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[Muku]

When my husband told me this morning "No FFBE for you today!"

Spoiler

Maybe I'll be lucky and can play after work. Maybe.

 

[Xion86]

Good thing this is a free to play mobile game...

 

[PantherLotus]

I guess I don't understand why people are thinking Gumi is doing this maliciously. It's incompetence.

Obviously the alternative is them rushing it and having a bunch of bugs, right?

 

[KeRaSh]

I guess I don't understand why people are thinking Gumi is doing this maliciously. It's incompetence.

Obviously the alternative is them rushing it and having a bunch of bugs, right?

What actually bothers me is the fact that it keeps happening every damn week. It's a planned maintenance where they implement stuff that is known beforehand. Do they not have test servers where they can figure out how to patch shit in? That way they would know beforehand how to do it and things like this wouldn't happen.
Right now it seems like they are throwing together a team 20 minutes before the maintenance starts and just throw code at the servers until something compiles.

Don't they get the JP code? It's not like they have to reverse engineer the JP code, right? Change some variables for the next Vortex boss and be done with it...

Spoiler

It's obviously harder than that but if you don't have people who know how shit works then fucking hire professionals or request a few training sessions from the JP staff ffs...

 

[Kouriozan]

The maintenance is so long because they have to include Orlandu data already, and we know how big this banner will be.

 

[MMBosstones86]

I guess I don't understand why people are thinking Gumi is doing this maliciously. It's incompetence.

Obviously the alternative is them rushing it and having a bunch of bugs, right?

Incompetence is worse.

It's staggering to have weekly maintenance that constantly gets delayed, but 14ish hours of maintenance? I mean holy shit.

 

[H3xum]

I guess I don't understand why people are thinking Gumi is doing this maliciously. It's incompetence.

Obviously the alternative is them rushing it and having a bunch of bugs, right?

Hardly, the alternative is some level of self respect and professionalism where this incompetence gets dealt with months ago after the first successive weeks of extended maintenance.

They shouldn't accept it and keep stringing us along while wanting our money/downloads

 

[Muku]

I guess I don't understand why people are thinking Gumi is doing this maliciously. It's incompetence.

Obviously the alternative is them rushing it and having a bunch of bugs, right?

I'd say incompetence is worse. This is why they should have hired actual professionals the first time. I mean, I could understand if this was an MMO. But this is a mobile game. And we're running 14 hours of maint? Doesn't that seem a bit ridiculous?

Also, I'd be WTB some of those bugs if they're like every pull is Lightning, Luneth, or Gilgamesh.

 

[DrROBschiz]

i wouldnt mind SE taking this game over and making a more serious mobile effort for quality control

Im not sure if that would be a good thing or not either way lol

 

[PantherLotus]

I guess I'm just not as mad as everyone as long as everyone suffers equally. What bothers me is when some benefit more than others.

 

[Xion86]

I guess I don't understand why people are thinking Gumi is doing this maliciously. It's incompetence.

Obviously the alternative is them rushing it and having a bunch of bugs, right?

Exactly I work as a System Test Engineer and I'm always happy when companies choose to have a delay to either iron out issues or improve on something haha. It's not on purpose for sure. Quality is key! (Probably why I get annoyed when I see some minor issues in game or the iOS crashes).

But as KeRaSH mentioned, they should have test servers and really prepare for this, and learn from any past mistakes (or have lessons learned meetings). Just need to prepare better. Whatever is taking so long seems to be quite a serious problem :/. Can't keep happening, hopefully they learn from their mistakes.

And I also feel the same way as Panther mentioned above.

 

[Broseybrose]

And just for clarification, Im not mad about it. Im SAD about it.

I want to see this game continue to succeed and even rise to new heights.

 

[The Silver]

If this is the standard required to work at GUMI I think I could get a job there.

 

[Xion86]

And just for clarification, Im not mad about it. Im SAD about it.

I want to see this game continue to succeed and even rise to new heights.

Yeah exactly. I mean this is the first Gatcha style game I've played and my first mobile game I've played every single damn day since launch!! It's got me hooked, really want to see it improve even more as time goes on.

 

[PantherLotus]

yeah i mean clearly this is not a good look for the game. wish more companies learned from that one scene in social network 'WE DON'T CRASH EVER"

 

[Syntsui]

Just when I said this was the most crucial point in the game and they absolutely couldn't fuck it up, this happens. Pray nothing is broken when this is over, because the life of this game depends on this.

