Flight Rising Discussion

It’s real cool that staff let us know what happened. I’m on/have been on a fair number of pet sites that wouldn’t bother telling the players or feeding their dragons/pets/whatever.

It’s just real nice. Thanks staff!

While I'm not technically minded enough to understand entirely what happened, I was able to get the sense we had a Murphy's Law situation and that's why everything was down.

Thanks staff, for being honest and open with us!

second that, i was so surprised that my dragons were not hungry, i love it that they got their food during maintance...also it really is nice to know before a maintance that there is one happening soon [s](i have a few games where you want to get on and dont know why you can not)[/s], so: Thanks staff! [emoji=gaoler love size=1]

Agreed. Super nice of one of the devs to explain in detail what happened even if most wouldn't understand.

Staff has always been open on site malfunctions and aiding on keeping users' bonuses (and eggs, back when rot was a thing) going. And when things irl affect the site as well (natural disasters, bad health scares). Several sites I've been to do sometimes explain "something went wrong during the process" but never this in-depth and sometimes don't fix lost bonuses either (as bonuses are just..bonuses, not something that 100% affects the player's time on the site). I'm always thankful for that regarding FR staff :)

FR Staff has always been great and I always appreciate when they give us dates and times when they do maintance. They are very well coordinated.

i appreciate the fact that they let us know. some other sites have that "dont worry about it" mantra. also, quite surprised my dragons were fed! haven't been playing in awhile so i appreciate it lol

The FR team is perhaps the nicest I've ever seen managing a pet site game, and I've been on a number of them in my time. It's very nice that pretty much all of the developers, from artists to engineers, speak up on what's going on!

@Chaosarceus here's roughly what happened, translated into a less technical word set/explained, if it helps?

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FR has been having lag, so they asked the people who handle the physical computers the site runs off of to move one of their server computers (the one that handles what things look like, as opposed to the one that stores things and/or does logic) to a spot with better internet. It was supposed to take an hour, but

- Their IP changed due to being plugged in a different place: this is like if their house was suddenly at a different address, so the mailman didn't know where to go with the mail. Except the mail in this case is players requesting to join the server. So they had to talk to the DNS server, which in the analogy is roughly equivalent to the post office, to tell it that FR's address changed, so people ended up at the right place.

- Boot settings on the server got corrupted:The server computer forgot how to turn on, basically, and if the computer can't start up then it's not exactly going to work very well, eh? So they had to fix that before they could go further.

- A port on the server was damaged: A physical place to plug in the wires that let servers talk to each other got broken. Which is bad, because remember, this server controls what players see. Without it, the site might work behind the scenes, but all we players get is "Pardon our dust!"

It took a while to figure out the port was broken, but when they did, they added another port to the server to let it talk to the other servers. Because this one wasn't built in, originally, they're going to keep an eye on things for a bit to make sure it doesn't make things go slower.

The last bit with "DNS propagation" just means that some people's local internet post offices might not have heard where to send the mail to yet. (Doubt this is too relevant a couple days later, though.)

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So yeah, your appraisal of Murphy's Law coming into play was definitely not far off the mark. Hopefully this made a little more sense than Mutron's post? I can try to break things down more if it'd help.

[quote name="Renaiwom" date="2021-08-20 23:04:38" ] @Chaosarceus here's roughly what happened, translated into a less technical word set/explained, if it helps? FR has been having lag, so they asked the people who handle the physical computers the site runs off of to move one of their server computers (the one that handles what things look like, as opposed to the one that stores things and/or does logic) to a spot with better internet. It was supposed to take an hour, but - Their IP changed due to being plugged in a different place: this is like if their house was suddenly at a different address, so the mailman didn't know where to go with the mail. Except the mail in this case is players requesting to join the server. So they had to talk to the DNS server, which in the analogy is roughly equivalent to the post office, to tell it that FR's address changed, so people ended up at the right place. - Boot settings on the server got corrupted:The server computer forgot how to turn on, basically, and if the computer can't start up then it's not exactly going to work very well, eh? So they had to fix that before they could go further. - A port on the server was damaged: A physical place to plug in the wires that let servers talk to each other got broken. Which is bad, because remember, this server controls what players see. Without it, the site might work behind the scenes, but all we players get is "Pardon our dust!" It took a while to figure out the port was broken, but when they did, they added another port to the server to let it talk to the other servers. Because this one wasn't built in, originally, they're going to keep an eye on things for a bit to make sure it doesn't make things go slower. The last bit with "DNS propagation" just means that some people's local internet post offices might not have heard where to send the mail to yet. (Doubt this is too relevant a couple days later, though.) So yeah, your appraisal of Murphy's Law coming into play was definitely not far off the mark. Hopefully this made a little more sense than Mutron's post? I can try to break things down more if it'd help. [/quote] I didn’t think I needed a simpler explanation, but I very much did. Super helpful!