Why lame maintenance period in middle of US playing time?

[Nicolee]

Why does this game even need a weekly maintenance?  Most games don't.  Can you imagine amazon or google going down for several hours every week for maintenance?  They are certainly more complex than this game.  Is weekly maint really needed?  If so, why can't it be during non-prime time hours?

 

 

[Ludrath]

Because maintenances are done by Korea now, that is why.

[Hungibungi]

47 minutes ago, Nicolee said:

Why does this game even need a weekly maintenance?  Most games don't.  Can you imagine amazon or google going down for several hours every week for maintenance?  They are certainly more complex than this game.  Is weekly maint really needed?  If so, why can't it be during non-prime time hours?

 

 

EU had it mid-day every week since release. Now NA has it mid-day and EU at midnight. 

[DenialOfTruth]

53 minutes ago, Nicolee said:

Why does this game even need a weekly maintenance?  Most games don't.  Can you imagine amazon or google going down for several hours every week for maintenance?  They are certainly more complex than this game.  Is weekly maint really needed?  If so, why can't it be during non-prime time hours?

Google and Amazon are distributed across dozens upon dozens of servers and do what is known as 'rolling maintenance', where they will take down a couple at a time and the remaining handle the work loads while they do whatever tasks are needed to ensure smooth operation and go though them that way. That is not a option for BNS for obvious reasons. Maintenance is more then 'lol they turned the servers off and back on again for NO REASON', a lot of key tasks can only be done when it's not running the game. I imagine at minimum they do a backup of everything, install any patches if there are any (and there has often been server side only updates that didn't need a client update), ensure it boots without problems, ect.

 

As for the time, I do agree 6 PM EST is absolutely absurd. That is when 90% of the people I know get on. But the maint is a key part to the smooth operation of the game. They just need a much better time for it.

[Nicolee]

1 hour ago, DenialOfTruth said:

Google and Amazon are distributed across dozens upon dozens of servers and do what is known as 'rolling maintenance', where they will take down a couple at a time and the remaining handle the work loads while they do whatever tasks are needed to ensure smooth operation and go though them that way. That is not a option for BNS for obvious reasons.

 

If they had a 2nd server running in parallel when maint was needed, same could be done.

 

1 hour ago, DenialOfTruth said:

Maintenance is more then 'lol they turned the servers off and back on again for NO REASON', a lot of key tasks can only be done when it's not running the game. I imagine at minimum they do a backup of everything, install any patches if there are any (and there has often been server side only updates that didn't need a client update), ensure it boots without problems, ect.

Patches come out less frequently than weekly, and that's more understandable.  But backing up  rolling database files by temporarily freezing things with updates going to a log file (that's replayed on unfreeze) was in Windows 7 that came out a decade ago.  It was in linux & xfs that came out over 20 years ago.  That's old tech that could be (re)-used in BnS.

 

Then, no matter what time maint caused a game interrupt, it would be less often.

 

I noted the max interrupt time on Blizzard related games was 2 hours for 2 of their games, the rest, including for WoW was 1 hour.  Five hours seems excessive by any measure for weekly backups.

 

1 hour ago, DenialOfTruth said:

 

[Nicolee]

1 hour ago, Hungibungi said:

EU had it mid-day every week since release. Now NA has it mid-day and EU at midnight. 

 

That doesn't explain why it should be mid-day or so long for anyone.

[Nicolee]

1 hour ago, Ludrath said:

Because maintenances are done by Korea now, that is why.

 

1 hour ago, Ludrath said:

Because maintenances are done by Korea now, that is why.

So now they do maint at 9am vs. before at 7pm?  Is 9am better for software engineers?  I don't think so -- or do they only work 9-5 in Korea?

Besides, noon in EU is at 7pm in S.K.    Since they are different servers, doing them concurrently shouldn't be a problem.

 

Edited April 11, 2023 by Nicolee

[DenialOfTruth]

34 minutes ago, Nicolee said:

 

If they had a 2nd server running in parallel when maint was needed, same could be done.

