Something put on top of Homepage, Forum Index, and on the Login Screen in big red letters.

Simply to tell us whether the server is online or offline. Every crash/shutdown/patch spawns a bunch of "ITS DOWN WERE GONNA DIE" topics that frankly, get pretty annoying.

Also there are always a number of topics asking if the server is up or down, unrelated to the screaming in Misc Forum.

Something like isup.me that checks SS server every 30 seconds or so.

Go on here ->

http://client00.chat.mibbit.com/#starso ... a.com:7777

Type !status and it tells you.

It also refreshes and updates automatically, which our website probably wouldn't.

Well, that's the point. It has to automatically refresh and it has to be blinky lights at the top of every major page people see often. A tiny percentage (even less than the regular forum goers) use the SS IRC-related stuff.

You don't have to.

If your internet is working and you can't connect to SS it's the Server.

If your internet is not working and you can't connect to SS then it's you. (But also probably the server because it's never up).

Don't have to log in or anything to Mibbit, just chose a name, type !status and there you go, the liberty status.

As for the planned maintenance/patches. A list of patches for the coming 48 hour period would be nice on the website. Including expected downtime.

No point having something dedicated to telling you whether the server is up or down due to non-planned reasons. Just have something that tells you "Patch in progress". And moot all the newbs who keep spamming or give them severe forum rage.

It is nice to do so and assures the screaming idiots that the world is not going to end without having to do anything extra on their part. The point of a game is to relax, not stress us out when you cannot log in for whatever reason. You may not think it's a worth while idea, but think of it this way.

Star Sonata has a few thousand players. Every little server hiccup or shutdown spawns hundreds of individual "Is it down?" topics and floods the ticket system with a similar amount of chaos.

You must reassure the playerbase or read and answer dozens of tickets every single time this happens. Can you imagine the work that the Admins would have to do? This is mostly for them; a way to reduce their workload with an automatic message that calms down the playerbase.

You're an idiot.

Right now, there are a few people that make these talks every little server offline. Some people do it to spam the forum; others legitimately want to know. The first thing people ask when they can't play the game is "Is the server down?" on Skype, Ventrilo, etc.

Eventually, the game will get bigger. If there is 200 people (not p2p accounts) in Star Sonata now, and the game grows by a factor of 10, that means you have 2000 people. If there are 3 topics per offline in 200 people, you have 30 topics in the group of 2000. It is simple math you learn in your fifth year of school.

Thirty topics is about a page of topics. All saying "Is it down?", "DOWN DOWN DOWN", and "I'm coming down to the beach". Every time the server goes offline. Furthermore, people use tickets to ask if the server is up or down, since that is a medium that people can use to get in contact with the administration. And a select few use IRC. Each time a person asks through the ticket system or IRC, an admin must answer. Every freaking time.

Can you imagine answering the same question 50 times in a row at work?

I understand you can use !status on IRC, but in the 9 years that Star Sonata has been running there has been only one instance of "!status" and "IRC" in the same topic. Furthermore, you have to know there is an IRC channel for Star Sonata to find it.


The goals of this suggestion was:

- To stop spam. If there is a blinky "Online/Offline" thing, there is no reason to spam the forum and the admins can outright ban you if you try.

- To stop "I can't log in" help topics. If you can see if the server is online or offline from the front page, there is not reason to make the topic.

- To reduce workload for the admins to deal with. You try it someday, DoW. Do 10 times more work at your job for no pay increase. See how it feels.

All those people posting constantly asking if the server is up or down should be warned/forum banned.

I don't really know how stupid you have to be to repeatedly ask on forums... or even send a ticket in when server goes down. In my opinion you really would have to be stupid to send a ticket it when the server goes down, therefore not really an asset to the community, therefore /care = 0.

On the news screen to the right of your login, if there is a patch there should be a notification here. Personally I never visit the main site, only forums and wiki occasionally.

Tickets can easily be answered with a generic reply of "The server is down/patching and will be back up at this time...../shortly".

By the time a ticket is answered anyways the server will be up.

Banning these people would ban a good portion of the game for something that isn't explicitly bad and would constitute as an unjustifiable ban. It isn't a malicious attempt at spam, but it can be annoying. A mass unjust ban would also force a lot of people to unsubscribe.

Now if they continued after a blinky online/offline thing was put in place, then that is a justified ban.

Also, you're snobbish. Try to not use this attitude at work. Your boss would probably punch you in the face, then fire you.

They would probably not notice a blinky thing.

If someone's repeatedly posting on forums every single fucking time the server goes down they should definitely get a warning. Why would they be so insecure that they have to worry about it when the server is clearly down. It's not asif it's not going to come back up. Any gamer should expect some downtime for a game every once in a while, it's just for SS atm it's quite common. Therefore it's even more easy to quickly learn that the server is sometimes down.

I have honestly never understood peoples fascination with posting when the server goes down, 99% of the time it's just trolling anyways.

Essentially you are just complaining about 'Event Horizon' who posts every time he cannot connect to the server. Not in complaint. Just to be annoying.

Therefore responding to his annoyingness by demanding a Blinking server status button is also annoying.

The ones who do post geniunely checking if it's down or not... not sure why suddenly they think they can't connect to the game because of something wrong on their end. Posting here requires them to have internet. And in the very rare eventuality that there is something wrong with the game on their side, then they should redownload the game. Because this is likely the first thing a QA dev would tell them to do unless in a ticket the cause of their problem can immediately be identified.

If they have connected to the game before and it has worked it is unlikely that upon 2nd connection to the game that they will not be able to connect, therefore the problem does not apply to new players in that instance.

You sound so arrogant, it hurts.

anyways, the down topics just seem like a community thing. don't like seeing them? too bad.

It's not a community thing its an annoying thing.

Why on Earth do you feel the need to post 'Down' on Forums every single fucking time the server goes down. It serves no purpose it's just an irritating occurrence. We all know the server is down when we can't connect...

Seriously though, just put the server status at the top of every SS-related site. Some people are actually curious. It doesn't matter if you're not curious or that you know it's down for whatever reason, because someone else most likely is.

You still haven't explained why you feel the need to post every time server goes down.