Deduction brings reason and with both most likely possible facts.
Over time the 15 of us all reported specific things that we noticed.
Official Server Clues:
Clue 1: Some servers in the game are older than others, don’t forget this and also that some are used far more due to ping and localized popularity based of location and population density. We all crash on the official servers, no servers list whats so ever. 4-6 hours later, servers list again attesting to some sort of master switch that either funcom has or gportal. I am guessing funcom since it also effects private hosted servers.
Clue 2: Some of us Crash on official servers and it comes up in the list when we refresh however we are never able to log on despite it coming up in the list and showing active gamers online even when those same gamers, 15 of them are on discord claiming they cant get in. This activity of refreshing and attempting to log back in continues for 4-6 hours. During this scenario other servers are functioning and we were able to create a character and log in without an issue.
Clue 3: Numerous times on official servers I would place a camp fire/bedroll down only to find days later it has vanished attesting to the fact that either funcom or gportal is till this day using the same SQL script that Pit recommended to use earlier found and used by a private host admin.
Hosted Server Clues:
Clue 1: I notice how long the server takes to come online in the refreshing of the games servers list, from its inception until today’s 35MB file size spanning 5 weeks now and the load times has been increasing exponentially.
Clue 2: Our server service goes down during the day most likely due to memory leaks and I watch it go down and come back up all on its own, kicking out all gamers and then instantly coming back on in the list after a short while, also dictated by the length and size of the game.db file. Basically a systems crash.
Deduction:
It is clear that the game.db file is the main cause of the issue. I agree that poor administration of gportal being able to react to server service malfunctions in a timely manner is murky at best but I cant blame a hosting company for the development of a game they did not create in the first place. Both are at fault here. The mystery surrounding the master flip switch where all server become offline, including those that are privately hosted is a mystery that plagues my thoughts till this day. During this mysterious event, no tweets from anyone, no patch notes, no server or client updates are provided. Servers all become available in the list shortly after around 5 to sometimes 30 min later and this happened often enough as it is. Why my privately hosted game has anything to do with this master switch or master death switch is also beyond my comprehension. We should solely rely on this only in the case of a server update. Clients should have to download patches separately but he server should remain up if the server doesn’t need any updates.
We can talk about hard drives and hosting companies all day long, same as I can talk about a certain french car manufacturer but at the end of the day, if the car itself is broken, what is there to talk about honestly. My private hosting company is literally one of the best if not the best in the business, using only top shelf servers, providing an extremely low ping, redundancies for all measures, including 5 separate IP nodes and power, and bar non the strongest SLA agreement in the business. These guys are very professional and their CS is also on point responding quickly. If they behaved how gportal should, perhaps some of these issues would be resolved but in the end its the actual game itself. The crashing, the inconstant game play, the plaguing updates that fix 1 thing and break 10 other things every single time. Our guessing games here is a testament on how alone we actually are also the main fact that we chose to pay for and host our own servers because we simply couldn’t take it anymore thinking that would be a solution but the solution is far from this. The solution is that funcom needs to address these very major core issues and instead their tweeting about fan art daily for the past 5 days, talking about taking vacations and submitting untested patches breaking numerous things and fixing only a few.
No specific order here game.db issues and complaints:
game.db stability is frankly sh** and cant survive beyond 24 hours without being reset, all the while internally causing numerous issues while it runs forcing intervention of a script to vacuum and whatever the f*** those other commands are.
Thralls continue to fall through the world as your dragging them back to your wheel.
I place a thall because I want it where I want it exactly for a reason and a friend during non pvp hours comes over and they all react and move around like dumba**es blocking doorways and of course never returning to the exact location i sent them to. Have too many thralls? After combat ends of a purge given their amount, some of them cant get back to their original placement because another thrall is now standing there. SO instead of picking a location to stand they pace back and forth forever.
Some bows/arrow combinations on archer thralls end up looking like their shooting but no arrows actually shoot. the combinations vary.
The in game broadcast feature is like a child wrote it. It literal puts a popup smack in the middle of the screen forcing the gamer to click to dismiss it, most of the time having to take damage and or die because they were in combat during this. Instead of simply making this message appear in global chat in a specific color and boldness and forcing the chat to pop up if it has been minimized would have been a far simpler.
Rock Ore is now difficult to pick, swinging at rocks directly on top of them and moving around them missing swings numerous times.
Some flowers require a sickle, while others a pick is just the dumbest thing I have seen so far.
Server restarts and or crashes stop the progress of all furnaces, thrall wheel and other stations.
Star metal drops are rare as they are and now they vanish even quicker than before. Why?
Its now easier to make Black Ice structure then reinforced stone? Seriously?
The volcano is lag city enough so to take down the game.db service all together since last week including some dungeons. most times…
Upon death there is always a lag spike that you may or may not notice where everything freezes and then comes back and your dead with a countdown to a bed roll.
After a service restart rolling over your bed it doesn’t say that its your spawn location although it still does work if you die.
Chests throughout the world are plagued, usually broken and your unable to see the loot entirely. The only solution we found was to destroy it and wait for it to respawn only to break again the next time. The ghost bear treasure also hasn’t worked for over a month now.
Dregs boss leaps out and vanishes like magic while your friend can see him and are able to attack, 3 leaps later your able to see and attack him but your friends cant all in the same fight.
Building has its own annoyances where certain pieces wont snap unless dropped and given to a friend who can place them. Numerous times your forced to destroy a foundation to only then be able to replace it and then to proceed upward with another.
A completely closed structure built over an object like a rock or world object, even though sealed still brings rain indoors despite all walls having no windows.
Numerous objects in the game thankfully have the ability to be taken back to your inventory while others cant. This stupidity is quite annoying. Something as difficult to build as a map room can be returned to your inventory but something as a furnace cant.
If you build a structure and surround it with a wall sealed, purges spawn inside your base, talk about moronic.
Purge levels are announced.
If your non clan friends join to assist you in the purge they should also hear the horns, and see the broadcasts the second they attack anything spawned from the purge and get the XP for completing it as well as the journey. The purge is a fantastic idea to bring the server and its gamers together as a community.
Fingers hurting
I can honestly go on and on for another hour sitting here but my point is clear. We are not the issue and most likely neither is our equipment. The issue is the new standard these days calling a game released when it is clearly still in Beta. The simple fact that all these things are still broken and yet they work on DLC releases for new content is literally the dumbest thing I can think of. Despite the need for funding, I can understand that part but then direct that funding to hire additional professionals to fix the looming issues but instead, we are getting pretty new outfits. Without a strong foundation of a game why continue to develop new? They need to fix the game as it is now, create a sustainable community that doesn’t have these plaguing issues and then develop upon that.
