The new Game Producer Keith Kanneg keeps surprising us, the community, with a much more open communication than what we were used to in the past years.
Today he posted a long message on the official SWTOR forums explaining the reason behind the frequent (and annoying) maintenances Bioware has been doing on the SWTOR servers. Turns out they are migrating from one Datacenter to another, while also upgrading the Game Server Hardware and supporting software.
The upcoming Maintenance tomorrow on the very birthday of Star Wars (25th May 1977) should be the last of the extra maintenances and, hopefully, from the next week they should return back to a normal schedule.
Keith also announced that community manager Eric Musco will be posting in the beginning of each month a message with all the regular scheduled maintenances, so we would better know when the game will be unavailable and plan our days accordingly.
Here is the full message:
Hey all,
I’ve noticed a lot of concern about maintenances and the impact it has on your game time. We probably should have just given you a schedule of activity for the month of May and explained what was going on. Going forward, toward the beginning of each month, Eric will provide a schedule of that month’s maintenance.
So, what’s been going on this past month? Essentially, we have been migrating from one Datacenter to another and upgrading the Game Server hardware and supporting software. You won’t directly notice improvements in performance, but these changes dramatically help us maintain the game and improve its overall reliability. As you can imagine, it’s an enormous undertaking to move absolutely everything – all servers and related hardware, supporting hardware, network infrastructure, upgrading the operating systems, management systems and tools, and more.
For the most part, we’ve been able to do it without a ton of downtime, but there’s been a couple times this month where the migration didn’t go as planned. As a result, we had to extend the maintenance window. Not fun for you nor for us!
Typically, we have a maintenance every two weeks and usually on a Tuesday. There’s a lot of coordination required between teams, as it’s not just turning servers off/on, but making sure all services spin up properly, databases are in good shape, all server hardware is checked, supporting software is updated, and more. No excuses, just means to keep the game healthy we need to validate everything and much of the work requires players to be offline.
What’s happening on Thursday should be the last of the migration components, but some of these impact our game services. So, this requires us to ensure no in-game activity is happening, and shutdown the Live Game. Our sincerest apologies to everyone as we did not realize it was a holiday (our bad for not looking at the calendar). We still need to have the maintenance, but I’ve asked the team to start an hour earlier and if at all possible shorten the window. We will get SWTOR back online as fast as possible.
The next scheduled downtime is June 13th and that maintenance is for Game Update 5.2.2. It’s possible we may need to restart everything on June 6th to flesh out any potential issues, but we’ll let you know.
Thanks for understanding and again, we’ll continue to improve our communications with you.
—Keith
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