WTF is wrong with Excal??

[Elewyth(TLSOA)]

they claim to have upgraded the server...this i highly doubt, we have a lower population than ANY of the French or German servers at peak time, and yet like a cheap whore excal readily goes down at any given moment, so please stop the bullshit GOA, sort this out... its just not acceptable anymore.. you cant go on justifying this ....surely as were getting a lesser service we should pay a lesser amount per month! :touch:

 

[York]

they claim to have upgraded the server...this i highly doubt, we have a lower population than ANY of the French or German servers at peak time, and yet like a cheap whore excal readily goes down at any given moment, so please stop the bullshit GOA, sort this out... its just not acceptable anymore.. you cant go on justifying this ....surely as were getting a lesser service we should pay a lesser amount per month! :touch:

Info here

 

[Direnad]

And why do you care? I thought you quit and had characters deleted

ps : You wouldn't happen to be Keri from Hib/Excal who used to be in LoC would you?

 

[Elewyth(TLSOA)]

ps : You wouldn't happen to be Keri from Hib/Excal who used to be in LoC would you?

no

 

[Drav]

imo mythic should start up UK offices and run the server from there, would much rather have it that way..... would be much more reliable too.... GoA with all their flaws just dont give us what they're paid for, and as business imo GoA is comparable with a guy selling hot dogs out of his car boot in the middle of the motorway.

 

[Xanthian]

Trying to cram almost 20fg into Temple of Twilight isnt healthy tbh

Quit trying to wtfzerg everything and try use a bit of intuition and skill for once.

 

[Svartmetall]

Xanthian - go buy a clue somewhere.


And BTW I agree about Excal, can't remember seeing any of the German or French servers having anything LIKE the downtime Excal has.

 

[Glendower]

Just monitoring the boards on occasion it is obvious that Excal has more than its share of problems. GOA=teh suck

Oh, and hi, Svart (Sneekyy)

 

[Archeon]

I've been traumatised by this experience, its just as well I brought a carebear the other day - I was in need of a hug when I found out i'd have to spend a whole hour not hinging.

 

[Kathal]

Excalibur crashes
[2004-4-03]

A small heads up. Excalibur is having some problems tonight, there has already been several crashes. We are aware of the problem and will hopefully have more detailed information about it tomorrow.

Hopefully?? Information??
Are they kidding?? Many, if not all have lost the hope for ANY info about the state of our server. This is 11 days ago now. Sure they say "We will bring the server back up ASAP", but who cares really. We KNOW the servers will be up ASAP, but what about the PROBLEM that caused the server to crash?? Why can the French/German servers support 3500 players and not the English servers??
Too many ppl in a Zone. Bullshit imo. We have RvR, Epic mobs, ML4.2 and many other nice things. Sure those things CAN be done in small numbers, but some can't help zerging raids/hunts/steps. On Excal we Zerg. Some more than others, but we ALL zerk once in a while. Afaik Excal are one of the most zerging servers in DAoC. But the game invites you to do so if you have the numbers. Give better hardware or at least some info about where the problem lies(software/hardware/”Sorry, but the game does not support large numbers in one zone”).
Is Goa on the edge to bankrupts or are they just milking the cow till it dehydrate??

Crashed
[2004-14-03]

Excalibur just went down and we are working on bringing it back online. It should not take long, the server should be back up and running shortly. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Don't be sorry. Give info and fix it.
What is the game SUPPOSED to support?? 100/500/1000 chars in one Zone??
Does GoA accept the crashes as “Working as intended, just too many ppl in one zone. Server will be back asap”.'

If Mythic haven’t sent technical documentation describing these basic thing, then they have sent you a less that complete product imo. Now pass on the info.

 

[old.Whoodoo]

All servers suffer the same, just cause they dont post their respective whines on here doesnt mean they dont have the same crashes.

This goes for French, German, US, Korea, Italy etc etc etc, just check their forums (use babelfish) to see.

Damn Im glad I can find other things to do, from gardening and shopping to watching pr0n and making the missus smile, DAoC players must have a high suicide rate seeing as you all get so depressed when a server goes down.

