If you missed today’s extended outage, you’ll be pleased to know Cryptic wasted no time in offering a nice bonus to everyone who had been inconvenienced. If you’re not already aware Cryptic has been making significant hardware performance improvements as one of the 3 elements to reduce lag experienced in the game. Added to recent code changes (some yet to be deployed), today’s improvements seem to have had a noticeable effect.
But like any major hardware role-out, there are often problems. What started as a 6 hour update, dragged further into the afternoon impacting many who need each day to earn the Summer reward ship – the Nandi (it’s worth getting – gentlemen – start your jetpacks!).
But you need not worry.
Stephen Ricossa aka Salami Inferno was quick to offer the community a nice bonus for our patience:
First off, I would like to apologize for an incredibly long stretch of emergency downtime. I know how frustrating it can be when a game you’re planning to play is unavailable. I’d like to take a moment to explain why we were down for so long and how we’re going to compensate you for this inconvenience.
We’ve had some problematic hardware in our network for some time, but have had trouble triaging exactly the best way to deal with the issue. The malfunctioning hardware has been the cause of regular stability issues on Holodeck for some time, but we needed a solid plan for replacing and integrating something new. The extra maintenance Tuesday and the extended maintenance today enabled us to completely replace the problematic hardware and integrate replacements. This update is nothing but great news for every Cryptic game, including STO. The maintenance was successful but took significantly longer to complete than we’d hoped. Again, I truly apologize for the inconvenience.
As I mentioned before I know how frustrating it can be when a game you want to play is down. My goal is to ensure everyone in the community can get into the game, have fun things to play when they’re in there, and earn great rewards. Since the game is up now I’m going to make good on the other two goals right now. From shortly after this post through Monday at 10 a.m. we’ll be running a 75% Dilithium Bonus weekend, the Elachi Red Alert event which includes a 50% mark bonus to marks awarded by that event, and I’ll be extending the Summer Event by a day for those that couldn’t get in today. I hope these bonuses, and our continued commitment to creating a smooth and stable play experience will make up for this necessary but unfortunately long downtime. Thank you for your patience, and I look forward to seeing all of you in game this weekend!
Steve Ricossa
Executive Producer
Not bad for a guy who WAS heading off for a few extra days of R&R. Dammit – I missed my hoverboard race typing this up. Well played sir, well played.
