Star Wars Galaxies Technical Difficulties

Thanks to several readers for pointing to a SWGalaxies.net post summarizing the multiple technical difficulties on both registration and game servers for the PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, which launched within the last few hours. The registration servers were down or extremely slow through the afternoon of the 26th, and official word was "..a combination of hardware failures and some other unforeseen technical problems resulted in a severe load on the registration servers." These issues were resolved later on the 26th, and many were able to register their characters, but unfortunately all of the game servers are currently (11.30PM PST) down, as Sony "..found a serious problem with our database that is being worked on as we speak." We'd recommend watching the official site for more information as it happens..

Comments

To be expected

[n_jed]

Nothing runs as expected. Give it a couple of weeks to settle down, and then get back to us.

Re:To be expected

[Kris_J]

Absolutely. We're in the middle of enrolment at the moment and our bandwidth was utterly consumed on the first day. Turned out we had a set of images in the enrolment system that totalled about 150k when they should have totalled 10k. We used to have no images at all in the system, but it lacked a clear visual message telling students that they hadn't actually completed the process. One quick optimise and bandwidth consumption returned to something more normal.

Doesn't surpise me as a PlanetSide user

[@madeus]

SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) are useless at server management and treat users with contempt.

As far as techincal support go:

Posts with complaints and bugs on the forums are frequently deleted by Technical Support and they constantly palm of users with lame excuses.

Most of the problems user have are user-side, but the could easily suggest fixes for them, or post known issues, but they don't bother.

As far as the developers go:

They don't bother to updated version numbers or the 'News' / 'Info' panels within the game after making significant changes, they just patch away. Recently they posted a patch and said 'we weren't able to get a test server up and running, so we just posted it live' in the announce. Of course the corresponding patch caused more issues than it fixed, and they had to release another patch shortly afterwards.

Due to problems with the severs they now reboot them once a day. It's like it's running on NT. I can't see why their line managers let them get away with that (unless they are complacent or incompetant).

SWG, like PlanetSide, appears not ready to ship, and I'm sure it won't be up to scratch for a few months.

This could be down to commercial pressure from Sony, if so then the developers lives are problably hell and they will end up quitting at some point.

If that's the case then SOE mangement need to lighten up quickly before they loose staff and customers.

If it's down to poorly disiplined staff with no focus on customer care and/or bad management (imposing artificial deadlines, not ensuring QOS) then they need to start replacing staff. Middle managment should be the ones to be replace, as it's prmarily a process and attuide issue. If there are issues they need to flag them, if they arn't doing that, then they are not doing their job.

I really like PlanetSide, it's not a very deep game as the RPG elements are very thin on the ground (it's much more like a huge Counter Strike/Unreal Tournament/CTF game than an Everquest with guns in space), but it's exellent fun and I play it for around 4 hours a day (closer to 8 at weekends).

I wish they had more displine in managing the service. A lot of users don't bother subscribing after their first month because of all the hassles they've seen.

Re:Load Testing

[SoVeryWrong]

Nobody does load testing on the registration servers before launch. At least no Beta I've ever been in. Once you got past Registration the game ran fine.