Service disruptions 17-18 May 2016

[Philipp Strecker]

Hello Hunters,

As you all know, we experienced periods of downtime and service interruption yesterday.
We wanted to share some more information relating to this, so you know what is going on.

We partnered up with Google for a couple of their services, Cloud SQL being one of them.
Yesterday at 14:00 (CEST), Google started to experience issues with their First Generation Cloud SQL instances, which led to a service interruption. We immediately reached out to them in an attempt to reduce downtime bring the game back online as fast as possible. Unfortunately the problem persisted and was only completely resolved two hours ago.

We hoped to eliminate such problems by switching to more services on Google’s infrastructure, but even the biggest companies out there are run by humans and are not completely void of problems.
We understand that the recent number and frequency of outages is unacceptable and we have already formed a task force dedicated to stability, making sure that the game is playable at all times.

This is our #1 priority and although it does not look like we are doing a good job at the moment, we are making some good improvements in the background.

External outages which fall outside our control are frustrating as there is little we can do, but recent times have shown us that we need to do everything in our power to minimize risk of any outages, both externally and due to our own work. We are 100% committed to this goal.

The game is now up and running and we will do whatever it takes to keep it that way.

On a brighter note, we aim to release a new patch today with some great feedback from you regarding added functionality for the Two Person Tree Stand and Spotting Scope and some more fixes. Be sure to check it out once it lands.

We sincerely apologize for the downtime you have experienced and are very grateful that you are still hunting with us.

All the best from the whole theHunter team,
Phil

[ru_Wanderer]

Thanks for explanations, we look forward a new patch today.

[FR_Bugs]

Thanks for the note Phillip

[dvotee]

Thanks for the update...Hopefully stability will improve. Like everything else, changes bring issues you can't foresee so as long as you are aware of them and working hard then there's not really much more we can ask of you

[HooCairs]

Thanks for the info and of course all the efforts Philipp!

I have a simple request to make. When the servers go down, so do all games. While this is inevitable for MP games, I think it should be avoided for SP games. It was possible in the past to switch away from an SP game when there was a disconnect, and continue to play even hours later when the servers were back. I understand this was unintentional and you "fixed" this a few weeks ago. While this might be a solution for EW, it is NOT a solution for the players.

Can you please consider returning this functionality properly. There is no reason to stop SP games and in fact players are losing competition attempts and uncollected harvests when the servers disconnect. Please consider this.

[Linden]

It was very frustrating for me trying to play yesterday and not being capable to log in. If you understand us as you say, please compensate our frustration by giving is back this lost time (I don't mind if you will throw in a little bonus, too). This way this bitter pill I swallowed for a couple of weeks (not being able to connect for random periods of time etc) will seem acceptable. And if I am talking to you and you are listening maybe you could let us know what is your plan to solve those crashes, which scourged this game since October the 7th, last year. When are these annoying crashes going to end please ?
I also noticed that you are changing people every three months or so but little is changing in terms of important bugs which plague this game. If this is your plan to eradicate them, I, for one, can tell you that it doesn't seem to work so maybe you do something in this direction soon. If one year, for instance will pass and you will keep saying "we are working on it", I am sorry but I won't be able to believe any word you will say anymore and you will lose me as a PAYING member of this community.

[caledonianblues]

Thanks for the update Phil. Next stop Amazon Web Services

[Hubert]

It was very frustrating for me trying to play yesterday and not being capable to log in. If you understand us as you say, please compensate our frustration by giving is back this lost time (I don't mind if you will throw in a little bonus, too). This way this bitter pill I swallowed for a couple of weeks (not being able to connect for random periods of time etc) will seem acceptable. And if I am talking to you and you are listening maybe you could let us know what is your plan to solve those crashes, which scourged this game since October the 7th, last year. When are these annoying crashes going to end please ?
I also noticed that you are changing people every three months or so but little is changing in terms of important bugs which plague this game. If this is your plan to eradicate them, I, for one, can tell you that it doesn't seem to work so maybe you do something in this direction soon. If one year, for instance will pass and you will keep saying "we are working on it", I am sorry but I won't be able to believe any word you will say anymore and you will lose me as a PAYING member of this community.

I agree. These service interruptions are annoying. Maybe you can find a way to compensate us for them. We are paying money, HARD earned cash I might add, for the right to be able to play this game 7/24. I don't know about changing personnel in their company, but as you pointed out, little seem to change in the right direction when it comes to important bugs as those random crashes, they are stepping on my nerves, especially in WRR, where I can't hunt, without a crash, more than one hour- one hour and a half, no matter what resolution I use for my pc monitor. I miss those long hunts and, sadly, I have the feeling that I will never see them again.

[Hardtree]

Highly appreciated Philipp! Thank you for this info!

[ronMctube]

Philipp thanks for the explanation.it is appreciated.

can i ask why we swapped from the old way we used to run servers ? was its for business cost reasons ? for functionality cant be the reason as its worse.

originally the game worked better in every way before swapping to the cloud system.

while it wont go back to that way obviously as you say this cant continue.the game just keeps getting worse and worse in just the basics of even connecting ,trying to play.the gameplay is great everything else is pretty broken.


while i understand there is a dedicated team working on this.this needs to be looked at seriously now.the functionality of this game just decreases with every month that passes im not being negative before the pm comes im just saying honestly how can anyone say we doing this that or other and look at the outcome the game is its worst state ever.while some may disagree with that its the truth.more disconnects game crashing more regular for everyone.the causes need eliminating the stability needs to come back.

i do feel for you guys trying your hardest trying to get things right but just look at it from a players perspective.

the game crashes more regular now for whatever reason than ever before.now we have added constant server issues thrown in.so how is this getting better ?

it hasn't.

this isnt a attack please just understand from a players view the game is struggling it isnt getting better something needs to change.