downtime

[Tersyi]

With the upcoming 12 hour downtime on the 13th the downtime on the 11th seems excessive and lacking good planning.
They then go ahead and thank us for our understanding. Well i do not understand the need for a hotfix on the 11th and a 12 hour downtime 2 days later. idk, maybe i just don't see the big picture because i would have either moved up the one from the 13th or just waited 2 days for the hotfix and done both during the same downtime.

[Grapold]

Doing hotfixes during scheduled maintainence is inherently dangerous, so they are usually done seperately.
I don't know in what way it was "lacking in planning", we got 5 days notice for Wednesday's outage, and it seems that the good folks @ Turbine are prepared to come in at 4am to do it. That speaks of planning to me.

[Helgarm]

12 hours downtime strikes me as a hefty bit of updating/testing. I assume, therefore, that they have identified a couple of issues that need rectifying before getting on with that. Hence the current downtime.

By fixing these now, they have a couple of days to monitor the situation before the larger update.

Sounds like perfectly good planning to me, also.

H.

[nalsop705]

Sure you got 5 days notice for Wednesday, but what notice was there for Monday's downtime? Does the system need that much maintenance that it needs to be down 4 to 6 days per month? I finally have some time to play, and I can't because the servers are down again. I don't recall seeing any notice for the Monday downtime, until I went to log in on Monday.....and so 2 out of 4 days I can play this week are lost, thanks a lot.

[TheDisasterman]

I think that popping a hotfix in is great before a major update. Why? Because it means something annoying or destabilizing might go away and therefore not affect emergent content. I worked for an online game that will go unnamed. They never announced hotfixes. They also never implemented many unless there was a game-breaker involved. I later worked for an MMORPG that, when a hotfix was implemented, rewarded players by implementing a suggestion or two from the list that would not affect the hotfix issue itself. When there was nothing simple to modify for players, a small reward item or stat bump was the payoff.

I cannot wait to see what they fixed. Where are the patch/hotfix notes? That is my only Q.

[Sapience]

With the upcoming 12 hour downtime on the 13th the downtime on the 11th seems excessive and lacking good planning.
They then go ahead and thank us for our understanding. Well i do not understand the need for a hotfix on the 11th and a 12 hour downtime 2 days later. idk, maybe i just don't see the big picture because i would have either moved up the one from the 13th or just waited 2 days for the hotfix and done both during the same downtime.

I'll happily answer this.

Hot fix today was to address game issues, including some performance issues that have been addressed and we felt important to get into the game as quickly as possible. We could have waited until Update 10, but we felt these fixes were significant enough to warrent their own update as they would improve the quality of game play for a large number of players.

The maintenance on Wednesday is the result of a tremendous amount of planning and development by our internal support teams. It is a significant upgrade to our backend systems and completely unrelated to any game play changes we made in today's hotfix. In fact, if you read the messaging you'll see that today's downtime impacts only LOTRO and Wednesday's maintenace will impact all Turbine services.

We avoid, as many IT professionals will tell you you should, 'doubling up' on unrelated things. In the event that one or the other had an issue, having done both at once would making tracking down the cause much more difficult and could result in dramatically extended downtimes and would not fit industry accepted 'best practices'. Especially when dealing with significant upgrades to a backend system as we will be doing on Wednesday.