Server "Emergency Maintenace"

[Award]

So, this is the second Friday within a month where the servers go down for unplanned maintenance. This time it shows "emergency maintenance" in the official status. Anyone have ideas of what might be up?

 

[Airi]

They might be fixing up the servers from the last Japanese Splatfest. Ever since the system crashed, I've been noticing a lot of lag. I've always been the player who never had trouble connecting to the Japanese and rarely experienced lag. But I've been experiencing some in quite a lot of battles since the system crashed. So I'm hopeful that Nintendo is just patching up their servers and fixing the issues to get them back up to playable condition. They do have an upcoming worldwide splatfest to handle and they can't handle it on the servers current connection.

 

[Sonikku]

No clue, but it's really inconvenient :/

 

[Quicksilvr]

Trying to level up my splatfest tee, but nooooo. :(
Well hopefully they get things up and running smoothly soon.

 

[Award]

They might be fixing up the servers from the last Japanese Splatfest. Ever since the system crashed, I've been noticing a lot of lag. I've always been the player who never had trouble connecting to the Japanese and rarely experienced lag. But I've been experiencing some in quite a lot of battles since the system crashed. So I'm hopeful that Nintendo is just patching up their servers and fixing the issues to get them back up to playable condition. They do have an upcoming worldwide splatfest to handle and they can't handle it on the servers current connection.

That's a good possible explanation, but it seems unlikely they'd take the servers down on a Friday night at prime time. That's the type of thing that's usually a scheduled maintenance on Monday or Tuesday....not "emergency maintenance" Actually for Nintendo to use the word "emergency" rather than "unscheduled" like they did during the Japan Splatfest outage sounds extreme. It sound like either the hardware took a dive, or the whole datacenter is down, or the had to kill it immediately due to a hack or DDoS going on. Nintendo doesn't use words like that. Ever.

You're right about there being a lot of lag lately, but Splatoon is P2P - one of the players is the actual game server. The Nintendo servers are used only for lobby building, team sorting, statistic tracking, scoring, etc. Just metadata and player database stuff, not actual gameplay. That's not do downplay the load of 4 million people hitting the servers for that stuff, but I don't think Nintendo's servers can be at all involved in lag (beyond the fact that they don't actually provide gameplay servers to begin with...But that's proably the only reason we don't have Nintendo Network Plus for $40 a year. )

 

[chubbypickle]

since it's come back online the server's are horrible everyone is dc'ing and i never dc

 

[Splatoon❤️]

since it's come back online the server's are horrible everyone is dc'ing and i never dc

Same I bought a hdmi cable lead which stops all lag and disconnections but now every 7-8 matches I disconnect and at least EVERY MATCH someone disconnects

 

[Award]

Same I bought a hdmi cable lead which stops all lag and disconnections but now every 7-8 matches I disconnect and at least EVERY MATCH someone disconnects

That's pretty weird. Since the Nintendo servers aren't actually used to host the game, I'd think that really is just coincidence, unless the game really DOES keep a background connection to servers just to upload player metrics...if it does, that means matchmaking isn't actually as randomly bad as we've assumed it is, it would imply something more akin to Microsoft True Skill is going on than just score aggregations after the match. It would be nice to believe they're actually tracking our shots, misses, proximity to objectives etc to build our skill profiles though...but I'm not convinced they really do it.

That's the only way I could imagine Nintendo's servers could affect anything in game other than lobby building and matchmaking.

 

[jsilva]

That's pretty weird. Since the Nintendo servers aren't actually used to host the game, I'd think that really is just coincidence, unless the game really DOES keep a background connection to servers just to upload player metrics...if it does, that means matchmaking isn't actually as randomly bad as we've assumed it is, it would imply something more akin to Microsoft True Skill is going on than just score aggregations after the match. It would be nice to believe they're actually tracking our shots, misses, proximity to objectives etc to build our skill profiles though...but I'm not convinced they really do it.

