So i've been sitting @ "Getting characters" for about, 30 minutes, and logged out once, and still no action... is there a server status page im missing?

Same problem with me man, Must be server related...

Same here.

Sorry about that. There was a server problem. It's fixed now.

Thanks Ray.

bump because it appears to be down again, in case the devs didnt know :)

The game server is not down, nor has it been at any point today, according to the people who have been playing all day. If you really think there's a server outage and want to inform us, a Support Ticket is your best bet for reporting it.

In this case, I would guess that your internet connection, or some connection between you and our server was not working well, and perhaps taking an extra long time to exchange the data necessary for login.

Noted Incarnate for the support ticket (i avoided it because as it says, it might be a few days :P) although, as a possible idea, is there a way to put the server status on the home page? If it says its up, then i know its something between me and the server, and if its down, well, i dont need to say anything :D

Hey Incarnate/ray:

I don't suppose it'd be possible for y'all to hook up your nagios instance (or whatever you use to do real-time monitoring) to post to twitter/an RSS feed/a "status" box on the website/etc, would it?

Rogue: that is possible. Although it's notable that our monitoring doesn't always show the problems that users may perceive as the "server being down", such as trying to log into an individual sector that is stuck (but all other sectors are fine, etc). We have many kinds of internal monitoring and checking to cover as many bases as we can. Nothing as simple as nagios would be able to detect the issues that actually crop up periodically (a nagios system would not have shown the issue that was raised in the original post here). It would be simpler, and about equally effective, to just have a static thing on the page that says "UP" or "DOWN" that we manually change during restarts.

Akuthia: Generally speaking, the server is up. If we're restarting, it will say "the server is restarting". Problems crop up occasionally, but (historically) we've managed at least 99.5% uptime, including restarts and maintenance windows. Visible issues are usually not us.

I'm actually all for some kind of status page or something. The problem is that the displayed status won't necessarily be super meaningful if there's a new issue that isn't detected by the status system. This then requires a really complex status system that actually simulates a lot of common behaviours, and even then that will fail to show odd corner cases (like specific sectors being stuck, or something happening in a new and unforeseen way). If we weren't constantly changing the game, it would be easy to keep it , but with the addition of new code comes new bugs and the like.

I understand that no monitoring can be completely correct, however, Id like to think as a semi intelligent person, that if the server status says "up" and i'm holding after logging in, that i'd realize it was something in between; no biggie, shit happens on the web, i'll try back later. Same with an individual sector being down, if i'm "in" and selecting a character and getting stuck, i'd (again) hope i'd realize to try another or create another character. but, if i started out knowing before i even logged in that there was a problem, well, i guess i wouldnt even try :P

And i know the horrible downtime days are far behind us at this point. This may show my age (although, i'm still young just been gaming forever) but i remember the patch cycle of say, EQ (real, then stated in parenthesis):

BIG patch coming today folks, servers will be down 4-6 hours (6-8). Servers come back up, theres an issue, we're taking the servers down, they'll be back up in 2-4 hours (4-6). THOSE were the days of bad patching...