So why did your news item say it began 8 September? Very few people are interested in when the DT happened that changed the code, only when the actual DT was not happening.
The simple way to headline the article would have been, “There will be no DT on 9 September.” Simple, unambiguous.
We’re still on day #1, the main part of the experiment starts after 11 o’clock EVE Time tomorrow.
To engage players to help us test; see e.g. https://twitter.com/KhapriceHeska/status/1435572675171192839
I’m interested to see how fleets react with no DT in regards to our services that require clients to keep fleet open, so I will be on at 0700am ustz for this
So you just going to jip us on the daily like that? After a week of no daily because I’m not in Caldari space? So that’s how it is.
Daily will still show up.
By ccp
What Geo said – but to find out how all the different systems in EVE respond on this scale, then we are testing what happens.
If there are any daily things that you do or claim today, and then you can’t tomorrow; then please create a bug report and ping me here again with the EBR number.
So even your own colleague agrees your announcement was wrong and misleading!!! Sorry, cannot give a fig for your excitement, but I can give a fig for unambiguous communication with your customers.
No one I have spoken with has a daily today. Is that intentional?
As in “Kill # NPCs” or “do a proving ground”. Are there people who do have these?
There has been a fair amount of comments & questions in this thread on why we are looking at downtime; what’s the problem with a few minutes each day.
The first problem is that it interrupts primary play sessions for players in Asia and Oceania. Downtime at 11 o’clock EVE Time doesn’t affect Europe that much and doesn’t really affect the Americas at all. I covered this in detail in my 2019 dev blog on No Downtime Vol. 1 and the various options if downtime was not at 11 o’clock.
The second problem is that this is a larger impact than a few minutes. Shortly before downtime players start looking at the clock, trying to figure out if they have time before downtime to complete more of what they are doing. For example, can they run one more mission? We see this clearly on the online graphs that the population starts to dip around 10 o’clock and then it takes a while for players to start logging in again. It should look like the red line:
At the very extreme it can be argued that some impact of this daily reboot lasts from 09:40 until 13:20, i.e., from the pre-downtime peak until the population reaches the levels it would have been at if the play session had not been interrupted, or 3 hours and 40 minutes. Complicating this simplistic analysis of course are that players in Asia and Oceania would normally be starting to log off anyway in this period and 11 o’clock EVE Time is noon/lunch time on mainland Europe and people would log out to grab something to eat. We only have one datapoint on the uninterrupted play session, from Vol. 1 of this experiment in 2019, and this Vol. 2 experiment now will tell us more.
There are no changes to code or content today. We are setting up tests, disabling things that would run at tomorrow’s downtime (if there was one), and informing players and getting them engaged. The primary part of this experiment starts at 11 o’clock tomorrow.
EDIT: I checked with devs. The Caldari Union Day event ended today and there are no other time-limited events currently running. The daily login campaign is active.
Of course, you also need to find a way to identify whether logged in players are actually active. I see plenty of circumstantial evidence each day before DT for players still logged in but no longer active. DT does at least disconnect these false presences until the player is actually active enough to log them back in…
EDIT - eg, there are certain gankers in Uedama who are logged in right up until 1100Z, but inactive, yet strangely do not reappear for a few hours or more after DT. Without DT, they will just stay logged in, but still not be actively playing. Of course, it will make CCP’s player stats look better on a false premise…
20 or 30 minutes is fine?
I’m not fine with that at all, I want downtime to start when I log off and end when I log back in. That should keep people who are ok with 20 or 30 minutes totally off balance.
Oh and since you have nothing to do during all that time I’m not online, why don’t you go and peel me a grape?
You know I’m kidding right?
Two things, I think that downtime needs to be doomed, so to me this is good, oh, three things…
In the US people who are either up really late, or like me, get up fairly early (depending somewhat on daylight time) are infact effected by it. I have no idea how many of us that is though for obvious reasons.
The last thing is thank you for telling us all this, I hereby nominate you to become “he who talks to the unwashed masses”. We really like knowing what’s going on and why, left to ourselves we seem to come up with a lot of outrageous crap and after a while some of it starts to deal like reality even though we made it up in our little tinfoil encased noggins.
Thank you and keep this up please, if they let you, ok?
It’s good.
I’m not sure…
How do you know that are inactive?
What if that’s when they sit down and hash out how to make people freak out on the forums each day?
Perhaps they use that time to compare notes on how much salt they can sell in Jita?
Maybe they are eating cake! Have you asked them what they are doing, like “hi gankers!’ how’s business? Are you active right now or are you inactive?”.
Oh my god… I just realized! Maybe they went afk!
The shame!
The post to you was serious, the one to the other guy about peeling me a grape and stuff was not.
Though his idea of 20 or 30 minutes of downtime being fine sounds terrible, having it as short as possible would be good for everyone, having it be not needed at all would be fantastic.
I never have an issue with AFK, although given so many of those who DO have an issue with AFK are of the ganker persuasion, then there would be a certain hypocrisy. Oh my god, hypocritical gankers!
My point is actually one of getting a nice continuous red line on a CCP chart for player presence may actually be a false Holy Grail. If DT currently acts as a purging mechanism for code and databases, it also acts as a purging mechanism for inactive players. Not that there is a problem per se with inactive players; unless, of course, CCP then draws false conclusions from their phantom presence in development plans…
