You. Why are you awake? Oh right. ArcheAge.
While the European launch of ArcheAge’s Revelation update and fresh start servers today appears to have gone off without much of a hitch, American players aren’t having such an easy time. The servers were meant to have come up early this afternoon but spent most of the day suffering locks and disconnections and restarts instead.
As of this evening, the plan is to bring the servers back online tomorrow afternoon (EST).
“All NA servers are now down for the night. We have Techs working with XL and hope to have them back online by noon PST tomorrow, possibly starting as early as 10:00 AM PST.”
So really you have two choices: You can go hang out on Reddit and make memes about how the servers are on fire, or you can go to bed and get up early and then go hang out on Reddit to make memes about how the servers are on fire. It’s ArcheAge. That’s just how it’s done.
Whatever you do, maybe don’t get yourself banned over it by treating the community staff — who we’re confident have no role in any server fire or lack thereof — like trash. “We all understand that you are frustrated,” Trion’s Brasse wrote while reminding official forum posters of the same thing, only more politely. “We are too, and working around the clock to get the NA servers back online. We all want to play!” Here’s her whole update:
“We do not know why the NA update did not go as well as the EU update; there is no point in our posting speculation and guesses – we’ll know as soon as the engineers have identified the issues AND resolved them. I am sure you’ll see a post from Khrolan (or commentary on the Friday livestream) when we have things running smoothly. He has a deep appreciation of sharing information with players. In the meantime, even the most stalwart among the devs needs to get a few hours of sleep.
“As others have guessed, just because we take servers down does not mean that everyone goes home. We have people who continue to work on making the NA servers stable. We are not making excuses and fully accept the issues we are facing together. You can expect us to work out a compensation package once we have attained the primary goal of getting everyone back into game. Prior to that we simply don’t know the scope of compensation that will be appropriate to the missed game time.
“Celestrata was very unhappy that sudden illness took her away from this community. She will try to be back tomorrow, but believe me when I say it takes something really serious to take down our AA CM, who lives and breathes this game. I started taking over communications over my cell phone while I was still on the road (which is not ideal, and I apologize for the less than stellar updates until I got back to my desktop).
“Meanwhile, DO post your constructive criticism, anger and frustration. We accept and understand it; just keep to the forum guidelines! I also love the otters, even though they can’t fix servers any better than I can.
“Again, don’t expect any more communication updates until closer to the 10:00 AM – noon PST window tomorrow that we’ve previously posted. We all look forward to playing on the NA servers with you!”
I understand the frustration, believe me. After six months of prep work and testing in every place we could, no one including our Archeage teams had expected to need to pull a 30 hour shift to try to get ArcheAge North America Live up and running.
I can promise you that it’s not a matter of competence, if anything, quite the opposite. While it might be hard to believe, it’s their competence that’ll get it up and running.
ArcheAge North America is the largest ArcheAge install globally in the amount of data it needs to deal with. Larger than any of the non-Trion installs by a massive amount, larger than Archeage EU by quite a lot. The software as delivered to us was able to handle the volume of data the other regions, it handled the test data on PTS, and handled EU with a last minute scalability assist from our engineers.
Since then, our engineers have spent the last day and a half working tirelessly with XLGAME’s to improve it even further such that it can properly deal with the amount of data in the NA live service in a way that gets you your game up and stable the way it needs to be.
As a regional publisher, this is way outside of what we should typically be doing. But as a developer of other games ourselves, it’s always all hands on deck, whatever we can do to make things work and get people in and playing, for our partners’ games too.
Our teams are as frustrated as you are here – especially those that worked so hard, fixing all of the learnings from the last releases, to make things go smoothly – And they’re not stopping until it’s up and running. Really appreciate the patience.
https://twitter.com/ArcheAge/status/808059892351324161