 

[MMBosstones86]

If I missed my release repeatedly and often had to ask for more time upon more time, I'd be fired without question.

 

[spyhunterzero]

I'm wondering if they decided to do checks on the patch seeing as last time it broke some things and it is the reason it is taking so long.

 

[PantherLotus]

Just when I said this was the most crucial point in the game and they absolutely couldn't fuck it up, this happens. Pray nothing is broken when this is over, because the life of this game depends on this.

there are a solid 80,000 active accounts man. And at least 1,000 whales. They're gonna be ok.

 

[cpp_is_king]

I built the server for a AAA online game, and for rolling out major patches like this we had an entirely separate instance that we would deploy patches to, do tests on, etc and once everything passed, we would bring the servers down, then flip a switch that made all connections go to the new server. This minimized downtime.

i suspect they don't have this, and they are trying to apply patches and database schema updates directly to the live server, which is pretty LOL. Probably what happens is they take everything down, do a backup of the server, apply patches and schema upgrades, then if there is an error during one of these ugprades they have to restore backup, fix the issue, and try again.

You're always going to have some downtime no matter what, because even in the model we used, you have to wait for all the connections to drain (which doesn't happen as quickly as you might think) so that no data is lost, then you have to migrate all the existing game data over to the new shard. Maybe you created your test server and applied patches and schema updates on Monday, did all tests, etc, then took the game down on Thursday, so all the progress people made from Monday - Thursday has to be migrated over to the new shard.

Anyway, TL;DR - They fucked up, but it doesn't really surprise me considering they are probably a pretty small shop.

The bug the other day with arena shows that they have no regression test suite at all, so they could literally break anything at anytime and have no idea.

 

[spyhunterzero]

there are a solid 80,000 active accounts man. And at least 1,000 whales. They're gonna be ok.

If the whales leave then does that become a problem?

 

[Lyrian]

If the whales leave then does that become a problem?

Not if you decide to start whaling in their place. Otherwise....

 

[Syntsui]

there are a solid 80,000 active accounts man. And at least 1,000 whales. They're gonna be ok.

You say this now. With data prior to this latest event (is this even real data?)

 

[PantherLotus]

If the whales leave then does that become a problem?

well there's a built-in assumption that whales are (literally) invested in the game, so they might have a bit more tolerance for downtime than the average F2P'er.

i just keep going back to this: everyone needs to remember that Gumi loses money when things are down. they're not doing this to piss people off. we can only assume something broke and it would cost them more money to trot it out there than it would be to go down for a fucking DAY. which is kinda scary how broken it must be if you think about it.

 

[cpp_is_king]

well there's a built-in assumption that whales are (literally) invested in the game, so they might have a bit more tolerance for downtime than the average F2P'er.

i just keep going back to this: everyone needs to remember that Gumi loses money when things are down. they're not doing this to piss people off. we can only assume something broke and it would cost them more money to trot it out there than it would be to go down for a fucking DAY. which is kinda scary how broken it must be if you think about it.

I think we all know that. What surprises people (or me, at least) is that they've been in this business long enough that they should have a set of tests and processes in place to prevent things like this from happening, precisely *because* they lose money. And yet it seems like they don't

 

[Zera_Bloodwinter]

I built the server for a AAA online game, and for rolling out major patches like this we had an entirely separate instance that we would deploy patches to, do tests on, etc and once everything passed, we would bring the servers down, then flip a switch that made all connections go to the new server. This minimized downtime.

i suspect they don't have this, and they are trying to apply patches and database schema updates directly to the live server, which is pretty LOL. Probably what happens is they take everything down, do a backup of the server, apply patches and schema upgrades, then if there is an error during one of these ugprades they have to restore backup, fix the issue, and try again.

You're always going to have some downtime no matter what, because even in the model we used, you have to wait for all the connections to drain (which doesn't happen as quickly as you might think) so that no data is lost, then you have to migrate all the existing game data over to the new shard. Maybe you created your test server and applied patches and schema updates on Monday, did all tests, etc, then took the game down on Thursday, so all the progress people made from Monday - Thursday has to be migrated over to the new shard.

Anyway, TL;DR - They fucked up, but it doesn't really surprise me considering they are probably a pretty small shop.

The bug the other day with arena shows that they have no regression test suite at all, so they could literally break anything at anytime and have no idea.

These past few weeks are proof there's no dev/staging server. Something BAD happened today and they are losing their minds trying to fix this shit. Hopefully when the dust settles our data is intact and it's just where we left off before the maint.

