Game Services and Helm's Deep Update

[Grimdi]

2) Why only a couple of gigs room? It could theoretically be as high as 16GB. If we had a download size (and it is stretching credulity to breaking point to think that Turbine don't know how big it is) I'd know exactly how much room I need to free up, if it were the case that HDD was my concern here..

Random guess here is that they don't want / can't commit to a single number for that. Several different client versions (high-res / low-res, pando / steam / happycloud) as well as a large number of possible origins (from original SoA install discs to latest update) and even different locales are all variables influencing the download size. And a range 1-20 GB to cover all setups isn't very useful.

[Feraxks]

Thanks for the extra time to turn in tokens! I traded in most of mine the day before, but I was still gathering tokens for some furniture and was almost done when the servers went down.

And thank you for keeping the pre-order up too. Today was the day I got my money so I don't have to make due with the TP I was going to buy Helm's Deep with, and instead I was able to get the pre-order version. Yay, quest slots and Big Battles for me after all!

Since there are so many conspiracy theories out there (seriously, they faked a power outage to delay the HD release two days?!?), I thought I would had mine since its sort of been outted anyway.

They did all this (faked power outage, delayed release, extended Bounder's Bounties, extend HD offer), just so Silmelin would have time to buy the xpac with cash instead of TPs. My apologies to Silmelin for outtting him/her like this, but the truth needed to be known.

[AZHuman]

@Egilric


Comparing live lotro folder to beta folder the size difference is only about 1 gig. That doesn't include the .bin HD files that are what we actually download but they of course are compressed and less than a gig.

[FoxFire]

I would like to file a few days delay in the launch of a video game expansion under "0th (zeroth) world problems". Perhaps this term has already been coined. But if not, it would refer to problems which are even far MORE trivial than 1st world problems.

[Gromit1710]

As with all information I would learn and prepare where necessary - you might like to try it some time.


1) As I acknowledged in my post.

2) Why only a couple of gigs room? It could theoretically be as high as 16GB. If we had a download size (and it is stretching credulity to breaking point to think that Turbine don't know how big it is) I'd know exactly how much room I need to free up, if it were the case that HDD was my concern here.. It would be a bummer to get midway through the download and it fail because none of us have any idea how big the download it. However, HDD space wasn't my concern there - monthly download limits was the concern, many, many people are still constrained by such.

3) You clearly missed the post where the DEVs said that Big Battles would require an increase in Minimum Specs - the new MS MUST be known by now, so there is no valid reason not to inform the player base. I know from experience of my Kin (mainly mature gamers where there are many other priorities for money for before PC upgrades) that there are a significant number of players out there whose systems are towards the bottom end of the current specs range. Which is, I suspect, why in my kin Pre-Orders are at the lowest level ever.

Would you pre-order a car without knowing its engine size, seating capacity, and MPG? Of course you wouldn't. Its a simple principle - don't spend money until you understand the liabilities involved.

All The Best

Whatever your theories are, none of them amount to a conspiracy by Turbine.

I can only assume that they have not published them because they know they have taken money from people who will no longer be able to play.

[Silmelin]

Since there are so many conspiracy theories out there (seriously, they faked a power outage to delay the HD release two days?!?), I thought I would had mine since its sort of been outted anyway.

They did all this (faked power outage, delayed release, extended Bounder's Bounties, extend HD offer), just so Silmelin would have time to buy the xpac with cash instead of TPs. My apologies to Silmelin for outtting him/her like this, but the truth needed to be known.

Hahahaha! Shhhh! You weren't supposed to tell anyone!

[Egilric]

Whatever your theories are, none of them amount to a conspiracy by Turbine.

Who mentioned a conspiracy? You, not me.

Its a most amusing, but intellectually vacuous, debate mechanism: someone says something you disagree with, call it a conspiracy, and thereby avoid having to debate the points they actually made.



All The Best

[sakisman]

Groovy, that is all we needed to know.

I shall fill in the time getting my (level 60!) Hunter the Kindred rep with the Eglain which he
never bothered to get before, having a Hunter port there already.

