin might consider runing a copy of the servers and doing updates on them, then replacing those servers and updating the others, this would not be to hard just costley at one point, the inital point of adding the same amount of servers to the system.

Actually it is harder than you think; it is not just the hardware but also doubling your software licences and maintenance fees; then a lot of it depends on design--if LOTR and DDO share the same authentication servers and DDO is going down for an upgrade while LOTR is not then you have to deal with security certificates, IP routing tables (internally and externally if it is your centralized point of presence being upgraded), etc. That solution would have to have been designed in from the beginning or as part of a major overhaul of the game. In short, not as simple as a second set of hardware.

[andrul]

I'm in the US, I'm VIP, and I work evenings so I'm affected by the downtime. But I'm not going to end my subscription because they need to do some maintenance. Yeah, I had forgotten about the downtime this morning so was disappointed when I couldn't log in but hey, I know how to read so pulled out a book and enjoyed myself anyways. Oh, and if anyone's checking in here apparently they're back up early so have fun!

[totalmir]

They need to start doing this in night shifts.Seven hours?Fine,do it from 0:00 to 7:00.Nothing unheard of.Taking a **** on European play time is unacceptable.Europe has well over half a billion inhabitants,and half of my server (Argo) is European.What is really weak is that they had a downtime just a few days ago,why the hell didn't they do the maintenance then?!