 

[Kathal]

Damn Im glad I can find other things to do, from gardening and shopping to watching pr0n and making the missus smile, DAoC players must have a high suicide rate seeing as you all get so depressed when a server goes down.

That’s a bright reply.
Pointing out there is a problem does not mean ppl don’t have others things in their lives.
And no, this does not indicate ppl are depressed. What it indicates is that we find it very frustrating wasting may hours when the servers crash when you are on big raids and so on.

X says: "There is something wrong with <insert subject here>".
Y says: "LOOOL you looser. Is that REALY all you care about".
Get my point??

As I said. INFO, INFO, INFO and INFO.
Why does the servers crash??
Do we have to accept the crashes??
Can the problems be fixed and are Goa/Mythic willing to do it (Pay the price)??

Its pretty simple questions and I think we have the right to get the answers.

 

[Seroquell]

That’s a bright reply.
Pointing out there is a problem does not mean ppl don’t have others things in their lives.
And no, this does not indicate ppl are depressed. What it indicates is that we find it very frustrating wasting may hours when the servers crash when you are on big raids and so on.

X says: "There is something wrong with <insert subject here>".
Y says: "LOOOL you looser. Is that REALY all you care about".
Get my point??

As I said. INFO, INFO, INFO and INFO.
Why does the servers crash??
Do we have to accept the crashes??
Can the problems be fixed and are Goa/Mythic willing to do it (Pay the price)??

Its pretty simple questions and I think we have the right to get the answers.

have to agree with ele and Kathal on this one, im fluent in french and german and monitor all their respective boards and sites just out of boredom, i can assure you Excal has crashed 80% MORE than any other server, this isnt just co-incidence i can assure you, there is something very wrong with some of the translation code going into Excal, it can be the only answer (barring alien abduction theories) i mean look at it, french based company, employs probably more German and French staff than english coders, i think i see the problem when it comes to the ENG translation, some n00b coder prolly half-drunk half obese from eating pizza (possibly)french or german miss-spelled something when transalting to ENG code (or whatever the term is) and thats why we get nuked so often, look at the FRENCH AND GERMAN servers... they seem relatively stable..wonder why that could be? yes it could be a co-incidence but it reeks of sloppy coding/translation to me.

flame away.

 

[Ssera]

i can assure you Excal has crashed 80% MORE than any other server, this isnt just co-incidence i can assure you

I'm sorry, that's complete bs - the french and german servers are up and down like yo-yo's (or the atlantis zones at least) and just as much as the UK ones. For example mid atlantis on YS crashed around 6 times over saturday and sunday (but you won't find any information about it on the main boards).

Do you actually play on any of the french/german servers, 'cos basing your argument on what you see on the forums is simply laughable...

Granted, there's less problem with the authentication server staying up (that I've noticed) tho the "account already logged on" problem seems to be just as bad.

 

[Seroquell]

I'm sorry, that's complete bs - the french and german servers are up and down like yo-yo's (or the atlantis zones at least) and just as much as the UK ones. For example mid atlantis on YS crashed around 6 times over saturday and sunday (but you won't find any information about it on the main boards).

Do you actually play on any of the french/german servers, 'cos basing your argument on what you see on the forums is simply laughable...

Granted, there's less problem with the authentication server staying up (that I've noticed) tho the "account already logged on" problem seems to be just as bad.

it int bullshit its FACT, i have friends on most of the highly populated servers and whilst zone crashes do happen, zone crashes are DIFFERENT to SERVER crashes where the WHOLE server goes down.. ffs read the post next time..

its a FACT that excalibur as a server has been DOWN 80% more than any other server and by down i mean YOU CANT LOG IN, not just some nancy zone crash where u can insta log back in...i mean fully DOWN! as in the server cannot be accessed by anyone.. sure they all suffer zone crashes, but they DONT suffer even a tenth of the downtime we do and i know this for a fact. the problem is almost certainly poor hardware/coupled with shoddy translation... but if you have another answer please share..

 

[Teh FnoRd]

The only fact in this thread is that peeps should get out more and try that thing called life! They have cheese there ya know!

 

[Sohan_thc]

imo mythic should start up UK offices and run the server from there, would much rather have it that way..... would be much more reliable too.... GoA with all their flaws just dont give us what they're paid for, and as business imo GoA is comparable with a guy selling hot dogs out of his car boot in the middle of the motorway.

