The lengthy server downtime maintenance was completed for Seadrift several hours ago but it looks like their server has crashed again as players are noting that it has gone offline (around page 87 of the original massive thread).
UPDATE #1: they have managed to bring Seadrift back online again.
This thread has more details regarding that servers earlier downtime.
Also, since players consecutive login days were affected by the downtime, Trion offered compensation for that in the form of:
- 3 day Elara’s Blessing
- 3 day Bolton’s Blessing
- 3 day Aira’s Blessing
- Refining Stone
- 30 Archemstones
Paying players (Founder’s pack with Patron) actually get screwed since because the 30 Archstonegems are what one would get for 3 days worth of Patron box rewards (there are always 10 in the box). Basically, free 2 players come out ahead on this. However, the above does not compensate enough for the inability to do some of the dailies (like Abyssal Tower) and to attain their rewards.
If something like this were to happen on the server I’m playing on, I know it would be more or less futile to expect much. I haven’t had problems on the lower level customer support side (as I do have an attendance issue with December 8th; but the game master/support agent was very thorough and gave me a detailed response as to the fact that the engineers know about the issue but there isn’t any way for anyone to manually fix it). And I’m okay with that because the GM didn’t try to give me some BS answer. And I responded that I appreciate the honest explanation.
But this highlights the backend engineering challenges involved with this game that really need to be resolved. As I mentioned, I really like this game but the handling of the EU situation are those kind of things that can drive players away from it (and taint the games reputation – to put it bluntly, it already has).
Short term, I know they need to do what they are doing in order to preserve players current character data and to patch the code that is responsible for causing the data loss. But the next priority after that is to assess whether the game at least in the EU region, currently requires two separate servers. If the population can be supported on one server, the next immediate priority is working on a server transfer mechanism, and to throughly test that, qualify it, and then migrate all EU players to Segarro. There is something more going on hardware wise that is causing that one system to have these kind of problems.
UPDATE #2: this server has gone offline again (someone at Trion needs to make an executive level decision because as far as I’m concerned, this is now putting the entire game in jeopardy even though it is affecting only one particular server).
UPDATE #3: the server crashed again for these folks on December 18th.
