I don't know how other league admins, but I would appreciate if I knew that I should have not planned a league race for yesterday evening. I was on a meeting with some our business partners, I told everybody in advance that I will have to leave some time before the qualifying starts. Then almost ran 10minutes across the city to get to the nearest wifi spot. I got onto the server just in time for the qual, when people warned me that not everything is ok, that people get kicked, because the master server is not working as it should... Not the perfect environment for a 3hours endurance race...
This is not a rant that I had to reschedule the race, the rant is about the time lost by all the about 40 people who reserved their precious time for racing only to find themselves with a "no-plan" evening...

Scawen, please would it be possible to let us know at least a day in advance next time before something like this will happen?

Let you know what? that the master server would fold under the pressure of everyone downloading X30?, how is he supposed to know that?.

It's something that doesnt happen very offen at all, it's just bad luck that it happened when your league race was about to run.

Last nights problem was an unforeseen technical one and did not have anything to do with the patch. The master should never have been unavailable at any time and it can cope just fine with new releases and many users.

As danowat said, it was plain bad luck unfortunately.

well I posted before I read the thread by Victor, so while I understand them and all is ok, I still think that the devs could tell us a day in advance that something like this will happen... It will be the same when the official patch comes out. League races are planned and now as an organiser you are in a not good position when deciding "to race or not to race" because maybe there will be a new patch...

The days on which patches are released are in general not good for league racing... People get confused, when you say we drive the latest patch, some people may have problems upgrading/unlocking, not enough fast connection to download the patch in time, etc. and if you drive the older one, there are people who 2 hours ago installed the new patch out of curiosity and now don't have a way back...

I really don't see why we could not know that "sometime afternoon/evening there will be a new patch"... This is enough for everyone to adapt to it... It does not ruin the surprise (on the contrary, there will be 2 surprises, one with the news that sometime today the patch will come out and the second when it actually comes out...

Quote from Victor :

Last nights problem was an unforeseen technical one and did not have anything to do with the patch. The master should never have been unavailable at any time and it can cope just fine with new releases and many users.

As danowat said, it was plain bad luck unfortunately.

How does telling us that there will be a patch "in the next few days" help with this...?

It's a test patch.....consider it fair warning that the real patch is coming soon.

Quote from Jakg :

How does telling us that there will be a patch "in the next few days" help with this...?

This is something different then I ment... Some technical problems can't be foreseen and I totally understand that you can't do anything about it...

It's just a strange coincidence, the master server just started to break down just BEFORE the patch was released, but stuttered on and off intermittently, gradually getting worse. After trying several things we decided to restart the server, and it never restarted again, we had to phone 24 hour technical support to physically look at the computer. It was offline for over an hour. As Victor said, this had nothing to do with the patch.

And no, sorry, we will not be able to announce test patches some time in advance. The nature of test patches is we don't have them ready 24 hours in advance then just sit around waiting to release them at some planned future time. If I announced there would be a patch "tomorrow" it would be extremely disappointing for the community because each day we'd miss it. To help you know what I mean, actually this was going to be out on Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday. Finally we arrived at Monday with not enough serious bugs found by the testers, to delay the public version any more. So we announced it as soon as it was definite. We gave the earliest and most accurate warning that we could.

By the way, master server upgrades normally take less than one minute. The new master server is ready, just close the old one, move a file and restart. Of course we won't make announcements for a one minute downtime.

Thank you for the answer Scawen. Sorry to hear that you will not be able to make the life of a league organiser easier, but that's life...

I do not mean that you should hold the patch in, but what would be enough is that when you get to some point and know that the patch will come in some time (be it one hour or half a day) just let us know... But if no, ok, I will have to deal with it...

The league admin could make sure that, in the lead up to new patches, a contingency plan is made just in case. Perhaps asking all players to NOT upgrade their patch, so that everyone knows WHICH patch to use.

As for the master server problems with your league, that's just tough. It's the internet, and these things happen. It's not like it cost you anything.

Quote from Chaos :

Thank you for the answer Scawen. Sorry to hear that you will not be able to make the life of a league organiser easier, but that's life...

I do not mean that you should hold the patch in, but what would be enough is that when you get to some point and know that the patch will come in some time (be it one hour or half a day) just let us know... But if no, ok, I will have to deal with it...

You did sort of get a couple of hours notice, in that the Dedi Server was released before the client software.

The master server issues were unrelated to the patch release though, so I doubt there's much you could have done even knowing that the patch was imminent.

Quote from Chaos :

Thank you for the answer Scawen. Sorry to hear that you will not be able to make the life of a league organiser easier, but that's life...

I do not mean that you should hold the patch in, but what would be enough is that when you get to some point and know that the patch will come in some time (be it one hour or half a day) just let us know... But if no, ok, I will have to deal with it...

Maybe you should be more grateful for what you already have Oh and I know you understand Slovak just as well as I understand Czech, but I chose English for the sake of others.

Quote from breadfan :

Maybe you should be more grateful for what you already have Oh and I know you understand Slovak just as well as I understand Czech, but I chose English for the sake of others.

This is not about me, this is about the racers in the league...

Dont really see the issue.. DBP had an event planned for last night, scheduled to start at 8PM uk time, and at that time, we were just learning of the master server issues. some 24 minutes later, we all got online, we all raced as planned.

Event admins and league administrators should have common sense about them to be able to make other arrangements. At any rate, what happened wasn't your fault, it wasn't anyone's fault. Technology brakes down, it happens.

Im quite sure your races in your league will get over it. After all, the new car alone will keep them busy for quite a while.