I hope you and the rest of the Turbinites can catch up on sleep now.

this delay gave me time to get my champ to moria and my mini to 85. I actually in this case am happy it was delayed.

[Makaia]

Thanks for the info! I'm getting so excited for HD, I can barely stand the anticipation!

[SNy-lotrolinux-EU]

Random guess here is that they don't want / can't commit to a single number for that. Several different client versions (high-res / low-res, pando / steam / happycloud) as well as a large number of possible origins (from original SoA install discs to latest update) and even different locales are all variables influencing the download size. And a range 1-20 GB to cover all setups isn't very useful.

That is, sorry to say, entirely missing the point.
It would be safe to assume that a major percentage of those about to embark in the patching would start from the current live version. Even if, as you assume, they would only want to commit to a single number, they could add a disclaimer that it applies to a patch from current only and will, naturally, differ for people not using same.

FWIW, the patch from the then-current version to RoR was:

Original patch to update 8 (RoR):

Downloading 2 program files, 1506992 bytes...
Downloading 18 program files, 22446160 bytes...
Downloading 13113 data files, 1800097226 bytes...

That would be 1824050378 bytes (just short of 1.7GiB) in actually downloaded content.

HTH,
SNy

[sakisman]

I very much doubt that the new launch date was influenced in any way by a perceived necessity to keep the Bounder event open.

There are three things about this situation that would realisitically influence the launch date:

1. Scheduling arrangements with the hosting provider.
2. Letting the servers run for 24 hours to ensure that there are not any undetected issues remaining from the unexpected shutdown.
3. Allowing the folks on the operations team to go home and have a full night of rest after the all-hands-on-deck emergency. They've probably been on-site in the office or at the hosting provider since Outage Time + Driving Time O'Clock last night, with no sleep since then. And they probably won't be able to leave for a couple more hours yet, even though things seem pretty stable.

Oh, boy. If you think our power grid is bad, you don't even want to hear about our internet infrastructure. And you really, really don't want to hear about the state of our road bridges...

I'm not sure what you mean by internet infrastructure and i suspect you mean rellyablility but looking at speed US is the 14th fastest in the world. This is on average of corse.

[Sapience]

I very much doubt that the new launch date was influenced in any way by a perceived necessity to keep the Bounder event open.

There are three things about this situation that would realisitically influence the launch date:

1. Scheduling arrangements with the hosting provider.
2. Letting the servers run for 24 hours to ensure that there are not any undetected issues remaining from the unexpected shutdown.
3. Allowing the folks on the operations team to go home and have a full night of rest after the all-hands-on-deck emergency. They've probably been on-site in the office or at the hosting provider since Outage Time + Driving Time O'Clock last night, with no sleep since then. And they probably won't be able to leave for a couple more hours yet, even though things seem pretty stable.

Actually, I made the case for the extra time to allow for players to turn in the Bounders tokens and also to allow for an extra full day of 100% XP. So while yes we technically could have launched today those two things did enter the conversation.

As for the 3 items you mention, they were all considerations. Mostly #3 (I know my time was about 22 hours (plus travel times of about 3 more) and I know the actual DB and IT people were involved for a lot longer) , but a good measure of caution related to #2 also thrown in.

[Lumbercamp]

Not a very funny joke.

[whheydt]

Oh, boy. If you think our power grid is bad, you don't even want to hear about our internet infrastructure. And you really, really don't want to hear about the state of our road bridges...

Part of that is because no one came through about 70 years ago doing haphazard urban renewal with large amounts of high explosives, not counting the "political dissidents" on the ground doing more pin-point work of the same nature.

My take on all of this...

The outage was outside of Turbine's control. Turbine management is probably going to have some very interesting meetings with the datacenter management. Datacenter management is going to have interesting conversations with their own engineering people, followed by equally interesting conversations with some of their vendors. If anyone makes any money from the outage, it will be the Guild of Lawyers.