That's the only way I could imagine Nintendo's servers could affect anything in game other than lobby building and matchmaking.

I've thought ever since I created my new accounts that they keep more sophisticated metrics than simply K/D and wins/losses, in part because I was matched very quickly with high level players when I started those new accounts in turf (and I deliberately wasn't kicking the newbie's butts so my splats weren't super high).

If it does record more sophisticated metrics then I'm quite certain the Wii U unit itself would record them and then upload that data to the server, perhaps after ever game or maybe after exiting the lobby.

 

[Award]

I've thought ever since I created my new accounts that they keep more sophisticated metrics than simply K/D and wins/losses, in part because I was matched very quickly with high level players when I started those new accounts in turf (and I deliberately wasn't kicking the newbie's butts so my splats weren't super high).

If it does record more sophisticated metrics then I'm quite certain the Wii U unit itself would record them and then upload that data to the server, perhaps after ever game or maybe after exiting the lobby.

The matchmaking doesn't seem good enough to indicate they take that level of metrics, but, yeah, it's adaptation sometimes seems that way at times. But I agree they'd do it post-match.

FWIW, in Ranked I only saw one disconnect all day. From what I heard from someone else, TW was about the same as usual.

 

[jsilva]

The matchmaking doesn't seem good enough to indicate they take that level of metrics.

That's assuming the matchmaking is attempting to create balanced teams ;)

I haven't experienced any connection issues, though I rarely experience them.

 

[chubbypickle]

matchmaking is a whole different issue the vast majority of my games are either we crush them or they crush us and its a shame because win or lose there is nothing better than a good close game. That's why i always go from s to a+ depending on the winning or losing streak 2 days ago i lost 17 in a row dropped to A then wond 13 out of 15 almost back at S again lol.

 

[Award]

Yeah, ,playing mostly ranked today but I still haven't seen more than 2-3 disconnects total through a lot of rounds. You guys with DC issues just got unlucky I think!

matchmaking is a whole different issue the vast majority of my games are either we crush them or they crush us and its a shame because win or lose there is nothing better than a good close game. That's why i always go from s to a+ depending on the winning or losing streak 2 days ago i lost 17 in a row dropped to A then wond 13 out of 15 almost back at S again lol.

Most rounds are "they crush us" Every once in a while it's "we crush them"....

 

[Award]

Down for maintenance AGAIN. Unscheduled, but the status makes it seem scheduled. 2 Hours. What the heck is going on at Nintendo?

 

[Flareth]

You noticed it too? Oh good, I thought I was going mad for a while there.

Well, it's back online now...

 

[Award]

It was some form of unscheduled scheduled maintenance or something.

I know they have scheduled maintenance every day this week from 12:00-3:00AM ET for "only play, rankings, etc" (which usually doesn't affect Splatoon and XBCX, that seems to be more backend, Smash, and Kart related.) This one popped up on the status page as though it was scheduled for 8:00 to 10:00PM ET. But it wasn't scheduled earlier.

That's twice in one week, 3 times in 4 weeks. Coupled with the full week of scheduled maintenance they're doing something big. I know some speculation is that it's Miitomo & My Nintendo account related, but that wouldn't affect Splatoon at this point unless they're just moving the whole datacenter piece by piece to DeNA (which would make sense if they're managing the accounts, and the "stock swap" for the "partnership" was basically, in the real world, Nintendo buying DeNA (they have majority control of the company now.)

But even so it's still weird Splatoon specifically would be affected. Maybe matchmaking really WAS FUBAR after Friday's "emergency" maintenance after all, and they took it down to fix that?

 

[Award]

Ok this is getting rediculous. The servers are down for maintenance AGAIN - only this time it looks like nintendo.co.jp is ENTIRELY down with it and as such we can't even get the status page. What is going ON at Nintendo? Are all these "maintenence" sessions them messing up their network, or are we looking at a month long DDoS attack on NCL?