Well to put the server on an island is not really a great plan i think.
soon we have the excuse of lag the the harold of free interprise is
hanging on the cable.
the solution is so easy but yet so hard for french ppl.
Just take the freaking US version , nuthing wrong with it
saves on translation cost and hard questions you forward to the US right now section. so easy but yet so hard

 

[Ssera]

The only fact in this thread is that peeps should get out more and try that thing called life! They have cheese there ya know!

have to agree with that

Ofc Seroquell, it's a big conspiracy from GOA aiming to undermine the english epeaking population so that they never have to deal with the whining and complaining (do they anyway?), and the idyllic picture in their minds of happy gamers dancing around in fresh cut grass finally becomes a reality.

Server crash != (zone crash -> login server crash)

zone crash = zone gets rebooted automatically
server crash = server gets rebooted automatically
login server crash = nothing happens, have to wait for GOA to manually reboot.

If this where to be made automatic too, then while not dealing with the root of the problem (why does a zone/server crash in the first place) itself, it would help with effective downtime of the server. Now I don't know all the little details about how the login server works - maybe you can't do an auto reboot - but I do know that it is not the servers themselves (the machines) that are at fault.

Prydwen has been stress tested (http://camelot-europe.goa.com/news/newsarticle.php3?id_article=1621) and GOA have stated that ALL the servers have been updated. Where does that then leave the problem? - Mythic and their code. This was also confirmed by US players when someone from FH went over and asked them (was during the repeated Excal crashes due to mass zerging of Midgard frontier).


Anyway, 80% of what? The maybe week/two weeks excal has been down over the last 2 years overall (honestly don't know but it hasn't been that often if you exclude official downtimes for patching etc).

 

[old.Whoodoo]

This game, and all like it, will suffer to a degree with problems like this, it cannot be avoided. They have to rely on so many other factors, from the OS being used to road works outside digging up a cable, they cant take the blame all the time.

This game has had crashes / server problems since the beginning, and dont you think that the hardware they started with 2 years ago would have problems running the game now...er yeah. So that answers your question regarding the updated hardware.

As someone else stated (although i too would like to see UK servers), put them on our island, and you got even more pipeline problems that can happen. And news flash but the UK is well behind the times when it comes to service provision (hands up all those in Europe with 5Mb connections at home, compared to us on 512Kb - LOL!). Most of you cant wait for WoW, well guess where its being hosted....about 2 miles from GOA.

I do sympathise for those who have put in 1-2 hours into events, even more so with ToA, screeming for someone else to host the game is pointless. no company can provide perfect service, not even Bill Gates himself (in fact a lot of the time its his OS's fault ).

As for telling us what the problem is, firstly what would you do if you knew? Nothing as 99% of the player base would have a flying clue why the discombobulated splatchet drive is causing a general exception fault in the scrotum-rectifying watsisface when they run a diagnostic on the infinate wormgrinder with only 500 millisporrans....you get the picture.

Secondly I am sure they are working on the best solutions, but its hard to make 100% sure you have cured the problem when you lot will whinge if they take another 5 minutes to make sure rather than get it running again, ask yourself are they bodging it up to get it working for your benefit rather than making sure the problem has been solved? Ever stopped to think that your whinging means they dont actually get things fixed...thought not.

Lastly, who could do better? Any answer you give would purely be your opinion, and nothing else, and probably poorly educated.

GOA do their best, thats all we can ask.

 

[sibanac]

Last night 3 or 4 servers crashed, how many of you noticed it ?

Its noy just excal that crashes, they all crash, as do the US servers under same load.
I was talking to a friend on the US servers and a quote him "If we get 200 ppl doing the same thing the server dies"

 

[Elewyth(TLSOA)]

This game, and all like it, will suffer to a degree with problems like this, it cannot be avoided. They have to rely on so many other factors, from the OS being used to road works outside digging up a cable, they cant take the blame all the time.

agree totally, although having experienced Ultima Online and some of the blunders they made by themselves...id hoped other companies would have learned by their mistakes... and realised it dont matter if your server is down aslong as they KNOW you KNOW its down they whine less, thankfully GOA has sorted that area out now, so i can't complain.

