The Updates DUN DUN DUN!

I'm just curious because I play other mmorph games, (Guild Wars, WoW, most mmorph games, fps, strategy) and during their updates they have minor fixes to where all players recieve notifications to exit the game and relog again (no down grid status timeframe) prompting a new download. The bugs are fixed while the game is still going on they get a notification to just relog after each one is finished. Just a little inconvenience. Then the game commences as usual. Players who weren't in the game at the time just get the downloader update window and the game continues flawlessly. Don't get me wrong, they have their bugs like trade exchange exploits capable of shutting down the whole game economy, but they don't shut down their grids. I could understand if those PVP mmorph games had to shut down their grids, because they have PVP tournaments game televised, trips to Germany, Taiwan, 100,000 dollar giveaways etc. So one false battle could be detrimental during the competitions.
However, I know Secondlife is different. There is no game objective other then creativity and virtual capitalism. Which is EVEN more reason to not shut down the grid. There are real merchants using real money to start up their virtual businesses. If Secondlife wants to be taken seriously, this isn't just a game box you buy at Best Buy that brags about virtual avatar marketing. If the RL stock market was down as much as it was this week in secondlife, our world would be in a permanant depression. I'm focusing more on the merchants that spent hundreds of dollars, including sim land maintenance fees, and painstaking hours of building and creation of their products. Yes the residents deserve a better working world as a whole but not at the expense of hours consumed in the SL global economy. Obviously, SL is cute and entertaining at first for people destined to sit on poseballs in an advanced virtual chatroom, but it's the businesses that keep the residents. Keep shutting down that grid, it's real money being lost.

I agree with the sentiment and know exactly what you say from other places. It does baffle me that they have to close down the grid to apply a patch - something that should take 2 minutes at most, not 5 hours (without all the cock-ups that will definately extend it to a hell of a lot more)/

Sometimes SL does rolling shutdowns exactly as you describe. maybe it depends on the size of the patch / upgrade?

everytime wow was updated in europe it was offline and required a download. not like you describe at all.

Have you noticed how clean most streets are, parks, sims, air, and more... I am sure the Lindens take care of al that when SL are down...

/Tina

Well, I can speak for the several MMOs I have played and, outside of Guild Wars, they ALL have downtime when doing significant upgrades/fixes. In fact, it seems that in-line updates are quite unique to games like Guild Wars, which relies very heavily on instancing.

With instancing, you can update the instance process images at any time, since they are loaded repeatedly when instances are changed. Exploitable instances can be shut down if need be, and the players can just re-start the instance under the new code.

Client changes in GW do not necessitate downtime, though if you stay logged in after enough updates are posted, you will eventually not be able to see other folks or enter instances until you do rlog and download the upgrade.

All in all, it is the type of game GW is that allows them to have such a low level of invasiveness in their update system. Persistent, non-instanced worlds don't have that luxury, because they only usually have one main instance, it is big, and it takes a while to restart. It's the nature of the beast.

Thanks for clearing that up, I see what you're saying now. Too bad there isn't a way around that.

Yeah but it didn't take 5 hours.

Im sorry, but in wow, that is not the case.. They have scheduled updates every tuesday :/ And you can't even post on the forums.. When they are doing emergency maintenance they shut that particular server down.

Actually it would, at least on the US side..