*grumble*

[Chenier]

I farm on and off for two days (half of which I farm for the wrong thing - must read recipes closer), do tons of subcombines, get them all moved over to my little Tart to work on tinkering and....

The server come down! Yea!


/seethe

[Ursawraith]

Cheer up Cupcake At least they didn't rollback 2 days of farming.

[Chenier]

True (well, at least I hope it's true)...

[Renjah]

could be worse I lost half an AA on a server down before.

FIVE MINUTES TIL SERVER DOWN!!!

cool I can kill this last mob then log

10 seconds later

YOU HAVE BEEN DISCONNECTED!!!!

I wish 5 minutes went that fast while at work.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

My favorite server coming down ...

"Server coming down in 15 minutes!"

Wait a half hour

"Server coming down in 10 minutes!"

Wait 15 minutes

"Server coming down in 15 minutes!"

Server comes down 5 minutes later.

Really grumbling about that one ... was a big rollback for me, and its not like you could really have any guess as to when the world was coming down, other than "sometime".

[Itek]

Hahahaha...

Not laughing at you folks, laughing at myself.

Back in the day I was working on developing a mudlib, basicly from scratch.

One of the things needed in old LPC style muds was a "shutdown" command for the admins. There was one in the bare-bones lib. (by bare-bones I mean about 80 files and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 meg of file space including the driver)

But it was "shutdown" ... like type "shutdown" and the process ENDED. Right NOW.

Well I decided to time in a little delay and allow the admin to decide on how much delay, with a minimum delay of 30 seconds.

I spent a few hours coding it, tuning it and so forth. I tested it with the actual function call to "shutdown" commented out and it worked fine.

Live test.

Well, long story short once it went live a few odd things happened.

First try -- instant shutdown. (It skipped right to the formerly commented out line.)

Next day, second try -- instant shutdown, blowing thru all the "this much time remaining" calls. Quite amusing so see 20 messages scroll by in a second followed by disconnect.

Next day, third try -- timers go off.... game doesn't shutdown.

Fourth try -- timers go off ... game doesn't shutdown, but now no commands can be input. (Log in with shell account and terminate process with kill -9 command)

Fifth try -- timers go off .... and the final timer goes off... and off... and off... and offf... (Again with kill -9 command)

Next day, sixth try, after getting some help from the other admins working on the lib .... finally it worked.

Seventh try (using a sub-minimum delay input) ... instant shutdown, no delay at all...

This is how it goes.

Without getting too deep in code and CPU clock cycle issues...

It's virtually IMPOSSIBLE to automate a "countdown to shutdown" timer that actually mimics the function of a real clock. You can get close, but not exact. So most people don't even really try.

Last shout competitions....

Armageddon shouts: Server coming down in 5 seconds.
Itek: Last
TheWife: Last
Utter: Last
Utter: Last
Utter: Last
Singer: Last Shout
(think you get the point)

Everyone tries to get as CLOSE to the last procedure call as possible. It swamps the processor and the "last 5 seconds" usually lasts 10.

That's probably not the problem that SOE has, but they are doing it by manual announcements. Because automated announcements are not really bulletproof either. (Besides, if you code them wrong, see above, they can cause real nightmares. Imagine that I had done this on the Test Server trying to automate shutdowns for patches. It took me several days to fix, and the server went up and down quite frequently. I can hear the howls of the darned coming from the Test Server community already.)

[salomeasillverfrost]

My worst nightmare was a server crash, I did my 7th shawl combine and succeeded the first try woohoo, go run to the bank and hit lag then froze then got the connect screen, log back on and what do I see? shawl 6 /cry gms basically tell me so sad too bad. did combine again and "you lack the necessary skills yadayada" /cry okay blow 3k on royal kromrif blood and try again and succeed /sigh Sal

[splunge]

Whever i loot a raid-won item, do a huge final combine, whatever... I immediately type /a /a /role /role then if theres anyone standing around, I hand them a copper, and then zone or log out.

Playing on a server thats prone to coming down at any time for any or no reason and with minimal or no warning... you learn to do this early. =)

[Caittune Bugstomper]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by splunge
I immediately type /a /a /role /role then if theres anyone standing around, I hand them a copper, and then zone or log out.

That is a great idea...I have noticed before that you save when you sell, buy or give something...but I never thought to use that as a tool! Thanks... and everyone have a safe and happy holiday!

[eniamn]

kill a grass snake and loot something. saved after most corpses too.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

There seem to be different "types" of saves, some more "deep" than others for lack of a better way to put it. After some types of crashs/LDs/whatnot, I go back to the state I was at the last time I saw "Dunthor saved." Other times though (and far more commonly) I go back to the last time I zoned. To me this implies that zoning is a 'harder' save than the 'soft' "Dunthor saved." you get after combat, trades, food, and whatnot.

[splunge]

If trading wasnt a 'hard save' then there would be a huge duping exploit. You wait for server to come down for a patch, as soon as they say '1 minute' you hand a friend/second account all your plat and bags of BDs or whatever you wanted to double. They log out/zone etc, ,and you just stand there.. waiting for server to die. When you log back in, you have all your stuff back, as it wasnt a 'hard' save, as well as the second person having all the stuff cause they DID hard save.

Trading is a hard save. /a /role is probably a soft save.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Originally posted by splunge
[B]If trading wasnt a 'hard save' then there would be a huge duping exploit. You wait for server to come down for a patch[....don't want to copy the whole thing for space]

My experiences really made me wonder if that was a working exploit ... but I never had the patience, planning, or luck of timing to actually test it, heh.

If the items aren't duped in that scenario, I'd personally be rather surprised. I've lost traded items (Gfay fun) to badly timed zone crashs, so it seems logical that the serverdown "predictable crash" would potentially let you "half-validate" a trade as well.

That is, of course, assuming that the server-down "crash" isn't specifically designed to avoid this - although the included rollbacks make me doubt it.