 

Patches come out less frequently than weekly, and that's more understandable.  But backing up  rolling database files by temporarily freezing things with updates going to a log file (that's replayed on unfreeze) was in Windows 7 that came out a decade ago.  It was in linux & xfs that came out over 20 years ago.  That's old tech that could be (re)-used in BnS.

 

Then, no matter what time maint caused a game interrupt, it would be less often.

 

I noted the max interrupt time on Blizzard related games was 2 hours for 2 of their games, the rest, including for WoW was 1 hour.  Five hours seems excessive by any measure for weekly backups.

 

That might introduce excessively complexity to how it works. Having a server be there just for maint time would be a huge waste of resources as well for little benefit. Every MMO has maint and that is unlikely to change. Even the big name ones like WoW, FF14, which have dozens of servers to play on, bring them ALL down for their weekly maint.

 

It doesn't matter that patches come out less frequently then weekly for the CLIENT. We don't know how often they update the SERVER, which sometimes has not required a client update but they have mentioned it a few times. They could be installing server side updates every week during maint for all we know.

 

Also this week's maint is just under 3 hours, a massive improvement if they can keep to their estimates. NCSoft also doesn't have a tenth the employees Blizzard has and BNS is very much a 'winding down' project at this point. And it is more then just 'backups', there are a large number of tasks that they do during maint and backups are just one of them. Installing updates on their end is not like how we install things on our PCs, there are multiple different things running on the server at once that can and do need things done to ensure they work.

[Grimoir]

5 hours ago, Nicolee said:

So now they do maint at 9am vs. before at 7pm?  Is 9am better for software engineers?  I don't think so -- or do they only work 9-5 in Korea?

Besides, noon in EU is at 7pm in S.K.    Since they are different servers, doing them concurrently shouldn't be a problem.

 

Current new maintenance time is 7:00AM South Korean Time. The change was purely done based on whats more conveniant and efficient for the devs. It is completely irrelevant whether its a EU or NA server.

Maintenances are always done based on devs, they rarely if not ever take into account player login/play times.

You might be unhappy about it but it will not change.

[matthew]

5 hours ago, DenialOfTruth said:

That might introduce excessively complexity to how it works. Having a server be there just for maint time would be a huge waste of resources as well for little benefit. Every MMO has maint and that is unlikely to change. Even the big name ones like WoW, FF14, which have dozens of servers to play on, bring them ALL down for their weekly maint.

 

It doesn't matter that patches come out less frequently then weekly for the CLIENT. We don't know how often they update the SERVER, which sometimes has not required a client update but they have mentioned it a few times. They could be installing server side updates every week during maint for all we know.

 

Warframe never has downtime. They'll push out updates while youre still in mission and keep your progress when that mission finishes. At which point you cant start another mission until you restart/update the game.

 

I've been wishing Blade and Soul copied whatever Warframe has been doing for the last 10 years.

[DenialOfTruth]

11 minutes ago, matthew said:

Warframe never has downtime. They'll push out updates while youre still in mission and keep your progress when that mission finishes. At which point you cant start another mission until you restart/update the game.

 

I've been wishing Blade and Soul copied whatever Warframe has been doing for the last 10 years.

I'm not familiar with Warframe, but odds are there is some sort of maint going on, just they might have some sort of server configuration that lets them briefly bring down portions of it to do what is needed, or the server is more for match making purposes for missions and a lot more happens client side compared to BNS.

[Uldrum]

3 hours ago, matthew said:

Warframe never has downtime. They'll push out updates while youre still in mission and keep your progress when that mission finishes. At which point you cant start another mission until you restart/update the game.

 

I've been wishing Blade and Soul copied whatever Warframe has been doing for the last 10 years.

Warframe is the exception then, not the rule.

 

World of Warcraft, Black desert, Lost ark, Vindictus, Final fantasy, Soulworker, Girl's frontline, Genshin impact and more (I'm just not going to list every game there is)

 

All have some form of maintenance every week.