As soon as the Forums were up Sunday night, I expressed the opinion that the HD launch would be delayed at least until Tuesday. Given the instabilities still being seen, Wednesday may turn out to be optimistic. If it turns out to be inadvisable to launch on Wednesday, I would consider Monday 11/25 to be a long shot (for the non-US folks...Thursday 11/28 is a national holiday and *most* companies take the following Friday off as well, making a 4 day weekend), and Monday 12/2 is much more likely.

I had some things I wanted to get done Sunday. Those things got done Monday. Had they not gotten done...no big deal. If the launch gets pushed out further...no big deal. I'd rather the pre-HD server issues resulting from the outage be 100% clean and resolved before the update takes place because fixing them after the update would be a really painful process for all concerned.

There are far too many people who appear to feel entitled, on *both* sides of these discussions. Leaving the Bounder Token barter NPCs up, HD pre-order process in place, and +100% XP in place is making the best of a bad situation. As I see it, that's not *why* the delay but those things are a logical consequence of the need for the delay. Granted, that's easy for me to say since none of my planned last day activities involved or depended on any of those things.

There also appear to be far too many people who think that (a) dropping power on a complex network of computers is like flipping the power switch on a home PC and (b) bringing such a system back up after a power outage is like turning a stand-alone home PC back on. Sorry guys...it just isn't that simple. Hardware has to be checked. File system checks (long live "fsck"!) and database integrity checks, with possible restores and journal roll forward are not fast processes.

All in all, my sympathies are with the Turbine employees that had to deal with a datacenter disaster. I'm all for giving them the time to recover and be able to go about doing the update clear eyed and rested. Sapience has handled his end well. I have little doubt that the delay in announcing the rescheduled launch was a direct result of Turbine upper management having to sit down and decide on the revised schedule and arrange that with the datacenter. Thus, Sapience couldn't make the announcement eariler because the decision hadn't been made.

[Darlgon]

[/LIST]

Actually, I made the case for the extra time to allow for players to turn in the Bounders tokens and also to allow for an extra full day of 100% XP. So while yes we technically could have launched today those two things did enter the conversation.

As for the 3 items you mention, they were all considerations. Mostly #3 (I know my time was about 22 hours (plus travel times of about 3 more) and I know the actual DB and IT people were involved for a lot longer) , but a good measure of caution related to #2 also thrown in.

When you get bored with CS, apply for the PR department. They are the guys who take the lemons from a problem and make it into lemonade, and much more palatable than the lemon. You are a natural.

[Darlgon]

As soon as the Forums were up Sunday night, I expressed the opinion that the HD launch would be delayed at least until Tuesday. Given the instabilities still being seen, Wednesday may turn out to be optimistic. If it turns out to be inadvisable to launch on Wednesday, I would consider Monday 11/25 to be a long shot (for the non-US folks...Thursday 11/28 is a national holiday and *most* companies take the following Friday off as well, making a 4 day weekend), and Monday 12/2 is much more likely.

I think we got an answer five minutes ago to your speculation, in an email advertisement from Turbine saying it is launching tomorrow, so get in your pre-orders. Frankly, the fact that four servers are still having login problems is kinda concerning.

[trcanberra]

[/LIST]

Actually, I made the case for the extra time to allow for players to turn in the Bounders tokens and also to allow for an extra full day of 100% XP. So while yes we technically could have launched today those two things did enter the conversation.

As for the 3 items you mention, they were all considerations. Mostly #3 (I know my time was about 22 hours (plus travel times of about 3 more) and I know the actual DB and IT people were involved for a lot longer) , but a good measure of caution related to #2 also thrown in.

I hate extra xp with a passion - but then you made me buy the xp disabler in the store, so I guess that's mission accomplished.

[whheydt]

Does it really matter why the power loss happened? There are a lot of things that can cause the power to go out in an area. My power company can't keep the power on for more than a few weeks at a time (though typically very brief, the outages last just long enough to shut down all my electronics). Sure, the skies were clear in Boston. All the tornadoes were hundreds of miles away. But that doesn't mean the power can't go out for other reasons. I checked the national grid status online when the game went down and there were reports of outages in the Boston area.