This game has had crashes / server problems since the beginning, and dont you think that the hardware they started with 2 years ago would have problems running the game now...er yeah. So that answers your question regarding the updated hardware.

i dont doubt that they HAVE upgraded it....just not to the level they suggested they had, the stuff they mentioned would NOT have these problems unless some french/blind school kid installed it..which by the way i wouldnt put past them !!

As someone else stated (although i too would like to see UK servers), put them on our island, and you got even more pipeline problems that can happen. And news flash but the UK is well behind the times when it comes to service provision (hands up all those in Europe with 5Mb connections at home, compared to us on 512Kb - LOL!). Most of you cant wait for WoW, well guess where its being hosted....about 2 miles from GOA.

A lot of the problems are beacuse the core of UK players are routed via Wannadoo's/freeserves servers to get to GOA... i dont think its a location problem personally but rather an overburdend transit line. Thank god AOL rout me via elsewhere!! only thing good they actually do!!

I do sympathise for those who have put in 1-2 hours into events, even more so with ToA, screeming for someone else to host the game is pointless. no company can provide perfect service, not even Bill Gates himself (in fact a lot of the time its his OS's fault ).

people like to think change is good.. and sometimes it is... id still prefer personally for it to ALL be hosted by mythic..but hey you have to work with what your given..not much hope of it changing now.

As for telling us what the problem is, firstly what would you do if you knew? Nothing as 99% of the player base would have a flying clue why the discombobulated splatchet drive is causing a general exception fault in the scrotum-rectifying watsisface when they run a diagnostic on the infinate wormgrinder with only 500 millisporrans....you get the picture.

on a personal note you'd be suprised how much a degree in Server maintanence can teach you... and also how much is known by the least expected people.. probably a lot of people who browse these forums know more than their letting on, the guy who fixed the reaver animations himself is a prime example of how educated some of the public are, GOA didnt have a fecking clue...but he worked it out...tell you anything about GOA?

Secondly I am sure they are working on the best solutions, but its hard to make 100% sure you have cured the problem when you lot will whinge if they take another 5 minutes to make sure rather than get it running again, ask yourself are they bodging it up to get it working for your benefit rather than making sure the problem has been solved? Ever stopped to think that your whinging means they dont actually get things fixed...thought not.

quite often most companies blindly ramble on without realising anything is wrong...why? because people are too trusting.. if people didnt whine most companies wouldnt care (even if they do at all)

Lastly, who could do better? Any answer you give would purely be your opinion, and nothing else, and probably poorly educated.

of course i could do better!! ffs!! silly question its the customers perogative to think they can do a better job!!

GOA do their best, thats all we can ask.

i dont doubt that, sadly it rarely seems enough to appease the masses.

 

[yaruar]

This game has had crashes / server problems since the beginning, and dont you think that the hardware they started with 2 years ago would have problems running the game now...er yeah. So that answers your question regarding the updated hardware.

As someone else stated (although i too would like to see UK servers), put them on our island, and you got even more pipeline problems that can happen. And news flash but the UK is well behind the times when it comes to service provision (hands up all those in Europe with 5Mb connections at home, compared to us on 512Kb - LOL!). Most of you cant wait for WoW, well guess where its being hosted....about 2 miles from GOA.

I do sympathise for those who have put in 1-2 hours into events, even more so with ToA, screeming for someone else to host the game is pointless. no company can provide perfect service, not even Bill Gates himself (in fact a lot of the time its his OS's fault ).

As for telling us what the problem is, firstly what would you do if you knew? Nothing as 99% of the player base would have a flying clue why the discombobulated splatchet drive is causing a general exception fault in the scrotum-rectifying watsisface when they run a diagnostic on the infinate wormgrinder with only 500 millisporrans....you get the picture.

As far as i'm aware they updated the server hardware for Execalibur last year at some point.

And as for mr Gates. Maybe at the client end, but i'd be suprised if the game servers were running off a win2k advanced server cluster. I always assumed they were running of a weenix cluster.

