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Age of Discovery DowntimeFollow

#1 Dec 06 2011 at 6:46 AM Rating: Excellent
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All servers came down at 12:01am PST on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 for the Age of Discovery and Game Update 62 patch. Estimated downtime is currently 12 hours; U.S. servers are anticipated to come back online around 12:00pm PST (noon). Due to the volume of data involved, international servers will experience extended downtime. When patch notes are available we will put them on our Game Update 62 page.

In addition, SOE account management and commerce services will be offline for all games during the transition period. Forums may also experience periodic outages.

Beginning at 8:00am PST there will be a live webcast, Countdown to the Age of Discovery, on TwitchTV. Various members of the EQII team will be interviewed on the webcast. It is expected to run until 9:45am PST.

A producer's letter from Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson is also expected tomorrow morning. We'll keep you updated once that is available. In addition, the EverQuest2.com website is being relaunched into its new incarnation and should be available after the downtime.

During the downtime you are welcome to join us in the #EQ2 channel of ZAM's IRC chat. Feldon of EQ2Wire also has set up a ZAM IRC java applet that you can use.



Edited, Dec 6th 2011 7:47am by Cyliena
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#2 Dec 06 2011 at 1:27 PM Rating: Excellent
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Quote:
DOWNTIME EXTENSION:

We have encountered some unforeseen issues that we want to address before unlocking Accounts and Commerce, to ensure that we provide the best possible experience for all our customers. At this time, we expect Accounts and Commerce to come back online this afternoon. We regret that the unlock on EQII servers will also be delayed to this afternoon.

While we have no solid eta at this time, we will continue to update you as quickly as we can as more info becomes available!

I know, I know... I want to build a dungeon with my reforged Beastlord of Doom too!

;-)# Brasse
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#3 Dec 06 2011 at 2:21 PM Rating: Excellent
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For those of you concerned about your account status, character slots, etc., please don't panic yet. Accounts migrations are still in progress while servers are down.

When servers come back up, if things are not 100% correct on your account, STILL please do not panic. Proceed directly to our Customer Service team, who will be very happy to help sort things out for you, I promise: http://www.soe.com/support/ (no, not now - see previous paragraph about migrations still in process).

Now, let's all go back to watching and waiting in antici...... pation.

Brasse


Patch notes are now available: http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/GU62#Patch_Notes
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#4 Dec 06 2011 at 3:20 PM Rating: Decent
Alright, so I get that the servers are locked now. But I downloaded the game before with Station Launcher, not the EQ2 launcher.
It did a small update and when I clicked "Launch game" it brought me to a different launch pad.. and it kept saying "Checking files" and is now starting to install..

So. Is it installing the new updates and when the servers are no longer locked i'm good to go?
I pretty much ignored the information on the new launcher, thinking that I use Station.. but now I'm thinking I should have read it and somehow not finding any information on it. Lol.

Thanks for any help! ;) I actually almost didn't get the expansion because I haven't played much lately, but i'm starting to get myself excited about it now. Heh.

Merry Frostfell!
#5 Dec 06 2011 at 4:54 PM Rating: Decent
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Station launcher has been unsupported for EQII for awhile now and the new (now old) launcher would completely reinstall if you switched to it from the station launcher because the files were read differently by the two different launchers with no way around it that I am aware of.

This new launcher is required, no more using the Station launcher or the other one. No clue if it's going to force you to completely reinstall. The update I did about 20 minutes ago was about 1GB. So if it's downloading more than that, it's probably completely reinstalling.
#6 Dec 06 2011 at 5:19 PM Rating: Decent
Any ideal on how much longer this is going to take?
#7 Dec 06 2011 at 5:31 PM Rating: Decent
Yeah, I knew that before, had a lot of confused guildies as well about trying to find their EQ2 files.. but with Station it downloads to ProgramData.. which you can't access unless you were to fully type out C:\ProgramData.. (However! Not in the correct thinking state at this moment, haha)

But! It looks like it found where EQ2 was installed before and just did the updates, so that's good. If I were to go to options > Open Game Directory on this launchpad that it brings up from clicking "Launch game" from station, it brings up all the files under that ProgramData, and I can't find any other folders where it would have been installed.

+1 for SOE! :)
#8 Dec 06 2011 at 5:33 PM Rating: Excellent
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I have Station Launcher as well--launching EQ2 from it will now bring up LaunchPad 4 (the new launcher). Everyone has to use that one, no way around it, but at least Station Launcher still functions for multi-game. :)


3:30pm PST: We still have not heard any ETA and are waiting for information.
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#9 Dec 06 2011 at 5:36 PM Rating: Decent
So with the new launcher if you did use Station, does it completely re-install EQ2? OR at least did it for you? Because like I said I can't find it again on my computer or anything, and it did install (What I presume was the updates) but nothing like four hours which is usually what my slow computer takes to Download EQ2. Lol.
#10 Dec 06 2011 at 5:38 PM Rating: Excellent
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No it doesn't completely reinstall, it should still be in the same directory you originally installed it in. The first time it takes a REALLY long time to scan while it checks to see which files you have.

