Planned Outage - August 11, 2010

eh i was DCing when i tried to go into factions areas.. but after awhile that went away.. now i just cant enter guild battle in my hall . so yea nice job anet you really got it done fast.. tho i was kinda hoping for some kinda new content you secretly mixed in while the servers were down ;P

Wow nothing has changed, I still can't log on and when I can it's 700ms ping and the moment I map I disconnect. Sheesh.

Same.

Though with Ice we did a few GvGs. Everything was fine till the last 2 where 4 people didn't load in. It was the same 4 both times and we came against full 8 both times. Needless to say we lost both and lost ladder but still had a laugh fighting in 2 inevitable fights.

keep laggin out in game,(jade quarry) continue to move around and gain faction but skill bar blinksanfter clickin skills then 60 seconds to 3 mins later 007 and unable to reconnect!!! this is gettin old fast, anyone else seeing this?

blegh, either shut it off entirely, or fix this crap. Sitting here in the middle of capping and have a 9000 ping, thanks a lump

Giving Anet props on a fast switchover. I was on the road all night, and when I got around to playing GW, everything was already done! ^^

The only ominous thing today was lag spikes and some weird irregularities in the interface (problems adding players, zoning, entering battles). I hope these will go away, because they definitely interfere. I don't mind Anet trying to economize an older game like this, if that's indeed what's going on, but people will really squeal if there's a dent in the service quality. Guild Wars has always had really high quality networking... most issues people see have actually been ISP or clientside.

They downgraded servers because they got sued for $28 million USD. Google "NCSOFT SUED 28 MILLION USD"

Gl with gw2

And btw, go into ra and you will see how crappy the servers are. 100% of the time you get less then 8 players total, 100% of the time you get code=15 when you win and 100% of the time it happens every time.

Nobody messes with the Godfather of MMOs.
All Hail Lord British.

I can't multitask on GW anymore. Everytime I switch to a new window the client freezes for a good period of time.

edit: restarted my computer and it works now. Was wondering how moving the servers would effect my GW client

Yeah can't log in at all.... Code=058, ever since this server update will this be fixed? I've worked hard and a long time on GW, and have been loyal since the beginning, feel like there just shutting me out without a care.

Hi, all. Our netops team is aware of the issues a few of you all have reported in this thread, and they've been working to address and resolve those issues. Rest assured that we're working on it.

Just a note: the reason we moved our data center is because the previous location decided to increase their rental prices. Nothing nefarious or sinister, as some people have been speculating.

Delayed in order to meet high standards?

Tell that to my 213,000ms Ping.

Well that is no fun regina , I was personally hoping for some kind of electronic satanic summoning ritual .

Thanks for the info!

great im getting a error code 072 now. i was in and lagging badly and my ac/ge chat wasnt showing up so i logged out. now i cant get back in.

See?! I knew it was totally a downgrade! ROFL It's okay, though. It's only logical that ya'lls support and interest in GW1 would decay. You guys can only support Guild Wars 1 for so long before the game's death must take its natural course. Can't wait for GW2, though. That's for sure! <3

I hope the Live Team can push out some awesome, pleasurable skill updates just before GW2 arrives and makes GW1 go the way of the dinosaurs. It'd surely keep up busy long enough to wait for GW2 until it gets its final polished before release.

Regina,
I have talked with you before about issues and I know you to be a very nice person. For that reason I am going to make my questions and comments as nice as I can, while still being extremely direct with you.

BEFORE the server "move" there was speculation that this was a downgrade. You were asked at least 5 or 6 times the reason for the move and you totally ignored the questions. Now a week later you offer an explanation. Now that is fine but here is the problem that I have with it and would like to give you the opportunity to respond.....

BEFORE the "move" extensive data was collected on the servers and pings were documented by many people and shared on another site.....

BEFORE the "move" IP Address 64.25.39.58 showed a ping to the user of 200 on the high end, this IP was listed as OWNED by NC Interactive Austin Texas, this is also the HeadQuarters of NC Interactive the subsidiary to NC Soft with Arenanet being the subsidiary located in Bellvue Washington. ALL THE SAME COMPANY

Now here is where I get direct with you...
AFTER the move the IP address 64.25.39.69 (see how close those numbers are?) was tested and showed pings of over 35k for some and much higher for others. 64.25.39.69 comes back listed as OWNED by NC Interactive Austin Texas and the ping numbers are only separated by 11 digits!!

Now I don't know if you know how all this works or not so I'll share a small fact, those IP addresses are made up of 4 octets, without going further into depth there are exactly 4,294,967,296 unique values in an IP address. And yet somehow we managed to MOVE the server to another location and get almost the exact same IP ranges and yet they are all listed as being OWNED by NC Interactive in Austin Texas. And these servers are NOT running proxy by the way, that is where they are.

