So there we are in the middle of (well actually very close to the end of) Intercept the Saboteurs when kaboom – somebody switched off the lights in Iceland and the Tranquility server went down with a mighty crash – 40 thousand odd players all dumped within seconds..
All the lights went off, my game client and my buddies game client reset, we’re both looking at the login screen and we’re both shouting our lungs out over Vent ’son of a bitch – no – don’t drop – you feckers!!!!’.
We knew it was coming – for about a minute beforehand there were notices flashing up on screen informing us the Star Gates were closed in XXXXX system due to excess traffic – hundreds of them. Its a dead giveaway when I see this that the servers are gonna drop any second. I’ve never yet seen it recover once these notices start flashing up on screen so it must be part of a manual shutdown process rather than just someone pulling the plug.
Either way, if it was CCP who initiated the shutdown or it was a system fault that caused it, I was not a happy camper I can tell you.
We had successfully ‘massacred’ all but two of the Guristas and we were seconds away fom picking up the mission objective (30 units of Confiscated Viral Infection) and looking forward to a nice haul of salvage.
Twenty minutes later we connected up again and thankfully our drones were still at the location so we didn’t lose everything!
However, this particular mission needs the Confiscated Viral Infection and as the target ships (plus all the salvage) had now disappeared I coudn’t complete the mission. It says ‘mission complete’ when I talk to the agent but of course I didn’t get the drop so I can’t complete. Damn!
I looked in the market thinking I could buy the drop and there it is in Tash-Murkon and two or three other locations – at 59,000 ISK p unit or roughly 1.5 Million ISK for 30 units. As the timer has dropped out on the mission I stand to collect 400,000 ISK. We did pick up the bounties but making up 1.1 Million is a big ask.
As we also lost the salvage its a big loss to make up by buying in the drop needed to enable me to complete the mission.
I am waiting for the downtime tomorrow to see if the mission resets and lets me go after those crazy Guristas again…
I think this is now the third time since January that this has happened to me and always at a most inconvenient time. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was in station making a trade or something similar, but having spent the best part of an hour in grinding a mission only to see it all go down the tubes in a few seconds is infuriating.
I think I would prefer CCP to concentrate on getting their servers stable and robust rather than spending so much time on pushing out bi-annual updates. How about an annual update that works ‘out of the box’ and spend the rest of the year ensuring game play is not interrupted at frequent intervals.
Gripe over for today .. 
