Guild Wars 2

We need at least 1hr notice on server restarts and maintenance, not 3m, or even 30m, so we won’t start something like a 1hr booster, banner buff, or other buff, or start some dungeon, only to have them cut off halfway through.

For example, tonight I just got kicked offline due to the Server Maintenance, 30m into a crafting booster. My only crafting booster, which took about two weeks of trying to get from a black lion chest. Really annoying.

I’ve also seen even worse case scenarios, where people get the 3m game restarting notice right before a difficult boss kill.

It’s totally awesome that ANet has designed a system that can do hot updates with effectively no downtime, but at least older’s games scheduled restarts are scheduled, predictable, you can plan around them and not worry about getting interrupted in the middle of something.

Also, re-announce every 10 minutes – 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, 5, 3, 2, 1… so that people just logging on are more likely to get the message more quickly.

I think that kurtosis.9526 is making a totally reasonable Request..

I had just ended the 2nd fractal in a 4 fractal set. Somehow this Maintenance ended up distorting my groups ability to BE in a group, half of us were being told we were NOT in the group, the others were still in group, and saw us in group. We were able to get into the 3rd Fractal, got all the way to the last boss where I was finally DC’d …

In short, giving us some REAL notice would be helpful..

Well if they only put these announcement up on LAUNCHER…at least you would know it when attempting to log in…as far as I know all other MMOs I have played does this for an obvious reason!

I agree ,also the notification is just not big enough. So make it obvious when the restarts are, give us some calendar or something and also notify 1-2 hrs in front.

Maybe would be ok if you could just relog and resume where you left (freeze status for 5 minutes after restart?).

Last night I was in a dungeon when a new build became available. Our party got a warning that the game would restart in 3 hours. After finishing and leaving the dungeon, the game updated automatically. In my opinion you get a very reasonable amount of time to finish your dungeon when a new build is implemented. But I agree that outside of dungeons the warning could be better.

2 nights in a row of having an ongoing fractal run disrupted by “30 minutes till maintenance that may affect connectivity” messages. Connectivity isn’t really something to take lightly in dungeons that can take 60-90 minutes to complete with a good group, much less a struggling one.

Why can’t we get the same 3 hours of warning we got before the recent patches? Or is fractals considered somehow less important than the other dungeons that are apparently still getting 3 hours of notice?

Fractals are somehow not considered dungeons at all. They didn’t count for the dungeon part of last month’s monthly achievement and they use personal story mechanics when considering connection and rejoin-your-party-issues.

I was suppose to suggest this very thing but completely forgot about it. There is nothing quite like when you’re in the middle of something and that short kitten warning pops up. it’s really annoying and i can see it totally screwing people over. this is a reasonable request and i hope A-net considers it. try to keep this on the first page for a few days to make sure they see it;)

Thank you! Nothing says ‘We don’t value your time at all’ more than this inane policy.

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Wasn’t yesterday’s maintenance because of a critical bug that just popped up? My friends told me that the chat was all messed up and then the maintenance happened. It’s completely understandable to have a shorter warning/restart if a critical issue occurred.

If it is critical. The 3 minute ‘we have a new build’ message is generally not critical.

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A 3 min restart sounds pretty critical to me o.O lol. I remember them doing longer restart warnings recently though. Yesterday’s was an exception for whatever reason, but this same thing was brought up a while back, and anet listened and gave a longer restart warning.

Uhm….I work in SQA. Even if there is a critical fix, they are going to know about the issue, have to build, it test it, get it ready to roll out, etc. It is not going to be something that just happens.

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Okay. I’m pretty sure you know there are cases when patches have to be applied Asap right?

As far as work as experience go, I’ve worked with server game handling/coding. Once in a while, there’s a newly discovered critical bug. I get pinged on the problem and fix it asap and hot patch it in. Sometimes I can warn the server of a restart and fix the problem WHILE the restart countdown is going, but many times there are moments where I do a 5 minute warning while coding the fix in to apply. So yes, I have extensive experience with game servers and coding, and I’m saying there are definite times where you have no choice but to get the fix in as quickly as possible to avoid players flooding the support with reports and emails of a problem. In those moments where time is essential, you’re forced to skip a lot of steps and just hot patch things without getting QA or testing (besides your own testing). I’ve seen things that “just happens” with game servers when they run. Some examples include discovered bugs or current code doing something incorrectly.

I’m just pointing out that it’s not impossible to happen. And this rarely happens so I don’t see the point of jumping the gun and whining Anet to warn people about restarts when they already do, with this as an exception that happens once in a while.

Maybe you don’t play the game as often or for as long as I do. I know there have been at least 10 times, probably more that I have got the 3 minute warning in the last 2 months. Any way you dice that, it points to a failure on their end.

And as for any practice that allows a dev to bypass SQA on a regular basis, there is nothing sensible about that.

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Oh, my post isn’t about saying it is not their fault or anything. Anytime sometime goes wrong with the server code, it’s the developer’s fault. I’m just pointing out it’s not very constructive to point developers out and say they don’t care. If you developed games, that’s the most insulting thing to say to developers because they put a lot of care and love into their code.

There is no “practice” that promotes dev to bypass SQA. It’s just something you do out of necessity sometimes depending on what sort of position you’re in. Is it good? No, but things don’t go according to plan all the time and I’m just saying that there are situations where it is sensible to do hot fixes. Idealy, I prefer things to go development→code review by others→QA\Testing→Release.

boosters and food buffs dont progress while you’re not logged on, so even if you’re logged out cause of a server restart the timer on your booster will be unchanged