Live to be down on Monday for maintenance

[Zeus]

Good thing we don't pay for the service....oh wait....

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6198112.ht ... op;title;5

[Lox]

Well, I'm not really sure how else they could do a major maintenance. They probably based the day off of statistics that show Mondays as the day the least people are on Live.

[Tessian]

Everything needs maintenance downtime every now and then... even pay services! I do kind of have to question the duration though-- 24 hours? SERIOUSLY? What in the world takes that long to do? They going to be running FDISK and DEFRAG of every server in the farm or something? Re-index every database too? Just sounds a bit much, that's all.

[SineSwiper]

You would think that they wouldn't have a single point of failure for anything, so they can do their maint without impacting customers.

[Zeus]

You would think that they wouldn't have a single point of failure for anything, so they can do their maint without impacting customers.

I think they're doing a fundamental, base code update to be able to handle the major Fall update coming. That Fall update is gonna completely change the GUI, add in avatars, revamp the Marketplace, etc., so I don't think it's something they can do in the background.

I see the reason for it but if I were paying for Live to play my games online, I'd expect that they compensate me for that day by extending my contract for a day. I pay to play the games online whenever I want, 24/7. If you're gonna charge me for something I should be getting free then compensate me when it's not available at my leisure

[SineSwiper]

I bet you call the cable company for credit every time you get an outage. And I bet you're disappointed when you realize that the credit is only for a $1.25.

Let's do the math: for a year of service, it's on the order of $55. So, that would be 15 cents. Do you really believe that people give a shit about 15 cents?

[Zeus]

Actually, I did and was perfectly happy that it's only $1.25. It's a principle thing with a thieving, monopolistic company like Rogers. If they're gonna suck every penny out of me that they can, I'll return the favour. Now that I've switched to a smaller provider (Primus; they buy lines from Bell but don't have the same bullshit policies, just a horrible CSR department) I won't do it.

It would be the same for the monopolistic Microshaft as well. It's not the money it's the principle of the matter. I couldn't care less about the money and I'm not a monetarily-oriented person. You guys really have a hard time understanding that, don't you?

[SineSwiper]

Sometimes the logistics of the principle is not worth it for a company.

[Zeus]

Sometimes the logistics of the principle is not worth it for a company.

Everything for a company is a cost-benefit analysis. What I'm saying as a consumer is "I don't care. You're gonna nickle and dime me to increase your revenues and leave me without choice? I'm gonna do everything in my power to take every penny back that I can".

Companies expect their consumers to just do a simply cost-benefit analysis like they do and say "it's not worth the effort for so little in return". That's a stupid and short-sighted approach for the consumer to take. It only looks at the short term and not the long term. It's what's led us to have a retail cartel in the gasoline industry (in Canada it's WAY worse than the US) and collusion in the insurance industry.

When there's a lack of competition you have to do the little things to protest or show your displeasure. It's the only way to attempt to prevent it in the future. Even when it's something like this update which they actually need to do it's the protest against the fact that they're charging for a service you get free on every other console or PC that's important.

Sacrifice is often the product of doing things on principle. It's not about what you get in return it's about making a point and that will cost you something. Usually it's just time, occasionally it's monetary as well. Considering how much of that we waste, I say it's a pretty small sacrifice to waste your time to make a point

[Tessian]

Normally shit like this is written into your agreement with the service provider (be it Microsoft, Comcast, etc). They tell you up front that service will not be available 100% of the time and that you accept planned maintenance outages. Valve takes down all the LOTRO servers for 4-8 hours 1-2 times a month, does anyone bitch and cry for their money back? No, because they agreed to let them do that in the service agreement.

If you weren't too cheap to subscribe to XBL I'd tell you to go demand your 13 cents back; you stick it to the man by wasting an hour of your time to get that $0.13!

[Zeus]

Again, it has nothing to do with the money. The only reason you put the effort forth to get the money is because it's the only way a corporation will pay attention, if you take money from it. It's the only way to get your point across otherwise you (you is plural) get ignored.

And you're right, if one person does it, it don't mean much. But if the majority did, it would mean something.

[Tessian]

I don't get what the fuck you want them to pay attention to? Do you want them to instead charge more so they can waste that money on a totally redundant infrastructure so they don't have to take the service down 1 day of the year? Do you want them to go through and waste almost as much money putting together all the logistics and resources required to reimburse everyone for that ONE day? Or can you just not imagine that every service, even ones you pay for, can go down for maintenance every now and then?

If you want to bitch and moan about shitty service like your cable constantly going out that's one thing, but planned maintenance outages that have been communicated ahead of time? Why the fuck is that an issue?

[Kupek]

Good blog post on uptimes and SLAs: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html

[Don]

24 hours is sort of long for downtime, but I've seen that when you're patching really big stuff, something on the order of say a completely new expansion in a MMORPG for example.

[SineSwiper]

I don't get what the fuck you want them to pay attention to? Do you want them to instead charge more so they can waste that money on a totally redundant infrastructure so they don't have to take the service down 1 day of the year?

Actually, I fully expect an extremely popular service like XBL to be TOTALLY REDUNDANT and not have a single point of failure anywhere. After all, if the SPoF went out, they would have a massive outage to deal with.

[Tessian]

I don't get what the fuck you want them to pay attention to? Do you want them to instead charge more so they can waste that money on a totally redundant infrastructure so they don't have to take the service down 1 day of the year?