 

[PantherLotus]

You say this now. With data prior to this latest event (is this even real data?)

^ that's based entirely on a best guess from looking at the Arena. people that fought one battle and won and never tried again ended up in the 80K range, thus there are 80k-ish actives. And from the difficulty of getting into the top 1000, i'm guessing everyone there and above are paying not-small sums to play.

Perhaps there are more whales, perhaps fewer. The 80K actives number feels pretty solid IMO.

 

[NomarTyme]

Feel bad for the people who has to sleep at that time when server is back up. Pretty much a whole day missed for them.

 

[Falk]

i wouldnt mind SE taking this game over and making a more serious mobile effort for quality control

Im not sure if that would be a good thing or not either way lol

FFRK is done by DeNA. Mobius is done sorta-internally. Mobius global went from one of the most enticing gacha systems ever with a lot of the RNG toned down, to a rather blatant paywall.

 

[cpp_is_king]

These past few weeks are proof there's no dev/staging server. Something BAD happened today and they are losing their minds trying to fix this shit. Hopefully when the dust settles our data is intact and it's just where we left off before the maint.

Honeslty it probably wasn't even anything bad. They have to at least be competent enough to make a backup after taking the server down, so anything that might happen won't really affect peoples' data, as they can just rollback (Plus you can do the entire update in a single database transaction).

What likely happened is some database record somewhere didn't play well with the schema update, and so the transaction got rolled back, then they have to debug this issue while the server is down, and they say "ok it'll take 4 hours to figure this out", so they extend by 4 hours, fix the bug, then try again and now it's a new bug that they didn't even see before because the upgrade didn't get that far in the first place. So they extend it again.

Obviously just speculation though, but I wouldn't worry about data.

 

[Kouriozan]

Don't Mobius Global have or had a guaranted/exclusive $75 summon.
Now I know some people would pay that amount for a guaranted Orlandu x)

 

[PantherLotus]

I think we all know that. What surprises people (or me, at least) is that they've been in this business long enough that they should have a set of tests and processes in place to prevent things like this from happening, precisely *because* they lose money. And yet it seems like they don't

i'll be the first to admit that them not having a parallel environment (or w/e you developer folks call it) is kinda shocking. i was part of a teeny tiny little browser game back in the day (2007?) and it was like, the very first thing our developer had to tell us.

These past few weeks are proof there's no dev/staging server. Something BAD happened today and they are losing their minds trying to fix this shit. Hopefully when the dust settles our data is intact and it's just where we left off before the maint.

uh zera i hadn't thought of this and now i'm scared

 

[Rixa]

Feel bad for the people who has to sleep at that time when server is back up. Pretty much a whole day missed for them.

No worries, Ill be awake in 7h30mins time from this post.

Thus going to sleep now (22:32 here). Have fun and lets hope they get server up in 90mins time. Hopefully Gumi will give everyone daily login so people wont get one missed login day.

 

[Valentus]

It's probably already been discussed, but I thought having opposing element weapons would cancel each other out, but I'm not sure how it works.

I have a death scythe equipped (dark damage) and a gungir and tried attacking a Cecil. He resisted, but I still managed to do quite a bit of damage.

Then I tried replacing my gungir with an Excalibur and I only did a tiny amount of damage. So from what I understand, since Cecil fully resists holy, let's say he resists 30% dark. There's an difference calculated between the two, so 100-30 = he resists 70% of the damage?

The fórmula is

(Elm.res1 + Elm.res2)/2

So if cecil has 100% dark weakness and 50% holy resistance, the fórmula is


(100-50)/2 = 25

So your attack only does 25% more damage

 

[MMBosstones86]

^ that's based entirely on a best guess from looking at the Arena. people that fought one battle and won and never tried again ended up in the 80K range, thus there are 80k-ish actives. And from the difficulty of getting into the top 1000, i'm guessing everyone there and above are paying not-small sums to play.

Perhaps there are more whales, perhaps fewer. The 80K actives number feels pretty solid IMO.

I don't think that's super accurate. I imagine new people and others (myself included) routinely ignore the Arena in favor of the Coliseum.

 

[Iceman829]

^ that's based entirely on a best guess from looking at the Arena. people that fought one battle and won and never tried again ended up in the 80K range, thus there are 80k-ish actives. And from the difficulty of getting into the top 1000, i'm guessing everyone there and above are paying not-small sums to play.

Perhaps there are more whales, perhaps fewer. The 80K actives number feels pretty solid IMO.