Are you saying that NC Interactive was going to charge ITSELF more money in rent for a server that is self owned??

So they made a decision to move the server from the NC Interactive Headquarters to the NC Interactive Headquarters and then not charge itself as much money in rent??

Can you explain this??

Because right now with all the info I have and all the problems that everyone is having and your delay in giving any explanation at all makes all this really difficult for me to believe. I feel like your doing your job right now as Community Manager by giving us a political answer to calm the masses through this difficult time, but I don't feel like we are getting the whole truth here and I feel like that is what we SHOULD be getting.

Again I would like to give you the opportunity to respond before I go any further.

Thank you for your time.

For getting all jumped on your high horse Mr. Business Economics, you completely missed the mark. Any investment into GW is not an investment in a dead game. Selling alt. accounts, storage panes, costumes and all the happy crappy in the online store generates income. Also, keeping the GW community happy is the best way to ensure sales of GW2. The worst way to encourage GW2 sales is to alienate the player base. Beyond that, there are still people who have the job of working on GW. Without even allocating any new resources, they can improve the GW experience by simply better focusing their time.
Also, I don't know where you got your understanding of how the not-for-profit industry works, but you don't seem to have anything more than a vague understanding of it.

FinalRebel, there are several addresses in use by GW. Only the 64.25.39.69 has been shown to be causing trouble. The rest of the game seems unaffected, offering regular lag.

Does this, to you, sound like:
A) a problem with ONE server of many, which is being dealt with, but which only affects a small number of players
B) grand conspiracy to alienate customers

And in case you still believe in your own conspiracy theory: I have experienced the "huge lagspike problem server" once before, months before the server move. I managed to score a better server, and that was it, and Anet dealt with the problem server eventually.

Also, IP is not the same as geographical location.

See that wasn't so hard. And if you'd mentioned this before, you could have easily stopped all the speculation before it started.

How is a community manager supposed to know all of this? More importantly, what's the difference? She probably had to go out of her way to ask the right people why the servers were moved just to provide us with that information. Can we give it a rest?

I hate to break it to ya, bro: No Money = No Honey. Selling costumes, name-changes, storage panes, happy-crappy, etc. is insufficient earnings compared to their general "up-keeping" bills [server(s), employees, etc.]. Also, the game's 5+ years old already. They've pumped enough content into the game by now; any more new content would only further disperse the community.

World of Warcraft's still up and running with full-blown content updates still to this day. Why? Because they charge a monthly fee! They receive money for their constant upkeep. Where's Anet's monthly fee? That's right. They don't have a monthly fee. So, to keep the community happy requires money alongside quality updates on Anet's part.

Well, how's Anet supposed to provide content if they don't make enough money to support it? Anet's history of quality updates has declined, analogous from a time-based perspective and parallel to the rate of their income [which is in steady decline if you've notice the pattern by now]. Their provisions are a direct affect of their [online store] profit. Money and provision go hand in hand, like peanut butter and jelly, like cereal and milk, like a hamburger with two buns.

In summary: No Money, No Honey!

I'm not talking about sweeping new content or a full overhaul. I'm talking about taking the people who are working on awful updates, and having them instead of dartboarding it with other people who do not play the game, listening to the people who have been playing the game for years and implementing the changes that they believe would be effective.
I typed what was becoming a TLDR amount of text about the business side. In essence, I stand by what I said earlier. I think you underestimate the amount of revenue coming in and overestimate their current upkeep with the shift of large amounts of staff to GW2.
And about the monthly fee, GW is not free to play. If you paid upfront for a subscription to a newspaper, you would not think that you were getting it for free when it showed up on your doorstep every morning.

Just because the whois info says it belongs to them doesn't mean they *own* it. Ever hear of SWIP? You should google it.

But lets entertain the idea that they do own the block (which they probably do, I know of 2 /20 allocations). Looking at the data, this in particular is a /20 subnet allocation (that is 4096 IP addresses). Do you think that all of those addresses are BGP advertised and routed to a single location? No. They could, but no. What they've most likely done is only advertise a small chunk of their /20 subnet to the old datacenter, and another small chunk of that allocation to another. Just because they addresses are close together numerically does NOT mean they must go to the same location. The whois information of an IP address is NOT where that IP routes to, it is the address of the company who owns it.

Even if they own the IP addresses, what does that have to do at all with data center costs? Having an IP allocation from ARIN doesn't automatically come with power, cooling, bandwidth, transit, etc. The computers running the game have to be housed somewhere. What Regina said is that the location they were in before (which I believe was the LimeLight datacenter) raised the cost of having the servers run in their facility, so they relocated the servers to another facility with a cheaper monthly bill (looks like Level3's data center).

I think she is doing well, it is your [mis]understanding of how the internet works which should be questioned..