You can still launch it from Station Launcher too.
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#11 Dec 06 2011 at 5:41 PM Rating: Decent
Thank you very much, Ma'dam :)

Good to know that I'm not being a complete noob tonight and know what I'm talking about, seeing as I already have other people asking me about it. Lol.
Hopefully now they could just get the servers back up so we could actually play, eh? ;)
#12 Dec 06 2011 at 5:48 PM Rating: Decent
Could someone possibly seperate the gu62 and the new expansion so I might now what new updates I actually get to use without buying the expansion.
#13 Dec 06 2011 at 6:16 PM Rating: Excellent
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UPDATE 4:10pm PST: This was just posted on Facebook and Twitter: "We still do not have an updated ETA for the servers yet. We're very sorry. Please stay tuned and we'll let you know just as soon as we do. Thank you! [Isulith]"
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#14 Dec 06 2011 at 6:17 PM Rating: Excellent
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lorzazel wrote:
Could someone possibly seperate the gu62 and the new expansion so I might now what new updates I actually get to use without buying the expansion.

GU62: Freeport and EQII Share (and Goddess Reborn event when that launches)
Expansion: Everything else!
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#15 Dec 06 2011 at 6:20 PM Rating: Decent
so no mercs for me, now I am sad, going to bed.
#16 Dec 06 2011 at 7:28 PM Rating: Excellent
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UPDATE 5:25pm PST: Latest update spotted on Twitter: "We are unlikely to launch until 8:00 PM PST or later. We are terribly sorry that this maintenance has taken so long. [Isulith]"
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#17 Dec 06 2011 at 9:51 PM Rating: Excellent
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UPDATE 7:40pm PST: Everyone get some sleep! Here's the latest update spotted on Facebook:

Quote:
Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Trolls...
We have just evaluated the status of the current update and have come to the conclusion that we can either unlock servers and risk broken content, or ensure that we provide the best experience possible and delay the update to tomorrow morning.

We have to do it RIGHT. For all of you and for all of us.
So please, bear with us, relax overnight, and let us sortie into the new day together. Community will be in office at 7:00am PST and will immediately review status and give you all an update. We are aiming for morning and working as hard as we possibly can.

Yer faithful Dwarf,
Brasse
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#18 Dec 06 2011 at 10:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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UPDATE 8:37pm PST: We just saw this from Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson on Twitter: "Best laid plans of mice. We launch tomorrow at 10am. The background data scripts took WAY longer to run then anticipated. Sorry all."

I'm heading off to bed now, see ya'll in the morning! Smiley: nod

Edited, Dec 6th 2011 11:42pm by Cyliena
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#19 Dec 06 2011 at 11:14 PM Rating: Excellent
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I lied, I'm not in bed yet. :P


This was a really long post so I'm just going to quote it here. Original is on the EQ2 Forums.

rl_soe wrote:

Hi folks, this is Rich Lawrence, CTO with SOE. Some of you probably remember me from original Planetside as "Twist". TR rules, but I digress.

I must apologize for the extended down time of EQ2 while we get everything in order for free to play. Obviously we didn't anticipate it being this long. I know how important it is for the game to be available when you want to play, and what it means to miss a raid you were looking forward to, or check out new features. In this case the issues that are keeping you from playing are under my watch, so I need to say it: I'm sorry. I value my game time as well when I can get it, and I know how you feel.

EQ2 is a great product with a long history for us, and part of the reason we are taking so long on this update is because of that. Let me explain a bit. In order for everyone that played in the past or currently to get the best experience when logging in on the first day of free to play, there were many changes that had to be made in data to represent all of the features those players (past or present) were entitled to, plus new goodies, and the merge of what amounts to two different products in a business sense (EQ2 and EQ2X). This is a lot of accounts - millions - and a lot of 'business rule' complexity. While we have top of the line hardware running our databases for this kind of thing, and folks dedicated just to keeping it working well, the result of all that took quite a bit longer than we thought it would.

I hear the engineers of you out there (and yes, I know we have many very capable developers in our audience) saying, "But you should have modeled it ahead of time and known how long it would take!". You're absolutely right. We did. Turns out our model was just a tad less than 1:1 scale in some respects. I know, I know, Captain Obvious calling.

In the end we realized two things as the maintenance progressed - that this was going to take much longer than we thought it would, and correspondingly the results would be not as well tested as they should be before release. For instance, there was a risk that some out of those millions might not end up with the right race packs or character slots. In the end, we decided it was best to extend the maintenance through the night so we could do a better job of checking that kind of thing.

Please understand that we don't do this casually or think that it's a lack of dedication. Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you'd be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that.

I'm committed to changing how we do this type of operation going forward so that it has much less visible impact on you the players - we will trade more back end prep time and resources against less publish downtime, basically. I do hope everybody enjoys the massive effort the game team has put into this release. I'll see you online tomorrow.
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#20 Dec 07 2011 at 8:29 AM Rating: Decent
im in england is eq2 still down?
#21 Dec 07 2011 at 9:45 AM Rating: Decent
I am in Germany is EQ 2 now up?
#22 Dec 07 2011 at 10:20 AM Rating: Excellent
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The game is still down for everyone!



UPDATE 8:15am PST (Dec 7): Just caught this on Twitter: "An update from the team. They are very close to completing the maintenance and doing some final testing. Things are looking very good!"
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#23 Dec 07 2011 at 11:49 AM Rating: Excellent
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UPDATE 9:48am PST (Dec 7): Servers are being reported as back up! Go play!
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