Thread: Client patching 18th April

The big E is UP!

Up means the worlds are open....etc....

thanks very much for the info

All, but Vilya >.<

Originally Posted by Sapience

There is also a built in buffer that allows us to fix any minor issues we may encounter without having to extend the downtime.

Captains are awesome.

Originally Posted by Sapience

All worlds are back up (54 minutes early)! Enjoy the game.

Well 3 hours of patch only to make our bags more full? i mean key not bound anymore to account but to each alt we got, lol no comment..; why this change? , and i can not imagine a patch to remove real bugs in the game that sitll on since 5 years *laught*

Originally Posted by Sapience

The only fix is the fix explicitly called out in the downtime message.

614 files for that?

they changed all items you get from the anniversary gift boxes from being bound to account to being bound to character...

Originally Posted by Mandura

they changed all items you get from the anniversary gift boxes from being bound to account to being bound to character...

Yep. They are now bound. Ugh. Well I'm not sure what else they could do. I posted in the other thread I wish they would have just taken them out altogether and put something else in the boxes. Now with them being bound to character they are not as useful to me. But meh, what can they do. If they had left it even bound to account (the keys) people never would have gone to the store to buy one so I guess this was the solution.

Oh well!

Originally Posted by OnyxSoulbane

I am a genious.

Yes you certainly are

Originally Posted by OnyxSoulbane

I guess the simple solution for you would be to not read those threads, or dont even come to the forums!!! There!!! I just fixed your issue, and it didnt even need a hotfix!!

I am a genious.

True I could take an avoidance stance and never know the griefing that gets put out in these threads, however taking the ostrich approach to life is unwise.

I have hope in our community, so I'll keep trying. Today is already much much better than prior patches.

Originally Posted by Armitas

True I could take an avoidance stance and never know the griefing that gets put out in these threads, however taking the ostrich approach to life is unwise.

I have hope in our community, so I'll keep trying. This thread is already much much better than prior patches.

Many ostriches have long and productive lives. Why u gotta h8?

Originally Posted by hucklebarry

I understand the 4 hour downtime. Its not competitive with other similar business models, but I understand it.

I think it's fairly competitive to similar models. That's well within the 99.99% uptime scale. I know that a lot of hosting and other tech companies like to brag about (or use as a sales pitch) the 99.999% or even 99.9999% mark and given a full redundant set of world servers that could be patched and then brought up as the main servers were brought down, those marks could be achieived here, but let's face it, games aren't on the same level of mission critical as to need that level of reliability. And in most cases over the course of a full year, they probably do get close to the. or achieve the, 99.999% mark, but 99.99% is perfectly fine.

4 hours of that allowed downtime all in one shot, does make seem a lot longer though, I will agree to that

I can tell you they fixed a quest bug I had in Stangard but forgot to tell the New NPC to give out the next quest to talk to Pada.

I went from 13/20 quests complete to 14/20.

I wont hold my breath for the fix to be fixed. lol

It's all good fun.

Has anybody had the error message of:

"Could not patch file 'lotroclient.exe', error 5: Access is denied." ?

Originally Posted by Iktomi

I think it's fairly competitive to similar models. That's well within the 99.99% uptime scale. I know that a lot of hosting and other tech companies like to brag about (or use as a sales pitch) the 99.999% or even 99.9999% mark and given a full redundant set of world servers that could be patched and then brought up as the main servers were brought down, those marks could be achieived here, but let's face it, games aren't on the same level of mission critical as to need that level of reliability. And in most cases over the course of a full year, they probably do get close to the. or achieve the, 99.999% mark, but 99.99% is perfectly fine.

4 hours of that allowed downtime all in one shot, does make seem a lot longer though, I will agree to that

Ok, as someone who actually has to do four nines, I can't let this pass. Four nines (99.99%) uptime is 8.6 seconds of downtime per day, or 52.5 minutes of downtime per year. So this morning's three hour maintenance is over three years of downtime for a four nines site.

