Age of Empires Forums

In order to keep things clean, i'm going to put server status discussion here and keep a news thread locked.  The news thread with the latest server status can be found here:

 http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/ShowThread.aspx?PostID=922977

What is the problem with Microsoft and AOE3...have they cut resources down to one DB manager? I would think if you took the server down for 3 hours overnight (not on a weekend or weekday) and had 15 techs doing disk defrags you should be able to get it up and running right away. I guess the revenue stream is minimal and Microsoft under estimates the impact of poor customer service. I know the kids may not complain but the 45+ strategists who have already stopped buying Sony online entertainment due this same problem with their market and have now stopped buying games and PS3...will also stop buying XBOX and perhaps even MSOFFICE software.

Opportunity COSTS might be worth the support we lost when this transferred directly to Microsoft.

1st, get over the down time. second, ES used to manage the servers then RE, and now MS. The game is getting old, and i think you should just be happy we have a mod that is willing to actually try to fix things,after all the game has been through. Also, just because ESO was down for a few hours is hardly a reason stop buying MS stuff. and another point, the game is online, around the world. so because the world is round and revolves round the sun, its not night time everywhere all the time, im sorry you didnt realize that. And the servers had an error, and they needed to be fixed. so, if you want ryzon to wait until its a weekday night, then sure, lets have an error bring them down, and keep them down. This wasnt a scheduled down-time.

I agree. Remember that the servers are running a game that almost into its 6th year. It's really amazing that there is still enough interest in AOE 3 to maintain them at all. By this time most other games are on third-party systems. And, from what I've seen posted, the third-party, unmoderated, systems are mainly about who can stack up the most game cheats. Not to mention the unsupervised 12-year-olds who think it funny to just scream obscenities the entire game.

Metis:

Not to mention the unsupervised 12-year-olds who think it funny to just scream obscenities the entire game.

its actually pretty awesome :D

wish aoe3 had an easy voice chatting feature :((

Storm_:

Metis:

Not to mention the unsupervised 12-year-olds who think it funny to just scream obscenities the entire game.

its actually pretty awesome :D

wish aoe3 had an easy voice chatting feature :((

But I thought you were a mute?

Man, Microsoft did ES dirty anyway. Wish they were still around because in my opinion, they were the best RTS developer. The Age series is the best series of RTS games. While there are many starcraft fans or warcraft or any other popular RTS games, all you have to say is Age of Empires or Age of Empires II the Age of Kings, and you get instant respect from almost all of them. I feel AoE3 was more of a niche game for a lot, but it still is a really good game.

I expected a lot of Robot Entertainment since it claimed to have captured most of the former ES employees, but I was let down as soon as I saw Orcs Must Die, do I seriously need to explain this one? When the NDA was lifted for AOE:O, and I could play the open beta, I did. And I was let down again. AoE:O is not an Age series game in its truest form. Its an MMO first and then a true competitive RTS second. I'll leave AoE:O to the casuals as it will be impossible to balance.

While I feel that microsoft game studios is not as bad as old EA or the current activision I don't respect them as much as other publishers as it seems that while they do make better products they don't provide a service as well as they should.

ditissparta:

Storm_:

Metis:

Not to mention the unsupervised 12-year-olds who think it funny to just scream obscenities the entire game.

its actually pretty awesome :D

wish aoe3 had an easy voice chatting feature :((

But I thought you were a mute?

oooo men i use a text to voice program!  so it sounds like steven hawking is flaemin them, so op!

now that is funny.

no offence steven your still out of this world!

A corrupt database is not solved by a simple disk defrag, I think you are misunderstanding the issue here..  

Many things, including this one, will take a certain amount of time no matter how many people you have working on it.  Restoring a 50GB database from off-site backups takes a while - about 2 hours in this case.  There is no way to make it go faster.  As for the timing, I don't even work on weekends, but spent Saturday getting the service back up.  I'm looking for solutions to the issue to prevent it from going down / taking so long in the future, but the issue on Saturday was not planned maintenance.

I'm not going to even justify the comparative comment to other online services, it really has no bearing on this situation.  

Do you know how the data base came to be corrupted?

I posted the error before, if you want to look it up its Error 644, Severity: 21, State 1.  Could not find the index entry for RID (big number) in index page ....etc

The particular specific cause is very difficult to determine, however i'll be putting a hotfix on the server tomorrow that hopefully will address it.  There are several documented things that can cause the issue, most were in the latest service pack for the SQL server (which we have installed of course). If it works, i'll be able to detail a bit more in the future. 

Sorry, I already saw the error and looked it up. I was just wondering if you knew what was causing it specifically, apparently you dont yet.

So anyone feeling like having a chat with me on Xfire while ESO is down ?

Btw ryz0ni how long untill I can pwn noobs again ? 

Jerom:

So anyone feeling like having a chat with me on Xfire while ESO is down ?

Btw ryz0ni how long untill I can pwn noobs again ? 

jeromi do you have gameranger?