Open Letter to Haxus from French Empire

[StarOri]

State of the art software developement nowadays uses this everywhere.

No? Can you name a few?

Well I'm working in web development and yes we're always restarting server stuff when they crash. Because the condition that made them crash may not present itself again, so there's no point to wait for a human intervention while not keeping it available for other users, that's all. If it always crashes, it will without harm until someone fixes it, I don't see the problem here.

I have much to say about the topic, but sine it's work time, I only highlight a few point now.

We don't understand, at all, why you're not restarting servers when they're in a frozen state or if they crash. I mean, it's not like one of the first computer science thing you learn is "If it doesn't work, try rebooting".

Actually, you'd be surprised how young this motto it. "Simply rebooting" only helps when you KNOW the program should work fine, but somehow it does not. And you reboot to free the environment from external factors. I.e. isolate the testing case.
In cluster, like SoH, servers are not isolated, and the game itself IS an external factor. Simply rebooting the crashed server would either cause it to crash again, or propagate that same crash to other servers. At the least. At worst, it would cause corruption in the environment (means, destroying the game itself).

I don't know for games for sure because I don't work on that domain, but I don't see at all why it couldn't be applied there too.

See above.

When a freeze or a crash happens, you save the logs and you restart, that's all.

Restart what? It's not just a single governing server, that does everything. It's not Lineage2, where you have 3 server. World, NPC AI and logging. It's a part of whole system. A very SMALL part.

But yeah, since I'm not working on games as I said you may be right there. Maybe what I think is not doable in a game context. Those were examples so this post was not just critics but also presented solutions. They may be wrong, but that's not really the subject there as long as Haxus hasn't answered and acknowledged all of this for starters. There is no point in debatting solutions if the problem isn't even recognized on the first place.
And btw, this post is for Haxus, I would like an anwser from him and not from someone else, which may then convince him without even trying. And then, and only then, we can talk about solutions.

The way I see it, solar systems are isolated between each other, so if a server crashes that means something bad happened in one of its system. With that in mind, restarting it with its previous data just before the crash won't mean it will crash again, because that depends on players doing (otherwise why was it working on the first place?). And I don't see at all the risks of corrupting the entire game . But again that may be a wrong lecture here, it's just a guess on my part, but unless Haxus gave you all the details of how his game architecture is built, you have nothing to say here for now, thanks. ;)

the first thing to do right now may be to create yourself a real testing environement

There IS a testing environment. The problem is that testing massively distributed system is not easy, and it may behave slightly different at a different scale. Ask CCP about it.

Well that's the precise reason why I said he should compare the cost of creating this vs continuing to test without good conditions, that brings him to deploy massive bugs that drives away players and the community as a hole. It's his call, not yours, as I just said previously.

And please, please dammit, put HTTPS on your website... HTTP nowadays is lame

Please don't spread google-induced hysteria. No important information is transferred on the website.

Yeah sure, you obviously don't have to register or login on the website to pay, or in the forums!..
But anyway I mainly wanted to point out the browsers giving warnings everywhere, that's the main problem there.

Here are quick examples:





This, is the main problem here because its scary to people, so that probably drives them away (again), thus the community shrinking.

About that, it seems your decay rules are getting harder and harder with each year passing.

I'd say, the problem is not decay rules per se, but a management overhead to maintain the colonies.

That's entirely possible. However this post is there to signal problems originally, no to discuss solutions right away as I already said. Let's see if Haxus agrees for starters...

Gameplay and implementing functionalities

Here I would agree on one thing: The game now is both more complex to play and less challenging as a game.

That's precisely the point here.