Maintenance length

I always wondered why the maintenance here takes a long time to complete while it's much shorter in other games.
Can an expert explain why?

Maybe, unlike other games, they want to get it right.

dont tell anybody i told you this but... not every game has the same maintenance time. crazy, i know.

Without knowing exactly what their maintenance entails VS the "other games" it's impossible to say.

Maintenance for one system I manage at work is just rebooting the servers and clearing caches and giving the racks a once over to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. For another it's checking every single jumper one by one and passing test lights through them to make sure there is no degradation. The difference between the two is one takes 10 minutes the other takes 3 hours and if the first one fails it's usually easily fixable but if the other one fails someone could die (quite literally). So it's highly dependent on how thorough they're being, how complex the systems are, what their standards are for "passing" and what they're actually calling "maintenance".

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

Without knowing exactly what their maintenance entails VS the "other games" it's impossible to say.

Maintenance for one system I manage at work is just rebooting the servers and clearing caches and giving the racks a once over to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. For another it's checking every single jumper one by one and passing test lights through them to make sure there is no degradation. The difference between the two is one takes 10 minutes the other takes 3 hours and if the first one fails it's usually easily fixable but if the other one fails someone could die (quite literally). So it's highly dependent on how thorough they're being, how complex the systems are, what their standards are for "passing" and what they're actually calling "maintenance".

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Thanks! This is the kind of answer I was looking to.

As well as reboots and cleanup;

Maintenance time is also used to install the little ladies day event, the moogle tomestone event, sometimes small bug fixes (how Materia displays "next cactpot is in 2.") and so on.

I play ESO and when they actually have real updates their maintenance takes many hours also. Same issues with many games I’ve played like Aion and other mmos. Heck I even play mobile games whose maintenances got extended for similar amounts of time.

They're not usually 10 hours. This one was stated as 6.08 hotfixes and some infrastructure maintenance and infrastructure maintenance is always more involved.

Don't forget that there is a whole new data center will all it's shiny new servers (Materia) that has to be done as well. This will surely increase maintenance time in the future.

They also do the maintenance worldwide at the same time.
And they probably implement parts of the DC travel system which is probably extremely complicated.

Every game has also different kind of server.
Like, lost ark has a easy and cheap, not to complicated server were you can easily add now DCs and Server. But because of it you can't transfer your character to other server and if you want to login on another server you have to restart the whole game.

Idk I've been playing MMOs for a long time and maintenance lengths like this are the normal..

I remember the good old days of Nexon & Mabinogi maintenance. The game would be down for like a day or two lol when they released huge content updates.

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Idk I've been playing MMOs for a long time and maintenance lengths like this are the normal..

I remember the good old days of Nexon & Mabinogi maintenance. The game would be down for like a day or two lol when they released huge content updates.

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Dude just u mentioning mabinogi gave me huge nostalgia vibes xD

The game is stable. There are no crashes or time warps. The sun will return tomorrow and the fun-loving Lalas will be there again in droves...dancing, laughing and giving and receiving endless hugs and dotes. :p

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Originally Posted by Dragonlancer

The game is stable. There are no crashes or time warps. The sun will return tomorrow and the fun-loving Lalas will be there again in droves...dancing, laughing and giving and receiving endless hugs and dotes. :p

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Not really. Servers are open yet i cant login with quality anymore and no ETA on fix ;). If i were to login i would need to use slow buggy launcher made in the 90s

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

I always wondered why the maintenance here takes a long time to complete while it's much shorter in other games.
Can an expert explain why?

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We do not know, how the maintenance looks like. Sometimes it is only rebooting the servers. But if their servers run with Windows and the Windows update kicks in then it can take hours. xD


Cheers

I guess it boils down to how conservative vs "yolo" devs are with server updates.

Do they first make a full backup of the servers? Do they first make sure to cleanly uninstall the previous servers and any related data file? Do they also apply os and security patches on the servers? Do they update it piece meal and perform tests after each step before moving on, like maybe they apply any database update first and run a battery of tests to ensure everything is correct before installing new server software? Etc.

If they are really conservative they may also have QA teams perform a battery of tests on the updated servers before opening them to the public and making sure that all game systems still work, that matchmaking still works etc.

"The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks." :cool:

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

I guess it boils down to how conservative vs "yolo" devs are with server updates.

Do they first make a full backup of the servers? Do they first make sure to cleanly uninstall the previous servers and any related data file? Do they also apply os and security patches on the servers? Do they update it piece meal and perform tests after each step before moving on, like maybe they apply any database update first and run a battery of tests to ensure everything is correct before installing new server software? Etc.

If they are really conservative they may also have QA teams perform a battery of tests on the updated servers before opening them to the public and making sure that all game systems still work, that matchmaking still works etc.

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I've been through some of those YOLO patches before in a previous existence. In one case a certain 3 letter company who ran the data-centre just decided one day, out of the blue, to apply an operating system patch to a live production server, without permission, planning, notification, backups, or anything. Database went down mid-commit. Major incident ensued. Of course, this is the same three letter company who ran a data-centre in Sydney in such a run down state that the roof started leaking water one day. All over the servers.

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Originally Posted by Shibi

In one case a certain 3 letter company who ran the data-centre just decided one day, out of the blue, to apply an operating system patch to a live production server, without permission, planning, notification, backups, or anything. Database went down mid-commit. Major incident ensued.

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Ah yes, that would be the new junior software engineer.
Not that I would personally ever know. (and if ever, it's the QAs fault)


Also maintenance in this game is few between with the downside of longer maintenance when it becomes necessary.
Personally I'll take that over the once a week 12 hour maintenance some games have.

The maintenance length is pretty standard for an MMO, in my experience. Usually it will begin and end early after 2-3 hours which is normal, but sometimes they want it to go over the weekly reset or end at a certain time so the world first racers don't get a head start over eachother. If it lasts longer than 4 hours there is usually a very large patch or infrastructure maintenance, which there was this time.