@CCP_Falcon You’re the community guy, can you get us in touch with whoever does server stuff?
A little bit of a cross post from the previous forums… I, and I’m sure quite a few others, would be interested in what’s still being done in downtime. Much of the downtime maintenance seems to have been eliminated over the years. I’d be curious as to the history of downtime and the progress in eliminating it altogether. Crazy technobabble would be appreciated. 
so you want CCP to spend time explaining the technical side of keeping the game running instead of spending that time improving the game for you and me?
Sure, because communication is a bad thing.
This is the team that back when they used to communicate with the players (years ago now?) they always seemed like the most excited devs in the company to tell players about what they were doing. This is a topic I’ve seen come up several times in the past few weeks, it appears to me there’s an interest.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable question. Your response, however, does not. Your comment suggests that we should never ask questions because the devs are “too busy” to address them. However, CCP’s engagement with the player base has always been one the things that sets them apart.
I could care less whether a dev actually answers or not, but I worry when a fellow player chastises another for even asking a reasonable question because they think the devs don’t have time to address us peons.
Last I heard it was mostly database wizardry stuff.
For game play stuff reseed asteroid belts is all I can think of right now. it used to respawn a bunch of other stuff (like ded complexes), but most of that has been moved to a system where it will respawn on its own.
It will still respawn unfinished missions back to being full of rats from what I know… Which can be great if you find the kill bounties and salvage to be far more valuable than the mission completion bonus and LP. A week of farming certain missions can be quite useful for salvage and bounty purposes.
IDK exactly about actions the CCP is doing during downtime, but I see the results of it and have some clues of it.
Results:
I always thought that the hamsters have to be changed, next shift coming, previous resting or cleaning the CCP office.
Another thing it does is allow for rebalancing of which systems are on which hardware nodes. This, afaik, still requires a disconnect of all players.
Downtime is a good time for me to remember to go to bed. Its at 3 or 4am depending on daylight savings time.
It gives me a safe window to jump a super so… Viva DT.
The feedback so far, I appreciate. I wonder though, why does most of it have to be done at downtime at all? Why can’t the mission reset just be 24 hours after acceptance, for example? I can see things like that being a side effect of the downtime but not a reason for it. I imagine it’d be hard to do database maintenance while live, but is that just legacy code? Do other companies’ databases have server downtime? Cloud servers, google, netflix, etc? It is a distributed database with different services on different servers, could it be possible to have necessary downtime at different times for different processes? Meaning could you stay connected through downtime but with limited functionality? I assume that’s an idea already considered, so is it on the roadmap, or what makes something like that impractical? This is the kind of technical stuff EVE players eat up, but really, aside from downtime, I wonder what the technical team is working on right now.
I believe its legacy code.
Google have completely other technology they use with cooperation with Improbable game company to make persistent worlds.
Bonus: Hilmar was Special guest talking about games on this Improbable panel:
if there wasn’t downtime I don’t think missions would reset, and that they currently do is just an unintended side effect of DT. recording mission in progress status to the DB every downtime would just be a waste of resources imo.
What if it could be moved just on a “as needed” basis determined by CCP? Not flat out remove it all the time but for special in game “events”. Let’s say a large fight didn’t let you to get “saved by the bell” because CCP decided downtime will only happen after the committed force have found a way to extract or got wiped out?
There are obvious potential issue with such a thing like call of favoritism toward one or another side if it did or didn’t get moved or the potential logistical nightmare of moving such important procedure but as a “what if” scenario, I think it would be interesting to get CCP’s point of view on such things.
It also serves as a safety valve of sorts having missions reset. Every once in a great while a mission can break. Especially if you end up in the snowflake situation of somebody invading your mission instance and hauling off with say the Damsel.
Just wait until next reset and you’ll be able to actually complete the mission assuming you don’t get buggered by the same person a second time.
Actually, from my experience doing missions, a mission won’t reset if the final “event” of it has been triggered. Damsel dropping, other mission-specific loot dropping, boss enemy down, mission won’t reset once that’s been triggered.
Unless it’s changed. I’ve had this happen before when I accidentally fired upon targeted wrecks instead of tractoring them. Waiting for the mission next day just yielded empty space so I had to buy the “special delivery” off the market.
No…it’s questions like this that keep companies from delivering content. Stop asking to waste developer’s time on pointless questions.
I keep looking over your comment and I can’t make heads or tails of it. Care to explain yourself? Does the question keep a company from delivering content because they waste ungodly amounts of time writing out a simple paragraph explaining some tidbits of server backend? Or does the question keep a company from delivering content because they’re locked in fear of people actually being interested in the technology that makes the game run?
I’ll be honest, I can’t find a single angle in which your comment is anything but insane. God help me, I’m trying to find your mindspace where your thoughts make sense, but I can’t make it work. Either by your logic the devs should never post Devblogs because, you know, words. Or in the other case, the idea of hearing from the playerbase “oh that’s cool, how does that work” fills the devs with such terror that they will never invest any time into putting new things into the game ever again.
and sometimes stopping to do documentation is helpful. There are also probably some people that do a lot of work on maintaining the game and not working on new features
and yea, that’s how it should work. It’s also why when mission farming you don’t kill the final group to keep the mission active.