The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 9, 2008

Official News page 1


UNEXPECTED OUTAGE ON FRIDAY

by Hazed

When things go wrong, they always pick the most inconvenient time to do so. That's certainly what happened on Friday!

About six minutes before the game was due to reset at 8.00am eastern, it locked up. Everything just stopped, and we don't know why. Players lost connection to the game and couldn't get back on. It's not like the game crashed - because if it crashed, it would fire itself up again, and that didn't happen.

The game stayed unavailable until Alan got home from work at his day job, at which point he kicked the server (metaphorically speaking), killed off the frozen game and allowed it to fire up again. The bad timing was because being at work he hadn't checked in on the game all afternoon, and also because he had intended to rush home and then rush straight out again to go away for the weekend... but had to delay his departure to sort things out and get Fed2 back on its feet again.

The game finally came back at around 1.00pm eastern.

When the game came back up and everybody logged on in relief, it was to discover that some things had been affected by the unexpected outage. Since the game didn't close itself down properly, things that normally get done at shut-down were skipped, so unliquidated futures contracts were lost. The game also didn't do its final save so things that players did not long before the reset that didn't happen also got lost - some players who were expecting to promote found their advancements delayed.

The effects were still being felt at yesterday's reset when company cycles did not advance to the next day. The reason was that when the Saturday reset was reached, the game had not been running for 24 hours. Company cycles will only advance if two conditions are fulfilled: 1) the game fires up, and 2) it's been 24 hours since the last time it fired up. This measure was put in to stop the company days whizzing by too fast if the game crashes.

By today, everything was back to normal, or what passes for normality in Fed DataSpace.

Many apologies for the outage.


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