Tranquility (TQ), the live server EVE Online lives on, was down for an extended amount of time today. Long ago these extended downtimes were not unusual as expansions took several hours to install, but over the years the technology and the releases cycles made new expansions non-events. Nightly downtime itself was shrunk from one hour to 20 minutes. That is why today’s interruption is unusual. The last time EVE was offline this long was 2007, for the Tranquility expansion (barring DDOS attacks on the server that once took TQ down for 36 hours).
The nature of the problem was not publically released but look for a dev blog depicting the problem and the solution in the near future. CCP has always been forthright about technology issues, sharing information with the players since most of them are associated with hi-tech sectors in the real world.
Small post-expansion patches are routine, but when Tranquility would not start up properly several teams took notice. Initially, there was confusion over what would cause the nodes to fail repeatedly. After some efforts they opted to roll back to yesterday’s build, but the backup failed to start up as well. Both patches failed. Finally, CCP managed to use today’s patch with the server being stable. After some testing they opened the doors to the public, and TQ accepted connections.
CCP Nullarbor (Senior Programmer) surrounded by other Devs
Player speculation points to yesterday’s build being the first day of the new sovereignty system, and that today’s and yesterday’s builds could have both been faulty from the beginning. This would point coding for the the new sov mechanics as the problem. Another possibility could be hardware problems. CCP Falcon only said, “Sometimes Tranquility is just tricky.”
CCP wisely placed the server hardware in London, England instead of Iceland, where CCP is located. Island deliveries for broken equipment would be a great deal slower there.
CCP Falcon mentioned he would look into a convenience gift paid to players in the form of free skillpoints. This has been done in the past to sooth players, as well as on some anniversaries and holidays.
Whatever the reason, Tranquility is back and accepting connections, but careful not to jump in and start freighting your supplies all over to make up for lost time. CODE and others use these times to heavily hunt the trade routes. They’ve been waiting too.
Below is infotmation posted previously:
— CCP Falcon @ EVE-O Forums —
Hey guys,
As you’re all aware, Tranquility is still offline after today’s scheduled daily downtime.
This is due to an issue with a code deployment today while patching for a few fixes in EVE Online. The issue caused the cluster to fail to start up correctly, and as such, Tranquility is currently unavailable for play for both EVE and DUST.
Our operations and development team are working on this issue as we speak, and we’re hoping to have Tranquility back online for you guys as soon as possible.
Right now, we don’t have an ETA for when the cluster will be back online and accepting connections, but we’ll keep you updated in this thread.
Cheers,
– F
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