[INFO] Prydwen down

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Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
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Update:

Quite possibly the least informative update since the creation of updates:
I don't have any new news. I just spoke to our techies and they're waiting for the Mythic techies to get into work. I might have some more news in an hour or two.

Last thing I heard was that we're still trying to clean up the database and that this will be a monster job.

As predicted I'll keep this thread locked so the updates don't drown.

Feel free to continue the discussion here

If you have any questions (don't take the piss with this) pm them to me. I will NOT respond to your PM's but I might put your question and answer in the next update.
 

Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
241
Some Questions & Answers:

Q: The day Prydwen was down I was supposed to pay my house. Will it still be there when the server comes back online?
A: When the server comes back up the game time will only have progressed several minutes or less. So it's like time stood still so your house will still be there. If your house was due to be repossessed 2 hours after it was shutdown it will now be repossessed 2 hours after the server comes back online.

Q: Is it a coincidence that this bug happened right after a 100 characters were banned?
A: Yes it is.

Q: Have GoA/Mythic had technical personell working around the clock since server shutdown wednesday last week, trying to solve the Prydwen problem?
A: Not around the clock litterally, as in 24/7, but I can assure you we have worked on it as much as we could and it continues to be our biggest priority.

Q: Will there be a "grace period" between Prydwen coming back up and clustering Prydwen and Excal
A: Yes. As it stands now we will be able to bring the database back almost completely but there might be some work left and untill we're sure Prydwen is good again we won't cluster.

Sorry for the questions I couldn't reply to. Most were "what if" questions and I simply can't afford to fuel rumors by replying to possible scenario's people come up with.

And sorry for not responding to the most asked question: "When will Prydwen be back up" ... trust me I'd reply to it if I knew but then again I'd post it as soon as I found out so you won't have to ask me again.
 

Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
Joined
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Messages
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About the questions I've been getting via PM's:

Thank you for your questions and thank you for your support and continued patience. But...

Most of the questions are "what if" questions and most of those are about a rollback.

I will NOT reply to these questions as it's silly to reply to questions concerning a scenario that might or may not play out at all. You'll get pissed or happy about answers that might be completely unrelated to the reality of what's going to happen. I simply don't have time to go talk to our people about possible outcomes off this they are way to busy making sure we get a good outcome in the first place.

Right now it's unlikely we'll roll back more then a couple of hours (last backup before we brought the server down). And we will simply not decide our policies on returning items or compensating downtime untill we know exactly when the server will be back up and in what state.

Sorry to all those people that want answers to those particular questions. As soon as we have discussed this internally I will make it my priority to let you know exactly what our policies regarding return of items etc will be.

Feel free to keep sending me your PM's. If I have enough questions I can respond to I'll put up a new update.
 

Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
241
Update:

You might have noticed that Prydwen is no longer on the server list.

This does NOT mean Prydwen got (or will be) deleted or something. It's just a precaution. We'll be bringing the server up for internal testing soon and we wouldn't want people to accidently connect to it while it's open.

Some Questions and Answers:

Q: How much does GOA depend on Mythic to fix this problem ?
A: I don't know exactly how much Mythic is doing and how much we are doing but I do know that we have been in very close and almost constant contact with Mythic since the beginning of this problem.

Q: Will we get compensated in free days?
A: I can't answer this question simply because (like the other what if questions) we haven't decided this. However I deem it quite likely and if we do it will be to accounts that were open when the server went down.

Q: Why are there no updates on your official site?
A: The simple truth is there isn't much "news" to report. Prydwen is down and hasn't come back up yet. Any information that is posted on our website is (rightfully) concidered official information from the company. And therefor we're "carefull" with what we post there. The updates I post here are "tidbits" of info I post as I gather them. Some things I said a couple of days ago turned out to be wrong or at least not completely true. That is fine since I was giving you info as it came available without triplechecking it. We won't post anything on the official website untill we're 100% sure about it. And so far we're not 100% sure about when Prydwen will be back up. When we are I can assure you it will be on the official website. But posting "Yep Prydwen is still down" is basicly all we could post on the website anyway.

However I do realise that even a "we have no news today but we're still working on it" post would go a long way and I promise I'll talk with the powers that be about this tomorrow.

Again I'd like to thank you for your patience and support. I expected to get a lot of "problematic" PM's when I asked you to send me your questions but most of your questions are very reasonable and justified. Keep sending them and I'll try to answer as many as possible in the next update.

We realise this is a very annoying situation and we realise that you are very frustrated by now. Trust us frustration is an emotion we are all very familiar with at the moment. Please remember that we are trying our best to solve this problem as quick and as good as possible.
 

Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
241
Update:

Q: Do the problems have anything to do with a hacking and if so are our personal data (creditcards for example) in any danger?
A: No. This was not a hacking and your personal data and CC's are completely safe. It's a database problem and a result of that is that some items got "duped". However this was a result of the database problem not the cause.

Q: If we get free days as compensation are you going to give them to all your customers or just the Prydwen players.
A: It is almost impossible for us to determine who is a "Prydwen player" and who isn't. I mean where do you draw the line? And giving free days to everyone might feel unfair for the Prydwen players that were most affected. Therefor we're also looking into other ways to compensate you for the downtime. Think of heightened xpgain for a short period for example.

Again I've gotten a lot of "if we rollback and I lose this and this and this what can I get back?" questions and as I already told you I simply won't reply to that yet. When we announce the solution for Prydwen we'll announce our policy on all that shortly after. Sorry.

I don't expect another update untill well into this afternoon we're currently waiting for the US working day to start to get info from Mythic.
 

