Asheron's Call Update: 7/5/07

[Ziv]

[turbine]

Quoted Link

Hello there and welcome to the latest edition of the Asheron’s Call update! It has been a while since we put one of these out and we have plenty of stuff to cover, so let’s get right to it.

As most of you already know we had a Hotfix earlier this week to address the server crashes that had been occurring since around February. This fix basically set a limit on how many messages a user could send back to the servers before getting booted from the game. Since it came up in a few other places I want to be very clear here. This fix was not put in as a way to break Decal or any other third party applications. It was done to improve server stability, which it has done.

In our initial testing we found that the original number we had set worked fine and should not have affected players who did not have any third party programs running. We have since learned this was not the case. After looking through the logs we put in place we found that approximately 5% of our entire player base was getting booted for one reason or another. Using some basic math and what we know of third party program use within Asheron’s Call we determined that of those affected about 2-3% of them were players who were not running any type of third party program.

After looking at these numbers we decided it was best to raise the number of messages that the server allows per player. With this increase we should still be well within the safe number of inquiries to the server, and this should greatly reduce the number of players who are getting booted from the game. As always we will continue to monitor things and make any necessary changes.

During the just mentioned hotfix we also took the opportunity to fix a few bugs that came out during the June event. We felt while we were going to be down anyway, it was the best time to address some of those issues. Though it is not something we want to get in the habit of doing.

We introduced our new Live Ops forum last week and kicked it off with a PK/PKL event that is still to occur on some worlds. So far these events and this forum have been very well received and we will continue to run some great events in the future. Geneva has been getting some great feedback from the forums and we hope that players will continue to give us their feedback and ideas as we go forward.

We have also added a bug reporting button to the forums which will take you right to our bug reporting form. Any reports filed through there will make it right to our QA folks so they can investigate the reports. So we encourage you as players to use this option to make sure we are aware of anything strange that might be occurring in the world of Dereth.

The team is now busy working on things for the July event. As of right now we have scheduled that event to go live on July 17th, but as always that date may be subject to change depending on our schedule and if any other issues may arise.

Well thats about it for now. We will make sure to keep everyone updated on the status of the server change we are making today and what we see from the logs we get back. Everyone have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc