IT'S BEEN A BAD WEEK...
by Hazed
Fed really has been having a bad time this week. We've had one major connection outage, two game crashes, and a minor connection blip.
Major Connection Outage
Late on Monday night, or early Tuesday morning depending on what timezone you live in, a problem at the data center where the Fed2 computer lives meant that for several hours it was cut off from the internet. Nobody could log onto the game or get to the website. The game kept on running throughout but there were just no players on for quite a while!
The problem was caused by a faulty router, which was replaced once the errant component had been identified, after which players could connect again. Still, for a couple of hours there was panic as players wondered if this was a repeat of the huge meltdown last autumn... thankfully, it wasn't!
Because the game itself kept on going, players should not have suffered any losses of groats or progress.
Two Game Crashes
On Wednesday and Thursday, the game suffered a crash. That's when something goes wrong and the program shuts down unexpectedly, without saving out any of the data currently held in memory. In both cases, the game came back up again right away so players were able to log on again.
Crashes are only momentary but because the game comes to a screeching halt, players may have lost groats or points gained before the crashes. Anyone who made major losses can ask to be compensated by emailing the details to feedback@ibgames.com (don't forget to put Fed2 somewhere in the subject line to avoid the dreaded spam mountain).
Two people did suffer more serious effects from these crashes: poor Jezz's company got messed up because she promoted to Manufacturer at just the wrong time. The game remembered her promotion, but forgot that her company had moved on, because the game doesn't always save all the files at the same time.
Unfortunate Fred found himself, somehow, exiled from the Sol system! I am not quite sure how the crash brought this about, but he couldn't get through the link to return to Sol until Bella (who owns the system) pardoned him.
Minor Connection Blip
In my mailbox yesterday morning were two emails from players complaining they had been chucked off Fed at 3.15pm eastern, and unable to get back in for a while. A quick look at the game logs showed that there hadn't been a general problem, so I assumed that these two were suffering from some local problem to do with their ISPs.
Then I read further down my mail and found a note from the data center which explained all. Translating the techno-speak, it said that they'd had a hardware failure which broke one of their switching modules affecting connections from particular areas, which is why not everyone had been affected. Once again, they fixed it and everything was all better.
What's the Difference?
So if you get chucked off Fed, how can you tell if the game has crashed, or if it's a connection outage - and why should you care?
- If you lose connection but can come back right away, and discover that nobody else has been affected, it was probably your ISP, or some other local problem.
- If you come back right away and see that everyone was affected, check the electronic noticeboard and the spynet review.
- If there are plenty of messages on the board and the review, then the game did not crash.
- If the board and the review are empty, the game crashed.
- If you can't get back on for a while, it either means that there is an ongoing connectivity problem, or the Fed2 computer has got problems that are preventing the game from coming back up. Check the website at http://www.ibgames.net and see if it's there or not.
Why should you care? Well, partly so you know who to swear and curse at, and partly so you know what you need to do to help us.
If it's a connection outage, then you don't need to do anything. But if it's a game crash then we need your help.
Help Us Solve the Crash Problem
The fact is, we do not know what causes the crashes. It's very frustrating! If they happened every day we might have a chance to figuring out what the problem is, but they are actually quite few and far between. It could be that there is a common factor. Maybe the game always crashes when a certain player logs on! Maybe when a certain player displays his, her or its company, or tries to transfer groats between planets, or walks into a certain room on the planet.
To help us try to figure out what that common factor is, we need you to email us the log of what you were doing just before the crash. Send it to feedback@ibgames.com (Fed2 in the subject line). Even if you were sitting doing nothing, send it anyway. You never know, your email might just contain the crucial piece of evidence we need to solve the mystery.
|