I've paid $0. Ranked 600 last month. Currently 340. 0 lapis refreshes used on arena as well. Not everyone is a whale

 

[Celegus]

Don't Mobius Global have or had a guaranted/exclusive $75 summon.
Now I know some people would pay that amount for a guaranted Orlandu x)

Yeah thats the new system they're trying for the legendary jobs (the ones that make you look like tidus, cloud, squall, etc). Seems pricey and I'm fine without them, but that's quite a bargain compared to how much some whales would spend in gacha. And it's not even just the job, you get the job for "free" for buying that much magicite (premium currency).

 

[Valentus]

After all this fiasco i really doubt that gumi can identify apk injectors... Hell i dont think they can even know Who is macroing and whos not lmao

 

[Alkez]

I guess I'm just not as mad as everyone as long as everyone suffers equally. What bothers me is when some benefit more than others.

For me the issue is just that. Not everyone is suffering equally because of time zones. If you live in the states then yeah this isn't that bad. But if you live in Europe this is going into the very late evening, meaning some of us are just not going to get to play at all.

It's only a game and I can begrudgingly miss one day of daily login rewards. What sucks for me is I'm on an arena streak and because of the weekly reset if I don't finish it tonight it will get reset and I'll have to go for 100 wins all over again.

 

[Alkez]

Exactly I work as a System Test Engineer and I'm always happy when companies choose to have a delay to either iron out issues or improve on something haha. It's not on purpose for sure. Quality is key! (Probably why I get annoyed when I see some minor issues in game or the iOS crashes).

Xion would mind getting a job at Gumi please? Would be good to have someone we know and trust (and who plays the game) in the company so you can relay our displeasure and sort these messes out lol.

Right now it seems like they are throwing together a team 20 minutes before the maintenance starts and just throw code at the servers until something compiles.

This made me laugh cause it's basically how the game is played. I just pictured the boss having the unit screen on his/her tablet but the units are the employees, and they have to select a 5 man roster before taking on the latest trial boss: content update 8/12.

 

[KeRaSh]

This made me laugh cause it's basically how the game is played. I just pictured the boss having the unit screen on his/her tablet but the units are the employees, and they have to select a 5 man roster before taking on the latest trial boss: content update 8/12.

Haha! The game outside of the game!

 

[Syntsui]

After all this fiasco i really doubt that gumi can identify apk injectors... Hell i dont think they can even know Who is macroing and whos not lmao

They can. They identified everything that happened in my account when I asked them to give me the missing arena tickets.

 

[Pejo]

So I play the game through the amazon app store, and it's telling me there's an update to download, but when I look at the amazon app, it just shows "open". Is there a trick to updating the client via amazon, or do I just have to redownload the .apk?

 

[PantherLotus]

I don't think that's super accurate. I imagine new people and others (myself included) routinely ignore the Arena in favor of the Coliseum.

I'm saying 80K as a baseline is pretty obvious. Saying that there a large number of users who aren't playing the arena only reinforces the point.

I've paid $0. Ranked 600 last month. Currently 340. 0 lapis refreshes used on arena as well. Not everyone is a whale

Yeah I'd have no idea how to measure how many whales there are. 1000 whales might have been optimistic based on the arena, but I think the point still stands.

 

[PantherLotus]

After all this fiasco i really doubt that gumi can identify apk injectors... Hell i dont think they can even know Who is macroing and whos not lmao

They can. They identified everything that happened in my account when I asked them to give me the missing arena tickets.

This exactly. This is what should give people heart -- they have the tools and they know when people who spend money will leave if they don't fix whatever the problem in question is.

Are long maintenance times one of those problems? I'm guessing not.

 

[Xion86]

Xion would mind getting a job at Gumi please? Would be good to have someone we know and trust (and who plays the game) in the company so you can relay our displeasure and sort these messes out lol.

Thanks but hmmm I don't know how secure a job there would be! I'm quite throrough with my testing though, got a bit of a perfectionist in me, I always try to think of the end user experience too. Really enjoy my job but never worked in a test role for a games company (just e-Security right now).
Let's just hope the servers come up when they do and we have a good experience from the get go. It's 21:17 here right now in the U.K., I just hope I get a chance to play before bed.

 

[PantherLotus]

seriously though you could make a TON of cash!

 

[Kouriozan]

30 mins left, finally.

 

[tuffymon]

I'm impressed Chilly still kept the top spot... and that I was on the list at all... I've been slacking the last few weeks with school work... sorta >.>;

 

[Alkez]

30 mins left, finally.

For now...