IainC

English WAR Community Manager
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Apr 21, 2004
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There will be news on the website today regarding Prydwen. The Mythic office only opened for the day a couple of hours ago and as you can imagine they need a little time today to get back to us with more info. Please don't expect official updates regarding this until late in the afternoon or early evening there simply isn't anything we can tell you until then.
 

Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
Joined
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Messages
241
Update:

We're currently testing Prydwen internally and will continue to do this all evening. There will be news up on the official site later today as well.

Some Q&A:

I'm getting a lot of questions I already replied to in earlier Q&A's so if you sent in a question I'm not replying to have a look at the earlier posts it might already be answered.

Q: Once everything is sorted is there any chance of getting a detailed technical description of what went wrong?
A: I can imagine you'd like to hear this just out of curiosity but I don't think it's very likely we'll go into great detail. There is all kinds of agreements between Mythic and GOA about what we can talk about and what not and I think to play it safe we'll just won't speak of it much.

Q: Do you feel GoA is doing enough to inform people through the official channels?
A: Yes and no. I think we could do a lot better but I don't think it's nearly as bad as some people like to claim. I've already explained to you why information on the official site has been scarce and I stand by that explanation.

Q: Why is the broad playerbase not informed about GoA using FH as an official source of announcements?
A: Because FH isn't an official source of announcements. It's a forum a lot of our playerbase read and hence we've been using it to give you tidbits of information. Like I already said sometimes this information wasn't confirmed and ended up being plain wrong. We could never post information like that on our official site.
 

IainC

English WAR Community Manager
Joined
Apr 21, 2004
Messages
1,862
News
News said:
Tests are still continuing on Prydwen and we are busy double checking every database to make sure that the corruption we discovered has not affected other areas of the game. As you can imagine this is a very large job, but we hope you agree that the server should not be restarted until we can be absolutely sure of it's stability. We hope to be able to announce when the end of this process will be tomorrow. In the meantime we thank you for your continued patience.
Not the most informative post I know but we will have more definite information for you tomorrow. Expect to see an announcement regarding the reopening and compensation for players.
 

IainC

English WAR Community Manager
Joined
Apr 21, 2004
Messages
1,862
Friday News
Friday News said:
Return of Prydwen and the English server clustering
As the Prydwen server is experiencing a problem related to corrupted files, it had to be shut down for more than one week in order to allow us to identify the cause of this unprecedented bug and implement the corrections necessary. The major part of both Mythic's and Goa's teams exclusively dedicated their work to it, and thus we are happy to announce that the server will reopen on Monday. In order to avoid any bug propagation risk, we had to delete one or several objects in the inventories of a number of characters. We will naturally do the best we can to restore as many items as possible. If you notice the disappearance of any non-tradeable object you won through a quest or an item needed to continue a quest, please contact our technical support so that they can restore it after checking that you had it before. Equally for artifacts, if one is missing, contact us and it will be restored at level 10, whatever its initial level. Finally, for those who lost objects other from the kind of objects described above, the character concerned will be given money to compensate.

Furthermore, in order to compensate the disturbance inflicted to the players who were deprived of their server during this period, GOA will offer a free subscription corresponding to the actual duration of server shutdown to every player owning an active account on the English servers at the date of Prydwen's shutdown. And in order to make up for the "wasted time" inflicted, all Prydwen's Realms will benefit from the maximum help granted to under-populated realms until Friday the 16th of September. This means the following bonuses :

Days for a free level : 2
Camp Bonus : 120%
RvR Bonus : 10%
Hookpoints Purchase : 50% reduction

Due to this problem, the Excalibur-Prydwen clustering could not be carried out as announced initially but it is still on the program. However, the date will only be set once Prydwen is re-opened.

There will be specific news on Monday detailing exactly how to report any missing items. For the record, we will be running very thorough tests over the weekend to ensure that the server is stable and that no additional problems have arisen ready for the restart on Monday.
 

IainC

English WAR Community Manager
Joined
Apr 21, 2004
Messages
1,862
To answer a common question, there will be a small rollback to Wednesday morning. This is unavoidable as this is the latest salvageable database backup. As this is only a few hours it means that people should not lose too much, if you gained items, levels, etc after this point they will have been lost and we will be unable to restore them, if you had items or whatever before this point and they were lost as a result of the bug then they will be restored.

As we said earlier, anything that you have lost as a result of the bug will be restored as far as it is possible to do so - so quests, ML steps, items, levels etc can and will be restored where it is possible.

There will be more news on Monday explaining in greater detail what will happen and how to report any problems that you find.
 

Xalin

[GOA] English Servers GM
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
241
Another small Q&A:

Q: I am on holiday during most of the bonus you are giving on Prydwen. Will that mean I miss out on this or will it the bonus kick in when a player logs in for first time?
A: The bonus is server wide not character specific so yes if you go on holiday the next couple of weeks you will miss the bonus. Sorry :(

Q: If GOA are confident that everything will be fine by monday, why can't the server come up for the weekend and just start to replace items on monday when GOA comes back to work?
A: Because there is still some work to be done on Prydwen before we are ready to open it up again. I (and the rest of the English GM team) will be in the office most of saturday and possibly sunday. We'll be restoring things on the characters that submitted Rightnows about lost items/xp/realmpoints before we brought the server down. We want to make sure that whatever "problems" we face monday we can deal with monday without having to work through a backlog of work.

Q: Has Zenythe been sacked as we seem to see more of you and Requiel at the moment.
A: No thank god she hasn't been sacked I wouldn't like my job much without her around ;). She just hasn't posted here lot recently because she planned a long weekend EXACTLY in the middle of this crisis and when she got back she went in a "oh I'm so sorry I'll make up for it"-work frenzy keeping her away from the forums.
 
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