Originally Posted by Throm

Network News

Guild Wars Server Maintenance

Guild Wars will be unavailable during scheduled maintenance on March 30th from 00:00 PST (08:00 GMT) to 04:00 PST (12:00 GMT).

Unfortunately the Guild Wars database servers experienced a hardware failure that prevents them from operating properly, and in order to restore functionality we need to replace several components. We apologize for any inconvenience this maintenance may cause, and hope to have Guild Wars running again in short order.

For those folks with a technical bent, or for those who'd just like to know more about why we're taking such a long outage after almost a year with no scheduled maintenance, read on:

Because Guild Wars is a global game, where players from anywhere in the world can play against other gamers from any other location on the globe, there's really no good time to schedule maintenance because there isn't an idle period; there are always players from some part of the world enjoying the game. We've therefore strived to minimize the number of scheduled maintenance periods, and we've been largely successful.

While we have had several brief, unplanned outages in the nearly one year since the launch of Guild Wars, by and large we've been able to keep the game running continuously. We've had approximately twelve hours of downtime this year, ten hours of which was due to the unfortunate (but necessary) database rollback. Though the database rollback took quite a while to complete, the rollback only removed one hour of progress from character progression. Nevertheless, we recognize that players lost their time, and for that we apologize wholeheartedly.

This outage will allow us to perform some critical maintenance on our database infrastructure. In order to ensure that Guild Wars is always available, we purchased quite a lot of redundant server hardware (also known as clusters). The clusters are designed so that if one part fails, another part is capable of taking over the load. Instead of one computer for a given task, there are two computers, each with multiple network cards, power-supplies, drive interface controllers, disk arrays, and all sorts of other components. While this is expensive, it's really the only way to ensure that the network continues to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

A simple analogy is that it's like having two lightbulbs (with two power supplies and two switches) to keep a room lit. If one bulb burns out, there's still time to change it before the room goes dark, unless the other bulb burns out at the same time, of course...

In the past we've had several successful cluster failovers, but unfortunately not everything worked as desired this time. Basically, one disk controller went bad, and even after replacing the controller we can't get it to come back again. To ensure that we don't have a catastrophic failure, we're taking down everything on Thursday morning (Pacific Time) so that we can replace the broken components and bring everything back to fully functioning service.

We've alloted four hours for the maintenance, and we certainly hope that it will take less time. We know that a lot of folks won't be able to play Guild Wars during that time period, but we hope that everyone will understand the necessity. We'll look forward to seeing you back in the game a little later in the day.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

The Guild Wars Team


1 more day aint gonna kill us.....

Originally Posted by art_

Throm why is your post related to this specific error 58 problem?

Originally Posted by Xemun

I give up :/
its over 2 weeks while I can't login to gw.
anet doesn't give a s...t.
good luck to all of you.
I think you won't see me in gw anymore ... or maybe one day I'll log back in.

Originally Posted by mathewthegreat

I am on univertsity connection, so there are a few routers, but my traceroutes reach the same server as everyone else then stop responding :/