[Divinehero]

yea.. warframe is definitely the exception to the rule i'm pretty sure it's due at least partially to the fact that outside of the relays and such the game is peer to peer meaning the player "hosts" the session so yea...EVERY MMO i've ever played has weekly maintenence

Edited April 12, 2023 by Divinehero

[Nicolee]

22 hours ago, Grimoir said:

 

Current new maintenance time is 7:00AM South Korean Time. The change was purely done based on whats more conveniant and efficient for the devs. It is completely irrelevant whether its a EU or NA server.

Maintenances are always done based on devs, they rarely if not ever take into account player login/play times.

You might be unhappy about it but it will not change.

 

What time in SK was the old maint time?  How did it become inconvenient for the devs? 

 

For my own systems, they do backups automatically by a maintenance script run on a scheduler.  Don't the devs in SK  have such things?  Such tech is at least 40 years old.  How much human intervention does it take to do automated backups?

 

FWIW, a 50+ year old system (developed 1970 to early 1980s) that needs to be brought down for weekly backups (plato/(cyber1.org)  -- still Free to play for ancient games with ancient graphics) does it via scripting that only takes about 10-20 minutes (no updates, FWIW).  It only has to be brought down because

it still uses a mainframe OS+disk subsystem that was developed back in the 70's and predates logging file systems found on more modern systems (the main frame + disk subsystem is run in an emulation that runs on a PC-desktop (that is faster than the original CDC+Cray mainframes it ran on).

 

What OS underlies BnS?  If the support costs of BnS could be lowered by using modern SW and SW techniques, it might last longer...?  If BnS is only 7-8 years

old, its underlying OS can't be THAT old...can it?

 

If the server is still in the US, they must be doing it remotely.  Wouldn't that also imply it could be scriptable?

*curious*

[Grimoir]

On 4/12/2023 at 3:45 AM, matthew said:

Warframe never has downtime. They'll push out updates while youre still in mission and keep your progress when that mission finishes. At which point you cant start another mission until you restart/update the game.

 

I've been wishing Blade and Soul copied whatever Warframe has been doing for the last 10 years.

 

Generally BnS works the same way if it is a client update. They can push out an update to the client while you are still playing and it will update next time you restart it. We had updates pushed like this in the past.

This does not include the need to bring servers down for whatever reasons.

 

6 hours ago, Nicolee said:

What time in SK was the old maint time?  How did it become inconvenient for the devs? 

 

For my own systems, they do backups automatically by a maintenance script run on a scheduler.  Don't the devs in SK  have such things?  Such tech is at least 40 years old.  How much human intervention does it take to do automated backups?

 

FWIW, a 50+ year old system (developed 1970 to early 1980s) that needs to be brought down for weekly backups (plato/(cyber1.org)  -- still Free to play for ancient games with ancient graphics) does it via scripting that only takes about 10-20 minutes (no updates, FWIW).  It only has to be brought down because

it still uses a mainframe OS+disk subsystem that was developed back in the 70's and predates logging file systems found on more modern systems (the main frame + disk subsystem is run in an emulation that runs on a PC-desktop (that is faster than the original CDC+Cray mainframes it ran on).

 

What OS underlies BnS?  If the support costs of BnS could be lowered by using modern SW and SW techniques, it might last longer...?  If BnS is only 7-8 years

old, its underlying OS can't be THAT old...can it?

 

If the server is still in the US, they must be doing it remotely.  Wouldn't that also imply it could be scriptable?

*curious*

 

You need to keep in mind the devs might also have other games they support maintenance for, in which case it is far more conveniant to have them all around the same time rather than spread out. This has nothing to do with a backup being scriptable or not.

Having maintenances be more bundled frees up their time to get any potential fixes or issues resolved faster rather than puishing them out because of another maintenance window they need to support. You are focusing too much on the "backup and restart" part. While this change is mostly due to future patches with content for the game.

 

Old maintenance window was give or take like 13ish hours later than the new time which would have made it I think around 8:00 PM Korean time or so (to lazy to 100% double check)

 

[Kittyaura]

..Its rather amazing how many things go wrong in this game, either by accident or purposefully, what with all the maintenance that goes on... Guess they are doing the digital equivalent of mowing the lawn... While the mice are at play in the kitchen, hatching up new ways to screw the game up and eating all of the cookies...