Age of Conan: Morrison on Merging Servers

Age of Conan's director Craig Morrison has penned the December version of the 'state of the game'. The letter deals primarily with the snafus associated with server mergers and the process to get things rolling. Check it out:

With the announced start of the server merge process not quite having gone as planned I wanted to take the time today to speak to you all explain where we are at with the merge process and what the schedule looks like.

Basically, on Wednesday when we came to do the first live merges we encountered an issue with the structure of our data that we hadn't found or experienced during testing. This issue caused there to be a risk, on some servers, under specific circumstances, of items having non-unique identifiers in our database. This in turn might have lead to some cases of player's items not surviving the merge. It didn't happen at all during our testing, and may have been (in the scale of all players and all items in the game) a possibly rare occurrence. However this was not an area where the team and I were willing to take any risks with whatsoever.

This is also exactly why we decided not to announce all the merge schedules in advance and to ensure we could do them in a live environment first before we went ahead with all the merges. While it is never 'nice' to have your contingency plans called into action, this approach has meant we caught a potential issue before it could possibly affect people's actual game experience.

It also showed up a legacy issue with code that allocated those identifiers that hadn't been apparent before. It is very important to me and the team here that we resolve these issues thoroughly and comprehensively and resist the temptation to rush a temporary, manual or 'band aid' fix to meet the goal of completing all the merges prior to the holidays at the possible expense of risk to players progression or items.

This meant we had to make the decision and do this task correctly. That means both resolving the conflicts in the database and fixing the problem with the allocation correctly so that it can't happen again (the 'band aid' solution would for example have meant ongoing character transfers might have been problematic in the future).

So we have taken the decision to do everything that needs to be done to ensure that player's items or characters are not risked, as that's just not a risk I find acceptable. We should, and will, do everything we can to ensure that the process of the merges is done smoothly and with the least risk to your characters.

Ok, so what does that mean exactly in reality I hear you ask? Most importantly this means that the merge process will almost certainly continue into January. We will now have to do some additional 'ground work' as it were to prepare the databases for the merges again. The community team will provide more details on this over the coming days and weeks in terms of schedules and when you can expect downtime so please keep your eyes out for details.

I really appreciate everyone's patience with this process and hope that you all understand that I want to ensure that no corners are cut or unnecessary risks taken with a process as important as this. I am very disappointed that we haven't managed to deliver the merges on the time scales we were originally intending, but it is far more important to me that these things are done with all the care and attention such a process deserves and hope everyone sees that while unfortunate in terms of time required this course of action is better for everyone.

Moving on from the merges, and on a much brighter note, the progress of the next major update is starting to shape up very nicely. Update four should go to the test server relatively soon. We hope to have a version up and running on the public test server next week and in preparation the provisional update notes are now available on the test server forums for everyone to go and take a look at. There is quite a bit there, some you already know about, some you don't.

Update four will most likely be deployed to the live servers in January, but we have to see how the testing goes first before deciding on dates.

It has been very pleasing to see players enjoying the new content, changes and fixes that have been going into the game over the last few updates. The team is working very hard to both address the issues that you guys have brought up since launch, and also to add new content and features. Heading into the holiday season I am very glad to see that progress is being made and that we are hopefully managing to keep on improving your Hyborian experience!

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I guess merging null values gave them a problem ;p

PerfectInsanity:
Why is it, no matter what the news piece is, WarCry always has a screenshot to go with it.

Ha Ha! She made yah look :3

I think is sad some WOW succubi whored out to this game.

Seems like almost everyone is taking lessons from WoW. That includes scantly-clad mobs.

PerfectInsanity:
Kalia, I've got a question:

Why is it, no matter what the news piece is, WarCry always has a screenshot to go with it. I mean, damn, I looked over the article, saw the guy in the bottom right corner, and thought: "Server merges and ELECTRICITY! Now this is a kick-ass article!" But then I read it, and it was kind of boring. What the hell is up with that?

Eye candy does wonders for an otherwise yawner article. :) As a librarian by profession, I'm totally down with picture books. Helluva lot more interesting than text only. :D

A picture says a thousand words... But I usually stab it with a pencil after about two or three and scream. "Take that you devil possessed picture!" Because inanimate objects shouldn't speak.