http://forums.deviliangame.com/showthread.php?7496-Seadrift-Server-Update-December-16th-7-30am-pst
Again, this is one of the servers for Europe and was originally meant to be one of the launch servers prior to the last minute decision to make all 4 servers (2 per region) available at head start. Myself, I play on the North America region and specifically the Ravan server. I know it isn’t out of the ordinary for online games like this to launch without issues but I have to say this is beginning to border on the ridiculous.
All I’m doing is putting myself in the shoes of those who unfortunately chose this particular server since I’d be peeved off myself if there were these sort of issues one after the other. It’s more concerning when they took certain precautions with Asperon, the other North American server that was also slated to be the launch server.
That leads me to believe (as noted in my above linked post) that there is something different in both hardware and software configuration which needed to be changed at the last moment; basically, the original design where the head start servers and the launch servers would actually be separate, must have some key architectural differences (probably to do with how certain Founder’s pack features would be deployed and managed; so this and other differences needed to be patched in).
I like this game and haven’t had much issues with Trion personally but watching this happen doesn’t increase my confidence now about the operational side of the business. Many including myself are supporting the game with Founder’s pack purchases so there is some level of expectation with the game at least being on stable footing. So even though I’m not on Seadrift, its issues and downtime still indirectly affects the way I view the entire situation because i know that players who have characters over on Seadrift, have had whatever enjoyment they may have had playing, destroyed by the loss of items and the inability to play.
The biggest mistake Trion probably made was not announcing how head start would work far earlier. During beta, both US and EU played on one beta server for their respective region. So it was assumed the game would launch on one mega server per region. Obviously that was not the case and probably not something recommended by Bluehole Ginno given the 2 server per region setup from the start (which tells me the backend tech cannot scale automatically in terms of server load balancing and hot-cutover).
As for the extended downtime for Seadrift, I seriously don’t know how Trion can even make it up to these players because I believe it has gone over that threshold where whatever enjoyment they had remaining is probably now completely gutted.
