Multi-Housing Now Patching… 2-3 Hours to Go

SmokeJumper has been providing frequent updates on today’s installation of Multihousing into EQ2:

Hi, folks,

Today’s housing feature has to do a lot of massaging of the house database elements. This takes a considerable amount of time (a bit like a world merge, actually).

This means that when we take servers down, they will be down for 2 or 3 hours while we do that process. We should have all the servers up by mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time).

The servers that are currently running are Antonia Bayle, Barren Sky, Harla Dar, Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, and Crushbone.

The next batch will be Splitpaw, Butcherblock, Nagafen, Freeport, Permafrost, Oasis, Crushbone, Valor, Storms, Sebilis, The Bazaar and Vox.

So be patient with us a bit. Multiple House Ownership and Prestige Homes will be here today!

As to the question of exactly when the servers will be up (with +hours corrected):

Mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time)

Add +8 hours in the UK and +9 in Germany to any Pacific Time estimate we give. So mid-afternoon our time is something like midnight or later in Europe.

Update as of 9:00PM GMT+1 (noon PDT):

Crushbone is one of the servers that will come up in the first batch in an hour or two from now.

In response to complaints about taking down the European servers at the same time, especially when today’s Downtime announcement suggested the usual 2am update:

When we do major updates like this, that require database manipulation, we need enough people “on deck” to deal with any issues in real-time that it’s not realistic to have them all come in at 2am.

Regarding complaints about doing a major update when Game Update 60 is coming on May 17th:

That’s part of the reason we’re doing this now. We need to clear the decks so that GU 60 can go onto Test and we can focus on that for the next few weeks.

Regarding the Russian servers:

We try to minimize downtime but in the cases where we have to merge or transfer data for an update, it takes considerable time and we need to watch it carefully in case there are issues.

This will be behind us soon and we shouldn’t have anything like this again for the forseeable future.

and finally…

GU 60 is scheduled to go to Test later today also (after the housing update is done).