If there is any doubt that EQ2 devs are working as hard as they can to resolve the persistent Receiving Zone Info issues affecting Freeport and (to some extent) other servers, know that Zoltaroth and Rothgar put in 16 hours on Tuesday, and I know that Zoltaroth worked again until midnight this morning. Sleep is overrated!
From Rothgar:
The good news is that we’ve found and fixed the source of the crash that both Butcherblock and Permafrost experienced today. This crash fix will go out with tomorrow morning’s hotfix.
and:
To update further, we have a patching coming tomorrow morning with several changes as well as a large amount of additional logging that will help us troubleshoot the issue even further. This is still our top priority and our lack of updates today has only been due to the fact that we’ve been very busy behind the scenes working towards a solution for this problem.
We will update more later in the day tomorrow.
From SmokeJumper:
1) Long zoning times on Freeport : We’re still tracking this down. We thought we had a fix that went into yesterday’s update, but it only did a little bit to improve things. There’s definitely still a problem. We were here very late last night trying to track it down, but we finally had to settle for putting tons of reporting into the code. We’ll be watching those reports today to try to track down the source of the issue…and then kill it dead, dead, dead.
In response to players seeing long delays with Receiving Zone Info, Rothgar continued:
It’s certainly possible and probable that the same issue exists on live servers but for whatever reason, they are not experiencing it to the extent that Freeport is. There have been a few other assorted performance issues in the past couple of days so its always possible a different problem is exhibiting the same symptoms.
I assure you we are just as concerned with the impact that these performance problems are having on potential new players, but honestly I’m more concerned about the impact its having on you guys that have been suffering through it for a couple of weeks.
In response to some serious trolling, Rothgar had this to say:
First and foremost, if you’ve worked in any kind of engineering or development company it wouldn’t be news that 90% of the time can be spent just finding the cause of a problem. Often times the fix is simple and can be done in minutes. So, in my opinion as a software engineer with 15+ years of programming experience, it’s perfectly fine to say that you don’t know what the problem is as long as you have a clear plan to figure it out. (Which we do)
Now myself and Zoltaroth were here when those guys left almost 5 years ago. We’ve both been with EQ2 for almost as long as the game has been live. No one knows the in’s and out’s of this software better than us and if anyone can fix it, we can. We understand that the issue is frustrating and while it seems we should just be able to take down the server, press a button and fix it, sometimes its not that simple. Insulting our intelligence, calling for firings and otherwise taking your anger out on our team isn’t going to help the situation.
This is a tough issue, we will admit that, but we’re making progress. The same code is running on all EQ2 servers yet Freeport is the only one with this problem. You might think it was population, yet we’ve reproduced this problem on the server when only 100 people were logged in. You might think its a database issue, but we’ve also reproduced this problem in situations where the data is 100% cached and the database was never accessed. It’s one of those issues where every theory you have can be disproved by another test. But like I said, we are making progress and we understand where the issue is occuring but need to narrow it down further.
Tomorrow’s hotfix has a few changes as well as additional logging that will help us narrow that down. The best case scenario is that tomorrow’s hotfix solves the problem. The worst case scenario is that we gather more information and get that much closer to a solution.
Again, accept our apologies for the problems that you’re experiencing. We are doing everything we can at this point to solve it in a timely manner.
Unfortunately I cannot answer questions about extending Velious rewards or other types of compensation but I will forward that on to Smokejumper.
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