Downtime Notice: Wednesday, February 14th 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT)

[Cordovan]

UPDATE: The game worlds have reopened.

UPDATE: We apologize, but our maintenance work is taking longer than expected, so we need to extend today's downtime. The DDO game worlds will be unavailable until 2:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT).

The DDO game worlds will be unavailable on Wednesday, February 14th from 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) for maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

[Nédime]

The DDO game worlds will be unavailable on Wednesday, February 14th from 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) for maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

On Valentine's ? Really ? You really want me to have some "us" time with my wife ?

[AbyssalMage]

On Valentine's ? Really ? You really want me to have some "us" time with my wife ?

lol

[thedip]

It is also Ash Wednesday and so you aren't supposed to be enjoying yourself too much.

[Veltamore]

The DDO game worlds will be unavailable on Wednesday, February 14th from 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) for maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

every week huge down times very disappointing.

[Kelcha]

6 hours again of downtime for maintenance pfff you save database every week on an extern data server!!!

Us day with children and wife, not so bad lol

[TinyAvain]

every week huge down times very disappointing.

International player here

Is it possible to get a little more notice than 12 hours? The last few downtimes have been rather irritating due to the lack of notice considering the short time between maintenance checks. Hell I'd be happy with 24 hours.

This game is the reason (well, one of them) why I'm single. Don't make me get a SO and hate my life more.

[Greantun]

6 hours again of downtime for maintenance pfff you save database every week on an extern data server!!!

Us day with children and wife, not so bad lol

It was already stated previously, but I will reiterate. This is to do OS upgrades, security patches, database maintenance, etc.

Instead of doing one long downtime SSG decided to do smaller ones once a week for several weeks.

[Kelcha]

how do the others MMORPG?
On WoW, who is much bigger than DDO, there no weekly downtime of 6H, there is no downtime!!!, only incrementable updates, the priority is to give players the most playtime, its not the philosophy of SSG cause technically, they can make it with another process

[MasterKernel]

how do the others MMORPG?
On WoW, who is much bigger than DDO, there no weekly downtime of 6H, there is no downtime!!!, only incrementable updates, the priority is to give players the most playtime, its not the philosophy of SSG cause technically, they can make it with another process

Sorry, but what ? No, really… WHAT ?!
Blizzard had it's weekly downtime for all of their games during Wednesday (I think it's Tuesday in USA) from like beginning of times !
(Usually they are something like 30 min. though…)

[Vorachtin]

Every mmo has downtime, welcome to online gaming and thanks for choosing DDO!

[HungarianRhapsody]

how do the others MMORPG?
On WoW, who is much bigger than DDO, there no weekly downtime of 6H, there is no downtime!!!, only incrementable updates, the priority is to give players the most playtime, its not the philosophy of SSG cause technically, they can make it with another process

Normally, the Wednesday downtime is somewhere between 2 and 4 hours. The IT folks at SSG have some back end maintenance to do that would take a LOOONG time if it were done in one day. Because of that, they decided to do a bit of it each week over several weeks so that they can take advantage of the time when the servers are already down to do that maintenance.

That was announced a few weeks ago, but I don't remember which week, so I'm giving a summary instead of a link.

[Nédime]

how do the others MMORPG?
On WoW, who is much bigger than DDO, there no weekly downtime of 6H, there is no downtime!!!, only incrementable updates, the priority is to give players the most playtime, its not the philosophy of SSG cause technically, they can make it with another process

Stopped reading at WoW.

[Adurna]

Normally, the Wednesday downtime is somewhere between 2 and 4 hours. The IT folks at SSG have some back end maintenance to do that would take a LOOONG time if it were done in one day. Because of that, they decided to do a bit of it each week over several weeks so that they can take advantage of the time when the servers are already down to do that maintenance.

That was announced a few weeks ago, but I don't remember which week, so I'm giving a summary instead of a link.

Which is fine, but I think then that Cordovan could mention something along those lines? Because as it is it looks like it takes them 6 hours to reboot the severs, which would be insane. You know, half a line like "for maintenance and continuing our OS improvements/database updates/or whatever it is they're doing".
It doesn't look much different but it conveys that they're actually doing a bit more than just keeping the servers alive.

This way, hopefully people will complain less about the extended downtime. Especially those who don't religiously follow every dev post and or don't recall something about more than a month ago. (I didn't see the announcement you mentioned, but if it was announced than they probably did when they started this. Which is at least a month ago.)

[UurlockYgmeov]

...
On WoW, who is much bigger than DDO
...

WoW 'player base' is 90%+++ bots.

[gravisrs]

it looks like it takes them 6 hours to reboot the severs, which would be insane.

1. World closure. Closing [not yet shutdown] login servers, shards [aka servers]. Kicking everyone out of pipelines. Waiting for all quest instances to close.
-- at this stage no more logical data regarding worlds or players are modified --
2. Graceful shutdown so all the logical data from RAM is safely stored in DB.
3. Pre-shutdown procedures (checking DB consistency, clearing caches).
4. Shutting down DDO Server software eventually Virtual OS eventually Host OS.
5. Maintenance job like: upgrading Host OS or packages, Upgrading Virtual OS or packages, upgrading DDO server software (see the compilation numbers grow after maintenance downtimes?), hardware upgrades.
6. Pre-initial procedures, checking if all the upgrades went well, all unit-tests went well etc.
7. Distribute patches to deploy for clients.
8. Starting Host OS, Virtual OS, DDO Server software.
9. Waiting for all caches to fill, worlds populates with necessary data.
10. GM is entering the world to check if all is fine (remember duplicating rats on Argo after one of the patches ?) flying thru public instances.
11. World are opened for players, login servers greenlights logins.

Now multiply this by number of servers.

Now imagine you have to swap CPU/RAM/MOBO in all of 8 DDO servers (yay Meltdown/Spectre), install few GB of patches for .NET environments 8 times, etc etc etc.

Even if you get prepared for everything writing automated scripts it will still takes hours to sit and watch all the process, and then suddenly some sh*t happens...

[Adurna]

snip

very nice, but I feel compelled to ask: did you miss my point entirely?

[Yamani]

Thank you all for providing my morning entertainment during downtime!

[Sunnie]

10. GM is entering the world to check if all is fine (remember duplicating rats on Argo after one of the patches ?) flying thru public instances.

No, this is the first I hear of it. What happened?

[Cordovan]

We apologize, but our maintenance work is taking longer than expected, so we need to extend today's downtime. The DDO game worlds will be unavailable until 2:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT).