At the risk of being presumptuous, we think it’s a fair statement that most people who enjoy playing online games prefer being able to actually log in and play those games. No one likes staring at a maintenance screen and not playing. The team behind Trove knows that the game has had an unexpected amount of recent maintenance downtime, and a dispatch to the community makes it clear that the developers want to correct this issue with database maintenance.
How will that help? Because Trion believes that Trove‘s chief extant issue on the back end is the fact that it has a big database system that’s just too big and unwieldy for what the game is trying to do. Says the studio,
We’ve had too much down time in Trove of late, and we understand how frustrating that is for all of you. Believe me, we feel that frustration too, and are taking action to make it better.
Issues we had with capacity at launch were addressed by radically increasing the number of servers available for players. With the addition of new game features, the data on which Trove is built has grown exponentially. Put simply, we have outgrown our current data storage system for Trove, and replacing it with a new system is our top priority.
This transition has been a massive project for our operations and database teams over the past month. We hope to have a more concrete update for everyone in the next two weeks, but did not want to provide specifics before we were confident in our time table.
To clarify what is happening, Trove’s data storage is many, many terabytes of data stored in a distributed database. Replacing systems like that takes a lot of time and effort from many people with a lot of different backgrounds and skills.
After this data migration is complete, we expect to have substantially fewer downtimes. When we do go offline, we should be able to restart much faster, so even our major patches will be rolled out more quickly.
I’m going to work very hard to keep all of you informed of our progress in the coming weeks. I know that we’ve asked for your patience in the past, but please bear with us a bit longer. You’ve all had to wait too long, and things are going to get much better very soon.
Replacing the system is the top development priority at the moment, and while it will take some time, the hope is that a better database system will result in a smoother and more playable game for everyone.
