Earlier this morning we had a DB die, unlike any death we have seen before, in that it died in functionality but to our auto-alert system it appeared to be alive and healthy. The good news is that in future deaths like this we will be able to alert off of them properly now, but the bad news is that we had a down time that is longer than what should have been if we were properly notified. VC is back up now. Please let us know if you have any issues and we apologize for any inconvenience.
OK, so the DB died...that shouldn't have prevented you guys from giving an update on the status to your users (customers?) No Tweets, no messages on the forum, no updates on the Viking Clan Facebook page - or even responses to the many comments asking/complaining about Viking Clan being down. Very poor, very poor indeed
No alerts, as in, we were not notified so no one received a wake up call. Usually if a server dies at 3am we are notified through alerts to our cells, in this case we were not so it was caught later than it should have been. Once we got it back up live we communicated the issue.
Alerts or not, it was still about 5 hours from the first posts on the forum/VC Facebook page until you announced the problem had been fixed
Petera, no alerts meant that we were not made aware of it until a developer was in the office which was about 7:45am PT, the DB died at 3am PT. We are taking measures to make sure that if this rare DB failure happens again that we will be properly notified at 3am so we can address in the typical prompt fashion that players have come to expect from KANO/APPS. We are also taking preventative measures to make sure this failure does not happen again. Again, apologize for the inconvenience, when we say the game was down our first reaction was to fix it as soon as possible and provide an update after the fix which we did in this case.
@ Kendall You mean you guys don't live at your job? LOL I've been playing a long time and the servers have been up more than most any other game I have ever been on and this was such a rare case I was a bit concerned when I woke up and saw : Jerome Griffin has earned 0 of 259 achievements in Viking Clan. Goal: Movin' On Up Level 1 Completed - Click to Play Viking Clan now! Scared me a bit. That being said , thanks for getting this back up and after the explanation it's understandable. The thing that worries me though is do you have some sort of backup system for out character info and if so what if it crashes? That message about moving on up and completing level 1 has shaken me a bit lol. LMFAO now this popped up. Jerome Griffin is ranked #1 in Viking Clan. WTH? I liked that one better than that first one though.
The achievements is a new feature facebook provides to add achievements and scores to their system. The developer that worked on that should be adding a post to the forum shortly, so it was just a delay in syncing our data to Facebook. Yes, in the +3 years that VC has been running this was our longest outage, and shouldn't have been it was a fringe case that just was not alerted on. We are working to make sure that doesn't happen again. In terms of back-ups, we have a very strict back-up policy, game data is safe!