 

[Kathal]

As for telling us what the problem is, firstly what would you do if you knew? Nothing as 99% of the player base would have a flying clue why the discombobulated splatchet drive is causing a general exception fault in the scrotum-rectifying watsisface when they run a diagnostic on the infinate wormgrinder with only 500 millisporrans....you get the picture.

Yeah, BUT, there is MANY ways to tell what is wrong with the servers. Does level of communication ring a bell??
Bad support is when you have no communication and when support gives technical information.
Good support is when the support gives SIMPLE and concrete information about what the problem is and what they will do to solve the problem.

Btw where is THIS guy??
[GOA]Erivoss come out, come out, wherever you are.

 

[yaruar]

on a personal note you'd be suprised how much a degree in Server maintanence can teach you... and also how much is known by the least expected people.. probably a lot of people who browse these forums know more than their letting on, the guy who fixed the reaver animations himself is a prime example of how educated some of the public are, GOA didnt have a fecking clue...but he worked it out...tell you anything about GOA?

You can get a degree in server maintanence. Wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on IMO. The servers themselves are complex beasties from what I've been able to glean.

6 server clusters (not even sure how they are clustered would be interesting to see the topology whether they balance the whole load over the servers of let the servers run as individual nodes for the zones or different aspects of the game)
Most probably running a linux based OS as both microsoft AS and Solaris will screw them for licances and the kit for solaris is not cheap. On top of that you have the game service and 1 or more MySQL databases (afair mythic got screwed by Oracle with their per processor licensing model and decided to switch)

All these aspects are particually complicated and all prone to problems. Say a sloppy sql stored proc leading to too much load on a form (i'm not a DBA but I regularly hear our oracle DBA screaming obcenitie about load and bad coding of queries )

In all these are incredibly complex bits of kit with multiple layers of software which can all have individual problems which compound one another. All it takes is one rogue bit of code or a memory leak from one piece of it to eventually bring the whole system to a grinding halt.

I don't envy the support guys there, and I do high end server support for financial institutions.

 

[sibanac]

Originally Posted by Elewyth(TLSOA)

the guy who fixed the reaver animations himself is a prime example of how educated some of the public are, GOA didnt have a fecking clue...but he worked it out...tell you anything about GOA?

GOA probably knew how to fix it, but they cant untill mythic gives em the fix, no matter how trivial it is.
Remember the missing buttons, was a piece of cake to fix, but GOA needs to officialy recieve the files from Mythic before they can patch em.

This is the way big buisness works, If a contract says 'you will only release files that we give you and no others', thats the way it is adding some silly file may seem harmless enough, but if there ever is a contract dispute, that one file could make a big diffrence in the result

 

[Archeon]

Btw where is THIS guy??
[GOA]Erivoss come out, come out, wherever you are.

£10 says he was hit by a car on his way to work one morning and the GOA staff are all so distraut they've been shutting down the servers are random intervals as an act of rememberence.

 

[Ssera]

Ys was down for over an hour last night, people couldn't log in again to any servers (check out: http://forums.jeuxonline.info/showthread.php?threadid=302722). No news was posted on the french part of camelot-europe.com and no GM that I can see posted on Jeux Online (the french version of FH).

Player complaints are pretty much the same as here, though in far greater numbers (11 pages in less than 45 mins...!).

Still think we're being treated unfairly by the all nasty GOA?

 

[Elewyth(TLSOA)]

Ys was down for over an hour last night, people couldn't log in again to any servers (check out: http://forums.jeuxonline.info/showthread.php?threadid=302722). No news was posted on the french part of camelot-europe.com and no GM that I can see posted on Jeux Online (the french version of FH).

Player complaints are pretty much the same as here, though in far greater numbers (11 pages in less than 45 mins...!).

Still think we're being treated unfairly by the all nasty GOA?

in terms of server stability yes we are, Y's is a very stable server usually

 

[Teh FnoRd]

in terms of server stability yes we are, Y's is a very stable server usually

And you know this fact how? I'm not trying to flame, I'm just curious.

 

[Ssera]

in terms of server stability yes we are, Y's is a very stable server usually

excalibur is very stable usually. How many days down have we had since the game was launched?

btw, Logres and Dartmoor also went down last night at roughly the same time (no official news either).