I've noticed my connection to the server has been consistently unreliable for a while now, with the signal jumping from 3 or 4 bars to 1 and back again--each time it hits one bar, the game stutters and becomes nearly impossible to play. Things improve for a while each time the server undergoes a maintenance reboot, so why not schedule a nightly server reboot? That seems like it would help improve degrading server performance, and if it's at the same time each day, players could know to schedule runs around it--this would seem better than the random (albeit in decent advance) reboots that we have now.
nightly server reboots
Wed, 06/29/2011 - 21:10
Wed, 06/29/2011 - 21:25
#2
Not a bad idea anyways
They should do nightly back-ups and reboots -- lately there has been a lot of hackers hitting this and that and that other thing around. At least having a nightly backup made at midnight of whatever time zone the server is at it would mean that if something indeed goes awry (here's hoping that it never does) the most that would be lost is a day's worth of progress to people.
Let's face it, it's happened in the past with games that get really popular. This would be a good way to take prevention methods from the start. Always prepare for the worst I say, that way when it happens it's not so bad since you were already ready for it. ^^
Thu, 06/30/2011 - 11:56
#3
observations, hypothesis, experiment...
Replicant,
My suggestion comes after making several observations:
* This issue with the server connection only started after the influx of Steam players.
* It does not affect only me. I can be standing around in Haven, and I'll see my connection drop to one bar, after which more than one person will ask "What happened? My connection level dropped and the game got all jerky." Although, you know, with varying levels of spelling and grammar. When actually playing, it will affect everyone in my party in the same way for the same amount of time.
* It's really not on my end. I can reset all of my network equipment, check any other site, and everything's fine. This is server-side.
* It gets better for one to two days after a server maintenance reboot. After that, it starts happening again, with steadily increasing regularity.
From these observations, I form the hypothesis that rebooting the server alleviates whatever issues are on the server end of the game. My experiment to test this hypothesis would be to have OOO implement nightly server maintenance reboots as a way to keep the game playable without the stuttering that causes my character to bounce around a room like a pinball and hoping it doesn't fix itself with me dead when the connection goes back up from one bar.
We can discuss the null hypothesis another time should the experiment fail to produce the expected results.
Rebooting the server won't improve your latency. The more you know.jpg