Get thee to the nearest Costco. Buy a 1.35KVA UPS for $90. Connect your computer, monitor, modem, and router to it. Never fear a brief outage again. Isn't it worth that much to protect the integrity of your much more expensive computer? Think of it as "cheap insurance".

I run everything behind UPSes, and I *don't* get frequent outages.

[Olahorand]

As a result, we will be extending our Helm’s Deep pre-purchase offers as well as the 100% XP boost and Bounder’s Bounty events until the 20th as well.

Great - since this allowed me to prepurchase (what I forgot in the stressful days after my arrival in the USA). But the cause I delayed this myself, was the added tax - and it had been added in full European percentage (and not only the 10% for Seattle area) anyway.

Best greetings from Redmond
Olahorand

[Darlgon]

Get thee to the nearest Costco. Buy a 1.35KVA UPS for $90. Connect your computer, monitor, modem, and router to it. Never fear a brief outage again. Isn't it worth that much to protect the integrity of your much more expensive computer? Think of it as "cheap insurance".

I run everything behind UPSes, and I *don't* get frequent outages.

I might add, it also prevent power SURGES from blowing your equipment out on clear days, when lighting strikes are miles away or if you are close to any kind of manufacturer that draws a high load sometimes and a low one a second later. So.. for pretty much everyone.

[Kerin_Eldar]

There also appear to be far too many people who think that (a) dropping power on a complex network of computers is like flipping the power switch on a home PC and (b) bringing such a system back up after a power outage is like turning a stand-alone home PC back on.

And so God created UPSes!

In the case of loss of external power it is NOT inevitable that system shutdowns will be any different from manually started ones, that's what sort-time UPSes are designed for, to allow a normal shutdown to take place so that when power is restored the systems will come back up just like they would do after any maintenance or other controlled 'outage'.

One is also left wondering why an apparently large-scale 'datacenter', as Turbine like to refer to it, wouldn't have standby power generation to prevent ANY outage, controlled or otherwise. Most organisations I deal with in a professional capacity selling a 24/7/365 service would consider a system like this MISSION CRITICAL and take necessary steps to ensure continuity of service in the vent of a relatively minor issue such as interruption to external power supplies.

[EruReborn]

[/LIST]

Actually, I made the case for the extra time to allow for players to turn in the Bounders tokens and also to allow for an extra full day of 100% XP. So while yes we technically could have launched today those two things did enter the conversation.

As for the 3 items you mention, they were all considerations. Mostly #3 (I know my time was about 22 hours (plus travel times of about 3 more) and I know the actual DB and IT people were involved for a lot longer) , but a good measure of caution related to #2 also thrown in.

I am fairly sure that most in the (non-vocal) majority appreciate that this was the right thing to do in the circumstances and are grateful for the extraordinary efforts that you and the team put into resolving an issue that you were not responsible for (though your managers / accountants certainly have some responsibility here).

Spurs at the ready - forth Eorlingas!

[Grimdi]

One is also left wondering why an apparently large-scale 'datacenter', as Turbine like to refer to it, wouldn't have standby power generation to prevent ANY outage, controlled or otherwise. Most organisations I deal with in a professional capacity selling a 24/7/365 service would consider a system like this MISSION CRITICAL and take necessary steps to ensure continuity of service in the vent of a relatively minor issue such as interruption to external power supplies.

Even Amazon and Microsoft at least once lost power to some of their datacenters, including failure of the backup power systems. The thing with backup systems in general is that ideally you never need them, so they aren't checked as often as they maybe should in many cases. And it's tricky to actually perform realistic tests on them anyway without interrupting your live operations.

[Stephen1981]

Even Amazon and Microsoft at least once lost power to some of their datacenters, including failure of the backup power systems. The thing with backup systems in general is that ideally you never need them, so they aren't checked as often as they maybe should in many cases. And it's tricky to actually perform realistic tests on them anyway without interrupting your live operations.

maybe so but it seems turbine loses data center power maybe 3 to 4 times a year which is a lot when it happens to microsoft,amazon it does not seem to happen very often and its very rare

[Ghosttaker]

it does not seem to happen very often and its very rare

redundancy ftw?