Actually, I fully expect an extremely popular service like XBL to be TOTALLY REDUNDANT and not have a single point of failure anywhere. After all, if the SPoF went out, they would have a massive outage to deal with.

Who said this is because there's a SPOF? It's being taken down for a massive upgrade of the system... that has nothing to do with a single point of failure. Do you think they'd take it down if they could avoid it with more redundancy?? They stand to lose a good amount of revenue for being down (Marketplace purchases, new XBL subscriptions, etc) because of it.

Not you nor I have ANY idea how the XBL infrastructure is built so you really can't do anything except wildly guess as to the reasons, but I seriously doubt this outage has ANYTHING to do with redundancy. You don't keep a service like XBL running with the uptime this has had (congestion problems end of last year don't count) without having a very intricate system of HA / redundant devices.

[SineSwiper]

Any time you take down a network with customer impacting results, it's because you have a SPoF. I don't need to know the network to understand that. If it's a code change, then stage the code change into groups. That's what the backup links/servers/routers/etc. are for.

[Tessian]

You're either wrong (which as seen around here is quite likely) or this SPoF is too expensive/complex for even Microsoft to afford to make redundant. You act as if this is something they just got lazy with and decided that it wasn't worth bothering to have a backup database server or something. Do you REALLY think that they would do this if they had a choice not to?

You lose a weekday of online gaming, they'll lose a lot more than that.

[Kupek]

There doesn't have to be a single point of failure. It doesn't even have to be because of the network topology at all. It's possible that the system update they're rolling out breaks compatability. If that's the case, then you can't roll out the update piecemeal; you have to update everything at once.

[Zeus]

I don't get what the fuck you want them to pay attention to? Do you want them to instead charge more so they can waste that money on a totally redundant infrastructure so they don't have to take the service down 1 day of the year? Do you want them to go through and waste almost as much money putting together all the logistics and resources required to reimburse everyone for that ONE day? Or can you just not imagine that every service, even ones you pay for, can go down for maintenance every now and then?

If you want to bitch and moan about shitty service like your cable constantly going out that's one thing, but planned maintenance outages that have been communicated ahead of time? Why the fuck is that an issue?

Because they shouldn't be charging for Live in the first place. You make them pay any chance they get for charging you to pay half of the games you pay full price for. That's what you're fighting against not some maintenance reimbursement. I've actually stated that it's reasonable for it to be down for the day considering what they're trying to do. I'd actually be happy about it if they weren't charging for Live.

It all comes back to the same principle thing. They're forcing you to pay for something you get free everywhere else then you make them suffer every chance you get for their greed. If you don't do that they never stop. It's small things like this that nip it in the bud, you can't cry after the fact like we in Canada are with respect to the retail gas cartel in our country.

[Kupek]

[Zeus]

For sure but Tess is the biggest critic of my stance on this paying for Live thing. I wanted to show him how pervasive it is in my arguments.

[Tessian]

The only thing you're showing is how often you love to beat that dead horse. "Force for you to pay for something you get free everywhere else" WHERE is everywhere else? Wii and PS3? Their online services are NOTHING in comparison to XBL. That's just like saying that Comcast/Rogers "Forces you to pay for television when you can get it for free elsewhere over the air". So this has NOTHING to do with the maintenance down time and EVERYTHING to do with you just using it as another excuse to bitch and moan again and again. That's just so... sad.

I hope your obsession with these ridiculous "principles" of yours (you call them principles, I call them your "things I love to bitch about") keeps you up at night and is causing you to lose your hair because you're the only one who cares.

[Zeus]

The only thing you're showing is how often you love to beat that dead horse. "Force for you to pay for something you get free everywhere else" WHERE is everywhere else? Wii and PS3? Their online services are NOTHING in comparison to XBL. That's just like saying that Comcast/Rogers "Forces you to pay for television when you can get it for free elsewhere over the air". So this has NOTHING to do with the maintenance down time and EVERYTHING to do with you just using it as another excuse to bitch and moan again and again. That's just so... sad.

I hope your obsession with these ridiculous "principles" of yours (you call them principles, I call them your "things I love to bitch about") keeps you up at night and is causing you to lose your hair because you're the only one who cares.

Wii, PS3, PSP, DS, and PC. Essentially every possible competing device or platform (look at how horribly Games for Windows failed). And we're only talking about the playing online portion not the Marketplace since it's the only thing you have to pay for. That's basically the same for the games that are ports.

Sorry, full head of hair (a little thinning 'cause of genetics) and only a little grey on my chin. If you think any of this every carries forward even to the next thread you're sorely mistaken

[Tessian]

PSP, DS, PC don't count at all as none of them have a centralized multiplayer platform for its games. Wii barely counts for all its shortcomings in its system, and PS3's online system is little more than a poor copy of XBL until their illustrious Home arrives, if it ever does. So in the end yes definitely, XBL is the best quality multiplayer service out there by a wide margin. If you don't want to pay the $3/month then you're free not to and you can go somewhere else, it's just getting real tiring hearing you bitch about the same shit for the same stupid ass reasons no one else cares about.

Live for Windows was poorly executed (only TWO games!) to a demographic notoriously strongly reluctant to such changes. Live for Windows was a good idea that just needed to be launched MUCH nicer, with more games, and more benefits and even then yes- lower cost.

[SineSwiper]

[bovine]

Live is all sorts of messed up. It's officially down now.