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Discussion: Depth of EME's understanding of server issues
Before reading, please keep in mind this is meant as a constructive discussion.
How extensive do you believe EME's understanding of the server issues are? If they have a semblance of understanding, do you think it's right to perpetually leave the community in the dark?
I don't have an opinion on whether or not they're aware of their long standing server issues. I don't mean the Valkyrie release, although providing the playerbase with 5 extremely unstable servers for the majority of a work day is alarming in itself. I mean the continual 1 to 1.5 second blips in connection, routinely happening every 1-2 minutes since... good lord, how long has it been? 6 months? People have tried to articulate this issue previously many times on the forums, which are promptly shot down by specifically uneducated individuals, or blatantly ignored by staff.
Secondly, do you think it's healthy to, as previously stated, keep the community in the dark? Spacecats has been making a strong PR effort to try and gather information from the community to aid in fixing the servers, however generally speaking there are never any official statements regarding ongoing investigations, updates, nor when the problems are fixed. I'm not suggesting transparency regarding issues, I am simply suggesting more in-the-loop style updates, especially when there are persistent issues that still remain unfixed.
Please discuss your thoughts in a constructive way.
How extensive do you believe EME's understanding of the server issues are? If they have a semblance of understanding, do you think it's right to perpetually leave the community in the dark?
I don't have an opinion on whether or not they're aware of their long standing server issues. I don't mean the Valkyrie release, although providing the playerbase with 5 extremely unstable servers for the majority of a work day is alarming in itself. I mean the continual 1 to 1.5 second blips in connection, routinely happening every 1-2 minutes since... good lord, how long has it been? 6 months? People have tried to articulate this issue previously many times on the forums, which are promptly shot down by specifically uneducated individuals, or blatantly ignored by staff.
Secondly, do you think it's healthy to, as previously stated, keep the community in the dark? Spacecats has been making a strong PR effort to try and gather information from the community to aid in fixing the servers, however generally speaking there are never any official statements regarding ongoing investigations, updates, nor when the problems are fixed. I'm not suggesting transparency regarding issues, I am simply suggesting more in-the-loop style updates, especially when there are persistent issues that still remain unfixed.
Please discuss your thoughts in a constructive way.
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Comments
This is all conjecture, however. I'm not claiming to know what goes on in EME's offices.
Perhaps part of the issue is that as soon as you show transparency, like official statements regarding exact server behavior, you sort of relinquish your assumed role as producer and provider of a product. This is likely something EME is not too keen on doing, and the community might react unexpectedly to transparency and, who knows, it might affect the business model as a whole.
From what I'm aware of, these long term continual small "blips" were happening a few months back when EME was still using Zayo for their routing (since some of the Zayo nodes had a large packet loss during fixed hours of the day). The fix for this was them switching over to Savvis which caused a lot of Sea players to have a higher average ping but gave a more stable overall connection. So to say that they are blatantly ignoring it would unfair. EME addressed the situation when it came up and had identified that the problem wasn't the actual servers; but rather, it was the routing that was being used.
As I stated before, Eme did address these "blips" back when it was relevant and had the community help them out in determining what the issue was. In terms of what's happening currently with the servers I don't believe there is much more that Eme can say other then "we're looking into it" considering that the issues just started today and are almost assuredly due to the sudden spike in active players due to the release of the patch. In all honesty, give it a few days and the servers will probably be back to normal since you won't have thousands of extra people pushing the servers as they race to level up.
Do you have any previous sources to cite? I'd like to educate myself on that troubleshooting if possible. From what I'm aware of also, the blips do persist even now, especially in Harrowhold.
https://forums.enmasse.com/tera/discussion/9028/recent-server-stability-issues/p1
Here was Eme's official response to the issues:
http://tera.enmasse.com/news/posts/network-outages-compensation
I remember these issues, and they are separate from my initial post's issue. There are still continual small blips that have a high impact in scenarios such as Harrowhold, or large scale PvP.
1. The know whats wrong, but don't have the part, the funds, etc.
2. They don't know what's wrong and are researching or escalating to someone who does.
*and most unlikely*
3. They just have an IT Staff that either doesn't care or is incompetent(Which is not rare in the IT world, but I would seriously doubt that to be the case here. I've had the opportunity to speak to the Dev Ops on the forums in the past and they seemed very knowledgeable.)
The thing is here is the same issue that faces IT staff in any organization. The end user (ie. The players) for the most part are idiots when it comes to the infrastructure needed to sustain their business model. It's not easy. I swear most players think there's a big room with "Server Control" on the door with a bunch of light switches inside. I wish they could just walk in there and flip the "Turn off Server Lag" switch and be done with it.
It just doesn't work that way. You have to give them time to come through the literal hundreds of things it could be in any situation.
The recent experiment with the test server was experimenting with a whole new datacenter and infrastructure, and they wanted to specifically get data points from as many players as possible so they could measure latency from various parts of the world, and also any load issues caused by the infrastructure they were using.
A lot of the issues -- but not all of them (again, not today's additional issues) -- are caused by routing, and so the only way to fix this is to change backbone providers or change locations. That was part of why they switched from Zayo to Savvis -- it reduced the ping problems significantly for a lot of people, especially on Comcast. (It may not seem like it, but lag complaints on the forum really did go down dramatically right after the change.)
But no change will benefit everyone equally. Specifically:
This is not normal, and the servers are not themselves doing this under normal conditions, even during prime time. So for this specific issue, there is something else going on, most likely in your routing. The timing of the change you're describing does align to the point in time when EME switched from Zayo to Savvis. So it stands to reason that you were one of the people (like those in Australia, for example) who were better off on Zayo. And for this issue, the best hope is that their experiment bears fruit and they consider moving facilities down the road. Of course, if they do this, it may be better for you, but be worse for others.
I should say, there is also an issue with specific content -- Harrowhold is the top offender -- where performance spikes occur at specific moments in dungeon/raid encounters. This is most likely a coding issue that EME can't easily fix just by tweaking servers or throwing more power at it. Most likely BHS has to improve the server and client code to help this.