beamdog servers down?

[kitiarawoofmoon]

went to log back in game (nwn ee) and no servers showing up

[Noctis]

Once again it is impossible to access the game...Should we wait again for working hours in Canada to see it fixed?

[Julius Borisov]

Sorry about this, really. Very sorry. Unfortunately, yes, we all have to wait until the office opens. In 7 hours from now.

[Nefzen]

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

Sorry about this, really. Very sorry. Unfortunately, yes, we all have to wait until the office opens. In 7 hours from now.

do we really need masterserver for lan game?

[Sir Floyd The Breathless]

Originally posted by Nefzen:

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

Sorry about this, really. Very sorry. Unfortunately, yes, we all have to wait until the office opens. In 7 hours from now.

do we really need masterserver for lan game?

you do
thats why we need the ip so we can just bypass it for lan, or remove the requirement.

[valerio.sgargi]

For me its' working now. Servers are online

[Julius Borisov]

The servers were restarted. We'll be looking into ways to prevent smth like this in the future.

[charly4711]

Originally posted by id795078477:

It doesn't, however you're not on point here with "do this for living" - they just .. don't. The major selling point of this game is.. the game. Beamdog doesn't sell MP specifically, if anything it would be a solid financial decision to just shut the central servers down and revert to the P2P model.

Why would it be financially advisable? Because the only way they make money is from selling .. the game. Not the MP of it, but the game itself. ...

But the thing is:
You do sell the game because of the MP part, because the replay value of the OC is ludicrous (I replay it something like once every 15 years). So, it's financially advisable to keep that feature usable.

Why was it a sensible decision to make an EE of nwn, even more so than any other EE? Because there was still a very active community of people playing the game on various persistent worlds. I obviously don't have the numbers, but I'd be very surprised, if a considerable part of the success of NWN:EE was not PWs moving to EE and people rebuying the game who already had the old version. That part was banking on the original decision by Bioware to provide the toolkit for creating your own modules and the community keeping the game alive.

I don't mean to belittle the work that has gone into the EE version and the improvements made. There's a lot of good stuff there that makes this EE one of the better examples of remasters. But if the decision _were_ made that the master servers aren't really worthwhile keeping available, then I wish it was done in a way that allows the community to take the mantle back (and maybe that's just the master server bypass and PW owners just need to enable that.) On the other hand, if the servers are meant to stay, then I also don't think it'd be so very expensive to have like three virtual servers in the Amazon cloud in different availability zones with some automation etc. etc. ... or something similar. But according to a post above, BD is looking into increasing the availability, so I'm fine with that.

[charly4711]

Originally posted by id795078477:

[

Originally posted by charly4711:

It really doesn't have to be that way, especially when there are companies on the internet who do this for a living, provide services to people around the globe no matter at what time in what timezone they want to access them.

It doesn't, however you're not on point here with "do this for living" - they just .. don't. The major selling point of this game is.. the game. ...

Oh and btw., I think you misread what I was trying to say. I didn't mean to say that it was BD's core compentency to provide always-on services. What I meant was: There are companies out there you can hire to do it for you either full-service or at least provide the infrastructure to do it.

[id795078477]

Originally posted by charly4711:

Originally posted by id795078477:

[

It doesn't, however you're not on point here with "do this for living" - they just .. don't. The major selling point of this game is.. the game. ...

Oh and btw., I think you misread what I was trying to say. I didn't mean to say that it was BD's core compentency to provide always-on services. What I meant was: There are companies out there you can hire to do it for you either full-service or at least provide the infrastructure to do it.

Yes, I understood it as if you means BD should provide the life service because it makes a bank on it. But while what you said now makes much more sense logically, it still doesn't connect the dots financially. If anything - it'd be even worse of an idea because such contractors would require additional spend - and since MP by itself doesn't bring revenue,

It's even more of a subsidizing a net loss which no business would want to do if they want to stay in business. They are likely doing it for the only simple reason that it doesn't cost them too much atm - and that's partly because they do everything in-house to not incur too much costs. So financially I don't think it's an unreasonable decision to put MP on a non-essential uptime SLA and address issues during work hours only (because night-time / over-time work requires contractual amendments and additional pay to the FTEs as well)

However I'm a bit surprised they need to wait till "offices are open" - I reckon a simple VPN solution could do the trick of accessing intranet and that solution could be used for everything, not just NWN MP servers restart, so there is merit in arranging it imo. Maybe they'll improve it in the future.

P.S. I didn't mean to say MP is totally unimportant - but you're also not fair in judgement by stating about OC replayability. There are a lot of other modules and campaigns included for free - with far better replay value. And there are dozens of great modules on the vault. Of course it won't substitute for MP but an "only OC" argument is not fair. And again - the totality of at best triple digits online MP clients numbers isn't motivating enough.

[Philip]

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

The servers were restarted. We'll be looking into ways to prevent smth like this in the future.

Thanks for the fix. Hoping this isn't going to be a reoccurring theme.

[Crackshot Johnson]

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

The servers were restarted. We'll be looking into ways to prevent smth like this in the future.

Any reason your servers need to be up in order to play direct IP or LAN games? I do not understand why we'd need your server, and I doubt the original game required external servers to do LAN. Couldn't play with my friends last night on our local network because of this.

Edit - the fact that this has never been answered anywhere says to me that the reason is to act as DRM or some other selfish reason like data collection. Shame, Beamdog. How many sales do you think you're protecting at this point with this ♥♥♥♥?

[BinTech]

It would seem odd if it was some DRM scheme, considering that you can also get the game via GOG.

I do however agree, that it seems odd, if you need a connection to their servers for local network play. That should never be a thing.

[𝑨𝖕𝖍𝖎𝖔𝖓]

Originally posted by Crack Johnson:

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

The servers were restarted. We'll be looking into ways to prevent smth like this in the future.

Any reason your servers need to be up in order to play direct IP or LAN games? I do not understand why we'd need your server, and I doubt the original game required external servers to do LAN. Couldn't play with my friends last night on our local network because of this.

Edit - the fact that this has never been answered anywhere says to me that the reason is to act as DRM or some other selfish reason like data collection. Shame, Beamdog. How many sales do you think you're protecting at this point with this ♥♥♥♥?

Actually the fix is a simple options change. But hey lets accuse thats productive.

[masterserver]
[masterserver.key-authentication]
mode = "if-reachable"

Edit:
Info Available here for anyone curious:
Game Options[nwn.wiki]