Thought about the AFK players clogging server access... and how to fix them.

[Raist]

Please don't shrug this off SE...I am not stating this sarcasticly or anything like that.

I am serious with this idea.

Bounce the servers each night at their lowest load point.

Shouldn't take long for them to reboot in comparison to normal maintenance activity.

The idea comes from my time playing Dust514. They ran a short maintenance on a regular schedule. Everyone knew when it was going to happen, so never planned to play at that time. The same would apply, once the ideal time to restart them was announced.

I don't intend this as a real fix, just a temporary one until the real fix can be put in place. There isn't much of a downside to this, provided you guys are actually working towards a solution that can be fully implemented soon. There really isn't much reason for people to stay logged in while AFK now. There is no Bazaar (retainers replace that), you get rested xp when logged out in a sanctuary, and you aren't having to watch for that elusive ToD for an NM like we had in XI. So, it shouldn't really matter if the AFK'ers get bounced. Everyone else will know when the reboot will take place and for how long the game will be unavailable, so they won't be expecting to be able to play.

Again, this could be a temporary fix at best for the 1017 issues, but it could at least relieve some of the frustration with the playerbase. Should be a simple enough thing to implement. I've scripted shutdowns countless times for both servers and clients in various environments.

Please, take this under advisement with your IT guys and not just the Devs and execs. This is a plausible and doable remedy for the short term for a LOT of players.

[iibukii]

This is a perfect temporary fix to the underlying problem. The maintenance doesn't even need to be long, a quick 15 minute reset or less. I've seen it on a few other games as well and it makes perfect sense. As long as it's at a specific time each day and Duty Finder goes down before it happens there's no downside to it at all.
EDIT; With that said there'll still be people logging in to 'save their spot', best way of doing it is maybe even every 12 hours. Not every night. If congestion is still an issue at that point every 8 hours for a reset.

[Raist]

true strike... good idea. Should have picked up on that. Used to manage some tomcat servers that took CC payments for a county's tax assessor--data was replicated nightly, so I scripted a routine to change the site to a static notice page about the server going down for maintenance, and then fired off the replication scripts a while later to give people time to get out of their transactions and stuff, then took the site down, flipped the site back to their live pages, and restarted everything.

It was a helluva lot of careful timing involved pulling data from DEC Alpha's, IBM iSeries, and Windows servers, along with a VPN and FTP pull. Uggh.. MS-SQL <shudders>... and people wonder why I left the IT field.

And I'm only A+ certified... no Cisco or Microsoft certifications.... just little old Prometric. If I can do it... I'm sure SE can figure out a way.

[iibukii]

I've seen the same system on an MMO that was up over 10 years ago so it's not new technology either - even if they have to do it manually at first until someone writes a script. I have no idea about server management other than what is obviously good and bad and I know this is bad how they're currently doing it.
I wouldn't get into the IT field just because it looks like a lot of stress. Imagine how stressed their IT guys are right now for example. But they could have relieved a lot of the stress if they would have had better choices overall in how they're managing it. I also wouldn't doubt that alot of IT guys / programmers are furious at how the servers are running, moreso than us regular people because you guys understand how it all should work.

[Chajava]

Why not just make a specified length of time to auto kick afk players?
Say like an hour or so.

[Raist]

I've seen the same system on an MMO that was up over 10 years ago so it's not new technology either - even if they have to do it manually at first until someone writes a script. I have no idea about server management other than what is obviously good and bad and I know this is bad how they're currently doing it.
I wouldn't get into the IT field just because it looks like a lot of stress. Imagine how stressed their IT guys are right now for example. But they could have relieved a lot of the stress if they would have had better choices overall in how they're managing it. I also wouldn't doubt that alot of IT guys / programmers are furious at how the servers are running, moreso than us regular people because you guys understand how it all should work.

lol.. I hear you... at least these guys know how to run their backups (hopefully). Had a group completely loose their email server because their IT guy wasn't putting in the second tape when the pop-up message clearly told him to insert tape #2. I hated it for the kid too... fresh out of college, still learning the ropes and he got canned over it.

Even those who know better, just screw up sometimes... so I try to give them the benefit of the doubt at first. But this mess has just gotten out of hand and something needs to be done to improve access in a big way, and fast.

Not gonna pretend part of this isn't personally motivated, but it's more out of concern for the long term impact this will have on things in general. People are REALLY pissed now. Something needs to be done to calm the masses. This seems like a simple thing they could do to help get more people back in. Will probably still be some clamping down, but if half the servers are currently AFK'ers like some have speculated... it could go a long way towards improving player retention down the road.

Just hope it stays up on the boards long enough for someone out there to take notice of it. Thanks guys for keeping the conversation alive on this topic.

^-^

[Raist]

Why not just make a specified length of time to auto kick afk players?
Say like an hour or so.

Yeah.. that's a good long term approach, but it requires development resources and all. We've all seen how that pans out sometimes. What seems like a quick fix in theory sometimes becomes a tangled web of coding.

The type of shutdown I'm proposing is a very simple thing that can easily be implemented by the most noobish of IT geek. For example, to shutdown a Windows box, you just have to type in a simple one word command (ironically, it's shutdown) with a few switches to detail specifics of the shutdown (delayed shutdown, whether it's a forced or planned shutdown, whether its a restart, etc.). This can be put in a simple text file renamed to end with a .bat extension, and then can be scheduled as a task in Windows own task scheduler.

It's an elementary mechanic available in every OS I've ever dealt with. Lots of power in the command line still that can be put into scripts for automation. Always amused me how much we return to the old school command line of the 80's to fix things, despite developers pushing everyone to GUI's and swipeable touchscreen skins.

There are a lot of good ideas being put forth for long term solutions. Please, everyone feel free to post them here if you like...but what we need is a quick fix.... NOW. With any luck, we may catsh SE's eye eventually.

[Raist]

Finally managed to log in on Midgard... really should have just gone to bed, but I was curious about the state of the players, so wondered around a bit. While for the most part, there was a lot of activity---it indeed seemed like a lot more idle players than when I got on last night. IDK.. may have just been because I was actively looking for them. But, it seems like there is definitely something there worthy of investigation.

So... yes, doing something about idle characters might be an approach worth looking into. Won't be the solution in itself, but it would be a very good part of the solution overall if SE can find a way to implement it without upsetting their concept of "balance".

[Raist]

Since I saw a couple posts in the main 1017 error thread asking for someone capable of posting some specific fixes, going to try pulling these posts I made the last couple nights back to the top, since the disappeared so fast from the front page. Seriously.. all the new thread spam on existing topics was getting out of hand. A post made 23 hours ago is already buried on page 26.

Things seemed to have slowed down a bit on the forums now... hopefully we can get more conversation going about possible solutions instead of rage posts.

[Raist]

Bump again to see if we can get any more ideas going.