After doing some research, I can say cut back on Nexon a bit for this round's server instability. If they need any criticism, it's the lack of communication. Whether this is to protect themselves from hackers or not, I don't know but they should at least give us some more notice rather than a very minor "backend change" every 2-3 days.
Continuing on, recently the servers have been absolute garbage. Speculation as to why went everywhere. "It's Nexon, it's expected" "Their servers are s***" "They don't care about the playerbase", etc...
/u/AKradian had an interesting post.
http://forums.maplestory.nexon.net/discussion/comment/58693#Comment_58693
"The PTS was for testing the content.
The issues we're having are network/connectivity issues, that can't really be tested on a single-machine test server. Even right now, Luna is not suffering. Which means that it's not something inherent to the patch.
Furthermore, the connectivity issues only started Saturday, 3 days after the patch.
My guess is that it's either a hardware issue with one of the NA data center's network components (router, gateway, etc) or a service quality issue with their ISP. Either way, not something that a test server could predict."
So I went and did some further research on my own.
First I tested out the Luna theory. I made a fresh new Merc in Luna and had no major issues with dc/instability outside of latency issues of playing on a Euro server from the US. Changing channels, going into CS and even AH shown no major problems other than taking ~.5-1s longer than gms on a good day. This instantly ruled out patch issues for me.
*note going past here, I am unfortunately going to keep many things very vague as to respect Nexon's current decision on keeping things vague to the community as well. I don't know what the actual reasoning is but if there is some legal reason I certainly do not want to be involved.
From here, I found the server address and i was able to see that the trace route would end at Las Vegas and time out. Going even further, I was able to pull up who the DC host was. This in turn led me to find out that the traffic was passing through SouthEast USA. Which if anyone has been paying attention to the news recently, should know that area has been affected by the hurricane. Looking at outage reports of the company, the timelines of when the major server instability occurs matches up with the highest amounts of reported incidents of downtimes by other users/companies that use this service provider on the day by day basis.
Meaning that, because of the fact that all the network traffic is routing through to this SE US Data Center it's out of Nexon's hands. Whether this traffic can be routed elsewhere I don't know. I would say that, Nexon being a customer to this service provider, they should be having these discussions with them.
I hope that this gives you guys some explanation and possibly some insight into the recent issues. Yes we all know it sucks, I certainly hate coming back to not being able to do bosses/dailies as much as the next person but coming from an IT background I understand.
Nexon - If this is the issue, at least give us some communication about it. Knowing something is better than knowing nothing especially when it's something that is directly out of your hands.
Comments
The fact that we've had 6-7 maintenances with no visible improvement and the fact that Luna has no problems most likely points to outside nexon's wall/patch this time. I think the timing of everything was just really bad.
There's a couple of other things that I've read regarding the service provider but if there's any impact hopefully not for another couple months.
I'd say, watch the hurricane reports and as long as things are calming, we should see improvement.
The point is that Nexon might be powerless as well and thus unable to fix the server instability issues if it's really due to the hurricane.
If they really cared about money they would care about the players more..... The game would have more players if they cared ,thus making more money . Shame they fail to realise this. Nerfing drop rate gear which many people SPENT money on is only going to stop people wanting to spend money. If the game was run better I would consider putting my hard earned money in the game like I do with other mmorpgs. But I haven't and never will because things won't change.
They don't care about their players.. They do care about money, they just don't bother spending it on server upgrades, they waste it on stupid events. Even Arwoo the so-called Community Manager barely even responds on the forums about these issues. (makes me wish Michael aka kthxbainao was back to community manager status as he cared so much about their player base.) Communication is truely something Nexon is lacking on. Especially since they let down a lot of people for not allowing world transfer to Windia.
You and I were both part of that. If you're finding that PTS was a disappointment, some of the blame would go to the people who participated in it.
I think I could say that the population of pay servers right now are fairly similar to PTS and we're still having more issues in live. CS, AH also point to different IPs. If there was an issue with the hardware in their data center, one would assume in one of the many maintenances they would have looked into the integrity of the hardware and replaced it. The fact that it still is crap after that, I would still like to believe it's an outside factor.
My condolences for grazed being a test dunmy again for a SC that most likely will be unable to solve anything.