Maintenance Notice: Monday, April 23, 2012 – 24 Hours!

[Villageidiot]

mportant: We will perform maintenance beginning at 12:01AM Pacific* on April 23, 2012. This will impact the following services:

Login for our games WILL be affected from 12:01 AM Pacific* to approximately 11:59 PM Pacific*
Commerce transactions, including purchases on our websites and in-game marketplaces will be unavailable between from 12:01 AM Pacific* to approximately 11:59 PM Pacific*
Account management will be unavailable starting 12:01 AM to approximately 11:59 PM Pacific*
All Games will be unavailable starting 12:01 AM to approximately 11:59 PM Pacific*

We apologize for this interruption and will resume all affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

 

[Quackanator]

Hooray more down time just what the game needs.
Almost wonder if they are doing it to keep peeps off MQ with the amount of patchss for patches for patchs for upgrades to patch the patch that patched the patch that was caued by the patch that *fxed* the last patch.

 

[jamie75]

it sounds like they are moving the ecommerce sites and login server to this new datacenter like they did the game servers last month

 

[Maetree]

I dont think it is, i just think SOE lacks good programmers. If they were doing their jobs correctly the first time they wouldn't have to go back and keep fixing their fuck ups.

 

[DigitalPixel]

I dont think it is, i just think SOE lacks good programmers. If they were doing their jobs correctly the first time they wouldn't have to go back and keep fixing their fuck ups.

I don't understand why you would complain about something like this. I would bet working on EverQuest is tricky on such an old codebase. It's more complicated than just "the programmers suck". Related reading: The Noble Art of Maintenance Programming. Plus, some of the bugs from them "not doing their job correctly" are the best ones you like to exploit. If anything it would seem you would be cheering for bugs.

 

[Remianen]

I dont think it is, i just think SOE lacks good programmers. If they were doing their jobs correctly the first time they wouldn't have to go back and keep fixing their fuck ups.

I don't think this is true. I think every programmer wants to fix every bug or abnormality that they come across. It's the producers who decide the priority (i.e. what bugs, if any, actually get assigned to said programmers to fix) and many times, if it doesn't completely destroy the game or servers (or if it's detrimental to the players), those bugs don't get priority.

QA might report a bug, and the producer doesn't think it's important enough to devote precious, precious code time to so it languishes. Along the way, other things crop up that "demand" attention and that bug gets seniority and winds up sticking around for years. Or, the producer might prioritize something asinine ("Let's get those new tradeskill recipes done!"). And because a designer isn't specific about what they want, it's programmed/coded exactly as design wrote it up. From what I understand, the latter is how we got cheese (remember that?).

If you want to blame someone, blame the swingin' dick who's deciding what gets done, not the worker ant who has to do what he's told.

 

[Kkthnx]

Since F2P, it seems the servers have been down longer than they have been up...

 

[devestator]

I dont think it is, i just think SOE lacks good programmers. If they were doing their jobs correctly the first time they wouldn't have to go back and keep fixing their fuck ups.

I don't think this is true. I think every programmer wants to fix every bug or abnormality that they come across. It's the producers who decide the priority (i.e. what bugs, if any, actually get assigned to said programmers to fix) and many times, if it doesn't completely destroy the game or servers (or if it's detrimental to the players), those bugs don't get priority.

QA might report a bug, and the producer doesn't think it's important enough to devote precious, precious code time to so it languishes. Along the way, other things crop up that "demand" attention and that bug gets seniority and winds up sticking around for years. Or, the producer might prioritize something asinine ("Let's get those new tradeskill recipes done!"). And because a designer isn't specific about what they want, it's programmed/coded exactly as design wrote it up. From what I understand, the latter is how we got cheese (remember that?).

If you want to blame someone, blame the swingin' dick who's deciding what gets done, not the worker ant who has to do what he's told.

This is true in large part. As a full time programmer myself I have to work around what I'm told to work around sometimes. If a specific project has priority at the time I have to work on it rather than fix other things that I know needs fixing. The only way to get around this, is to be the boss and able to dictate what gets worked on. However, a lot of the passionate programmers (the ones that do it because they enjoy it, not just for the paycheck) would spend far to much time on one thing perfecting it and going way beyond simply functioning as intended. There is nothing wrong with this, it's how I code when I have time, it's just not very economical from a business perspective.

I wouldn't really speak to the skill of EQ programmers. I doubt there are any programmers from the original team, and trying to go in and figure out what the heck other programmers where doing 13 years ago can be quite the chore sometimes. When I have to look at other coders old work sometimes I just get fed up and want to recode the entire thing to something that makes sense, but there isn't always time to do that. So you have to put band aids in, and band aids are prone to unexpected problems and side effects.

Now sometimes there are things that you can look at blame directly on the programmers though (especially when the original coders are the ones still working on it). I can't think of any occurrences in EQ off hand (although I know there are some), but if any of you have heard of the game Darkfall, this game was written by a bunch of script kiddies that got together and thought they were real programmers. It took them over 10 years to release the game, and when they did finally release it, it was riddled with bugs, clashing systems, and other stupidities. They still have trouble fixing even the simplest things because it was so poorly written to begin with.

 

[shaddrach]

Gotta remember that EQ was not originally Sony's game. It was originally by 989 Studios and Verant Interactive. And before that in beta and early release it was something Dog. I want to say Red Dog, but that is a beer lol. Hell its been 14.5 years since the beta so that is hard to remember.

So going all the way back 14+ years there have been vast improvements in programming. Look at the zone files for instance. Newer ones are in a different format and different extension. This would mean it is loaded and rendered by something completely different than original zones.

And how many teams has Everquest gone through? I would say at minimum 10 dating all the way back to alpha. I am sure some are not around to talk to about original coding.

I am sure they have done this in the past, but they need to hire a team to straighten out all code again and clean it all up.

And while were on the subject, how long has PoSky been screwed? I tried to go there last night to get warrior epic piece and could not get past azuarck isle. Kept telling me the key was wrong (Broken mirror). Unless I am remembering things wrong, kill island, kill island boss, move on.

Now from what I can tell from reading Zam, this has been a problem zone for some time and Sony knows, but has not fixed it. and then they wonder why people use hacks like warp. /boggle.