Sounds plausible.
Restoring a level 120 character and then scaling it down to 50 sounds easier than restoring a 120 character onto a game version, where the max level is 50/60 and then scaling it down. Also there might be more problems in the background we don't even see yet. Every major patch changes a ton of things and having a corrupted database to fix would be impossible if this database does not match the database the games uses anymore.
It's certainly laudible to first fix the game and then progress it. Absolute worst case would be for someone to permanently lose their character.
Also, it's interesting that the server merges rolled back characters to MoP. I always had the sneaking suspicion that between MoP and WoD some things got lost. I miss some Heirlooms that I was certain I had lying around on some character. Also some achievements seemed bugged transitioning into WoD. Maybe something major happened between MoP and WoD. I hope that this will be the topic on some dev talks in the future, but those are probably company secrets...
Over 10 years ago I was part of a small team that supported a database that had to cope with hundreds of writes per second. We made transactional backups as fast as the storage was able and a copy of them to 2 other sites every ~5 seconds, plus a full backup every day. In case of a catastrophic failure we could switch over to one of the back ups and at worse lose 5 seconds worth of data. Even if all backup locations would fail we would still be able to setup a new DB and lose a day at worse (would mean a big loss in value, that would be a huge impact on finances and the future of the company)
I don't see how Blizzard would not be able to do a full restore and lose more then a day worth of progress to be honest. Hell, rolling back a week and give compensation should be possible in that scenario so there must be something else wrong, possible they found out the backups are thrash but then you really never checked your backups..
With todays techniques restoring a full db is pretty much unneeded as well, as long as you still have a working one. Corrupting a database is not something that happens easily and unrecoverably.
Last edited by Amorac; 2020-09-29 at 07:34 PM.
~Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.~
~Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.~
Well, obviously the transfer are frozen. The server is on fire. They would not use this as an excuse to halt a worldwide million dollars release of a game, though. They could very well just hasten the server fixes, if that's what's happening. Not try once a week with a deadline.
That is not the point, this is the only thing holding the pre-patch date announcement back, and they would indeed pause the patch for something like this as it would not be the first time. One server is roughly 8k players that are very likely unhappy and people get noisy quick on social media.
It somehow feels like they restored an old backup or something like that, if true that's a real weird error to make, but that would indicate they should have lots of backups.
So, perhaps they found out that most recents backups are unusable and are trying to somehow get an older backup and use DB log files to get to the most recent point possible. Depends on how they handle the backups and keep the transaction logs, I can see how going from an older backup and using tlogs is going to take a while. Not sure a modern DB admin would handle backups this way anyway, haven't done this kind of work for years now.
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One route they could take is patch the servers that are working and not the broken ones. However, that sounds like a plan B or even C approach to me.
~Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.~
~Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.~
Speculation: They're all too hungover from binge drinking during the pandemic.
You no doubt getting a whole lot of "nuh uhhh, no way thats it" but i honestly think this is quite logical and reasonable to conclude. I dont know for sure, and i dont see you claiming to either, which is a refreshing change here. But I do think it is quite logical to think that they have identified a concerning cause of the issues with those realms, that could potentially affect others - so they have decided to deal with that before doing anything major like a pre-patch.
I don't get the hate for the OP. While this obviously would not be the only cause (if it was they could just concentrate their efforts to fix it), it adds a very plausible reason why the prepatch cannot be deployed until this failed merge (if it is as OP describes) has been fixed.
At least its not as bad as Revenant - that shit continually downloads 30gb+ for an update that is 200mb. Their file system is beyond a joke.
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I agree 100% - right or wrong, its a well thought out and logical conclusion to draw.
sunray of hope: tomorrow is stresstest on PTR. seesm they want to finish the stuff
This... Honestly doesn't sound outside of the realms of possibility. I've always been in the "there's no chance anything will get delayed" camp, but the server issues seem to be very serious, & throwing a brand new patch into that really wouldn't be the wisest idea.
Its extremely dangerous to share incomplete information though - the extrapolation and 'the sky is falling!' crap that the community creates would be much worse, if history is anything to go by. If their concern is that the issue could occur on other realms, but they have not found the cause yet, i would advise against communicating at this stage. If they DO know the cause, and are working through solutions, thats when they could come forward and explain what happened, what they are doing to fix it, and how long they expect it to take.
Oh ya, the team dealing with the server problem is not the same as the main dev/testing team so I imagine they are in the business as usual camp for production.
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That is true, it is probably better to stay quiet and get as little backlash as possible.
10/13 pre-expansion patch
11/9 Shadowlands
Flame on.