Honestly, the state of the art for MMOs is barely 99% uptime, if that. Many MMOs do weekly maintenance where they take things down for several hours, and 99% is 1.68 hours/week downtime.

Originally Posted by Iktomi

I think it's fairly competitive to similar models.

To be clear, I was only speaking of MMO's when I mentioned competitors. I was not referring to mission critical business models. (although, for an MMO... uptime is mission critical for them). While I'm sure they exist, I'm aware of more MMOs that have much smaller downtime windows compared to LOTRO, than I am of games that have equal or have longer time frames.

Its not competitive when other companies can recover from an update in 15 - 30 minutes. People will respond, and have several times over, that there are many reasons the window takes so long for Turbine. I never argue that, but I do point out that when the pricing is competitive, the tech should be as well. But this is getting off topic, that was only a passign comment in the issue of the communication (for my part)

Originally Posted by GrandCru

614 files for that?

I don't know why everyone is saying 614 files, I have over 1300 downloading.

Well it's 614 files for me.

Anyway they are obviously fixing something & that has to be good no? Especially if it's the lag issues many of us have been having

Originally Posted by Sardonyx

Ok, as someone who actually has to do four nines, I can't let this pass. Four nines (99.99%) uptime is 8.6 seconds of downtime per day, or 52.5 minutes of downtime per year. So this morning's three hour maintenance is over three years of downtime for a four nines site.

Honestly, the state of the art for MMOs is barely 99% uptime, if that. Many MMOs do weekly maintenance where they take things down for several hours, and 99% is 1.68 hours/week downtime.

You are right,I had my decimal in the wrong place. The only defense I can offer is that I'm dyslexic and dyscalclic. (Mostly dsycalclic). The high number of hours I got should have been my first clue I was doing something wrong, but I can't do basic math to save my life most of the time (If it goes beyond addition or subtraction even (multiplication and division are almost out of reach)), and I usually miss even those simple things unless they are explicitly pointed out the me. Thank G-d for calculators. Though, apprently even with calculators, I still need a human spotter. :P

Thanks for point that out. Which puts the avg downtime probably at the 99.5 99.6 range, which I do still feel is acceptable all things considered.

Originally Posted by DisposableHERO

It's my hope that they're trying to fix the lag/stable-travel bug while they adjust the keys.

this was my thought as well, seeing as how they didn't seem to fix the lag issues with the update......go turbine!

I think that the issue they were trying to fix was less with the keys than with the stuff you get from the two-year gift. I believe that some people were rolling new characters so they could farm those items for their mains (since you get the gift boxes on every character). This would make sense given that the update appears to have made all of these items now bound to toon instead of to account.

Glad I put a bunch of the items I got that other characters could use in my shared storage!

Originally Posted by saurontx

I agree too, if its a minor fix, should not take 4 hours.

In any complicated real time distributed software system, there is a minimum time to do the first simple change. It is typically a longer than most people expect.

Turbine has to spin down the complex. It is not the 30 seconds that a PC takes. They have to back up the state of the servers. They have to transfer all the patch files. They have run these patch files on hundreds of machines. Make sure all the machines patched. They have verify that the clients can connect to the patch servers and patch themselves. The got to bring the servers on line - not a quick process - it might take 20 minutes. Make sure all the servers are working. Make sure the clients can authenticate and connect.

If any of you play SWTOR, you might remember a recent incident when the team missed a step. They brought the game up with some machines on the server farm running one version of the server software. Some of the machines were running a different version of the server software. This situation is how a 4 hour maintenance operation turns into a half or full day outage. See:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3897083
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/bioware-mmo...1222963p1.html
maybe they will take more four hours the next time to make sure they do not have a Millenium Falcon incident.

Has there been official patch notes for those 600+ file changes? That's a huge patch, and should be documented.

Originally Posted by Alad.

Has there been official patch notes for those 600+ file changes? That's a huge patch, and should be documented.

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...12#post6118312