Classic EverQuest’s server merge update turned into almost two days of downtime

Crucible wasn’t the only game struggling with downtime yesterday. Over in the land of classic MMOs, EverQuest fans were in agony over an extended downtime that only became more extended as the week bore on.

MMO players will recall that the game went offline Tuesday morning for both a hefty bug fixing update and a server merge. It was intended to be down for 24 hours – already a long time. But by Wednesday morning, the downtime had been extended, and then extended again, apparently because of deleted characters and duplicate character names causing the merges to go awry.

“Resurrecting older tech is fraught with surprise dragons, and this tech was resurrected when we merged Vulak to Fippy, which if you played at the time you recall the real estate issues. The goal this time around was to make sure that issue would not be repeated,” Daybreak told players. “However at 2 PM on 5/19 we had to restore data for all players on our merged servers, we fixed the discovered issues in the merge process and started them again only to discover additional issues revealed by the fix.” While that was sorted out, there followed two additional delays, one stemming from new hardware.

But fortunately, it’s back up as of this morning, with caveats.

“UCHAT (global chat channels, friends, ignore lists, and mail) will be unavailable on Vox, Ragefire, and Firiona Vie until Noon (12 PM PDT) we are working on some remaining migrations for player’s friends, ignore lists, and mail. We’ll update as we know more. Please note that some shared banks on merged servers experienced issues playing with each other and we are working on getting your toys back. They will be returned to your /overflow items list and we will update this thread when we have completed this. Thank you and we apologize for any squawking this may have caused.”