I would not be proud of the facts you have stated. However regarding helping EVE. I will leave that up to EVE to decide who needs to be hired and fired. I do not seek employment with them.
I have invested my worthwhile time andmoney in this game and know if IT is doing their job. I am certain, what they are doing is working. But, any QoS, or IoS degradation is their responsibility. No one else to blame or congratulate. These consistent downtimes, in todays age and technology are avoidable.
This is a 18 year old game, with so many things tied into downtime, like respawning of asteroids among other stuff, that they knew before the second NODT test. with 18 years of coding, all on one server, you think its going to be quick and easy to unravel all that? noâŚ
Every time I see that red banner on the EVE launcher saying â⌠will be extendedâ, my heart drops as I imagine five hours of maintenance or code tweaking. Thirty extra minutes? Well, thatâs just a comfortable time-out to make sure all the bathroom necessities are taken care of 
If it means a smoother-running game with fewer disconnects and a marketplace that doesnât freeze, then Iâm all good with this.
3 Likes
So you do not parallel and normalize server groups before you switch?
this game is on one server⌠the only other servers are the other test servers⌠mainly they use TQ and SiSi (test)
OH MY!
Not even a backup standalone server?
nope. thats always been the beauty of EVE Online. All of it is on one server⌠thats why you can play with everyone in any country that has access to EVE (except for China, they have their own single server)
Geo,
That is great! But if I may âŚ
I recommend you purchase another server and run it concomitantly with this server. This will solve many issues you currently have.
For the record, the amount weâre talking for a 30-minute window amounts to nearly exactly $0.01 of lost time per account, assuming a basic monthly sub. Maybe let it slide.
And along with the correct backups will provide continuity of service regardless of the catastrophe. Never run you second server in the same building or even in the same town.
And since all you do to keep downtime to zero is normalize each server before transitioning. The client never sees an outage, while you perform your maintenance or recover from a disaster.
EVE Online this is the last thing that i can recall how their servers are set up⌠Not sure if anything has really changed much, that I can recall.
In the last few paragraphs of the article you provided is the following: (Please note it describes a similar process. Why are they not using it?)
The real benefit comes into play when (or if, but more likely when) one of these physical hosts needs hardware maintenance or needs to be taken offline for some reason. At this point, in a typical two-node physical cluster we would be forced to run on only one cluster node and have fingers crossed that our now-single-point-of-failure does not fail. Lots of soulful Amarrian prayers would be required.
With our virtual direction, we could simply vMotion the passive cluster node from its dedicated ESXi host to another ESXi host (the one hosting the 2nd clusterâs passive node)âŚand Bobâs yer uncle! Sure that one host with two passive nodes will now be over-allocated, but we would have to lose two more hosts before that becomes an issue!
This means that not only are we redundant on the SQL Instance level by using Windows Failover Clustering, but weâll now be able to survive more than one hardware failure as well! We have a lot of testing to do with this but for the most part this is all proven tech, so really, what could possibly go wrong?!
This is true⌠my accountant said I spend far too much real money on PLEX (to buy skill injectors and SKINS⌠yeas, I am a âwhaleâ), so I see your point of CCP making money on those of us who buy PLEX for SP, but I have several in-game buddies who refuse to spend any money on anything but Omega - they enjoy the challenge of playing the game while waiting for their skills to tick away.
30 minutes of increased SP rates is not going to hit CCPâs PLEX sales enough to make a difference. Those of us who get 30K SP for a small injector already have plenty of SP to their name. With a 28 day training cycle for one level 5 skill, a half hour of increased skill-learning rate is not going to put a dent into how many skill injectors we sell⌠and for those who refuse to buy injectors via PLEX, 30 minutes of added SP rate would be a nice compensation - so CCP is not going to lose sales from us whales, nor from those who wonât buy PLEX regardless.
As for those who DO buy skill injectors, 30 minutes of increased learning rate is still not going to clear our list of queued skills, so we will still be buying PLEX to get those Large Skill Injectors.
IF the downtime were a few DAYS, then having an increased rate of SP learning would impact CCPs sales of PLEX because a few days of increased learning rate WOULD make a huge dent in the skill queue⌠but 30 minutes? Naw, that isnât going to do anything but make the players feel compensated for their not being able to play for a half hour.
1 Like
Please forgive me ⌠but I have trained and worked with Microsoft Gold Partners, the best in the business. It sounds like a consultation with one might be in order to get this squared away. Otherwise, as I see it it, Eve is only one step away from a disaster, god forbid. Backups only help if you have another server. It could be months to reconstruct a new server from a backup, if you can get the parts on short notice.
I see the redundancy built into the system to prevent failure, but it is still one system. God forbid your server gets hit with a lightning strike and turns on fire. Never will happen but floods, you just can;t predict. Until then, IT should be congratulated for holding Eve together with bublle gam and bailing wire.
are you going to get down to work in this office of yours?
I ask politelyâŚ
1 Like
Contractual obligations do not permit me to seek employment elsewhere. I work hard, but it canât be for CCP. I advised an MGP. I would suggest strongly CCP takes my advice and consult. IMHO unless change is made, ccp will continue to walk a tightrope skirting with disaster, until it happens. I would not want to work in that environment, espescially one that had been accepting of this so long.
years of experiencesâŚ
dozens of employeesâŚ
hundreds of ideasâŚ
millions of coinsâŚ
and only one serverâŚ
No wonder you have so much downtime. From a professional perspective, it is horrifying.