The forums are going to be down for a little while thanks to a few pranksters that are endlessly attempting some SQL injection attacks. While they aren’t getting anywhere since I’m OCD about security, it is driving the CPU and RAM usage for the server through the roof. You may have noticed the site was down a couple times in the past two days.
So instead of just dealing with it (I’ve banned the IP’s on the server firewall, but they just use different proxy servers), I’ve decided to take the forums offline for a while. They’ll be back before you know it, so sit tight for a bit and comment more on the main site 
Xbox Live is going down on Monday to get some massive server upgrades and software overhauls to prepare for the upcoming New Xbox Experience. From the one and only Larry Hyrb (better know as Major Nelson):
On Monday, 9/29/2008 from 12:01 AM PST for up to 24 hours, Xbox Live will be offline for maintenance. As a result, Xbox LIVE and the ‘My Xbox’ section of Xbox.com will be unavailable, and the Xbox forums will be in read only mode (you won’t be able to post.) The remainder of Xbox.com will be available with limited interruptions.
This service maintenance is in preparation for the new Xbox experience which will be available later this fall.
Let me reiterate: When the service returns, you will not have any new features and you will not have the new Xbox experience update. That will happen later this Fall.
So don’t plan on playing online with your Xbox 360 on Monday. I’m betting we get the update sometime in October. If we go by past dash updates, things usually come out around a week or two after the scheduled maintenance on the servers. We’ll see what happens.
It seems that EA’s DRM policy is hurting a lot of gamers right now. Spore dropped today in a lot of places and the EA authentication servers have crashed under the load. Users can’t activate their game, which means all online aspects are null and void.
While this doesn’t mean you can’t play the game, you can’t have other people’s Spore creatures come and populate your world and other aspects of the game. This somewhat takes away from the experience.
EA says the servers should be back up in about 5 hours. But still, shouldn’t they have anticipated this? They expected the game to sell over 2 million copies in the first month. You have to expect that day 1 will be huge.
Anybody out there having trouble activating their copies of Spore?
I replaced the hamsters and their wheels that run our servers last night. The little fellas needed to go to the farm. All of our back-end tools have been updated and things are running better than ever… we hope.
While we’ve done extensive testing, there’s always the chance something slipped through. Hell, look at the current state of QA in game development. If we only have 2-3 bugs, we’re in good shape. If you find anything, make sure to let us know.
Some of you will be pleased to see the return of our Subscribe to Comments feature. If you wish, you can be notified of any follow up comments on your own discussions here at Loot Ninja. It went away a few months back when it got all broken, but now it’s fixed and running strong.
While this wasn’t done to add any new big features, we do have a few things in the works. While we’re sorting them out, if there’s anything you want to see us do, write about, sing about, or do squat-thrusts about, be sure to let us know. Steve loves squat-thrusts.
Incognito is taking the Warhawk servers offline today from 1-7pm ET (10am-4pm PT) to update the games playlists and a bunch of other features. Dylan Jobe, head honcho over at Incognito, detailed all the updates on the official PlayStation forums.
- By popular demand, playlists which include the largest layouts now include only the largest layouts. They will no longer occasionally rotate into medium layouts.
- By popular demand, respawn times have been set to 3 seconds.
- By popular demand, Broken Mirror servers now offer dedicated CTF and ZNS games in place of the mixed playlists.
- Dogfight servers were added back to the list. They were inadvertently omitted before.
- All games’ time limits were reduced to 15 minutes, and ZNS score limit was reduced to 5000, to combat complaints of prolonged base camping.
- “NEWBIE” servers were changed to “Rookie” to bring the nomenclature in line with upcoming changes in v1.4.
- “Pro” servers were changed to “Expert” to more obviously indicate a skill level rather than a player type. Some players incorrectly identified “Pro” servers as tournament games, a la MLG or GGL.
- “Casual” servers are essentially the same as before, but the “Casual” designator has been dropped. We now refer to these internally as just “standard” servers, and they are listed without any special identifier.
- The rank cap on Rookie servers was increased to Wingman, since players were getting kicked out of these servers too quickly and finding themselves unprepared to play on standard servers.
- A rank cap was imposed on standard servers at Command Marshall. This is rank 15/19 so it should not affect a lot of players. The intention is to pull some of the most elite players out into their own category, somewhat narrowing the rank gap on these servers.
- Many Omega Dawn exclusive servers were removed due to lack of use.
Some nice tweaks that the community has been asking for. I really have to hand it to Incognito as they have really catered to what the Warhawk community is looking for with these updates and patches. Keep up the good work!
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the server issues with the Konami ID website for the Metal Gear Online Beta. Basically, you need to sign up to use the Konami tracking system for stats and collecting other data for the beta test. Problem is, the servers have been getting so hammered, the site has been up and down, making it difficult to register or login.
It took me the better part of 4 days trying to setup an account before I was finally able to get through. Even after the servers came back up, I got error messages trying to do anything on the site.
This has me very concerned about how the beta will actually work. If you can’t log in to the Konami servers to setup or connect to your account, how are you supposed to play online? The whole Komani ID debacle is just as bad as friend codes and shouldn’t even be used. If it has to be, they need to make sure those servers are up and lightning fast, which they aren’t. Once Monday comes around and everyone tries to log on and play the Beta, I’m sure it’s going to bring their servers down even further. We’ll keep you posted, but it doesn’t look good.
You might have noticed a bit of downtime the past two days here at Loot Ninja. On Wednesday, we got hit with a DDoS attack. Yeah, hackers are oh so much fun.
Yesterday, however, was a hardware issue. One of our memory chips went bad and caused the server to lock up. All is well now, so don’t fret.
To those of you sending me IM’s and emails to pay my server bills… don’t worry, that’s well taken care of.
It’s been 15 days now and Xbox Live still isn’t back to normal. It’s hard to believe that it’s just more users over the Holidays, since most people have gone back to work and school and the service is still messed up. According to the Xbox Support page right now:
Xbox Live and Zune Marketplace users will experience billing related transaction failures, including but not limited to: Purchase of premium download content, music, and account management, including account creation, renewal, and recovery; additionally users may experience issues with matchmaking and statistics related transactions.
Don’t plan on buying anything from the Marketplace right now, because you can’t. Matchmaking is also messed up, so if you’re trying to play online, you might not be able to get into a game. I personally can’t login. So I guess I won’t be doing that Halo 3 co-op I had planned for the day.
Does anybody really think one arcade game is enough for this insane amount of downtime? There’s already a lawsuit going against Microsoft for these problems. It all seems stupid to me… how could they not have the foresight to see the need for upgrading the servers?
Another night, more problems with Xbox Live. I think it’s time to put a ton of money into some new servers there guys. Bragging about the best Holiday lineup ever for months, and then having your flagship service go down, causing tons of issues of both single player and online play? Not the best way to roll into 2008. According to the Xbox Support page currently:
Users may experience issues logging into Xbox Live. We are aware of the issue and are currently working to resolve it. We apologize for any inconvenience.
I personally can’t sign in. Which means I can’t play my Arcade games. I have friends over who wanted to play some Street Fighter 2. Yep, there’s no chance of that happening, since this is nowhere near my first console. I’m paying good money for this service, and it’s causing me to not be able to play games offline. Not making me happy right now.
[Update] Even though the service is quoted as running fine right now (2pm EST), I still can’t connect. An Xbox Live Connection Test passes everything except Xbox Live. Good times.
[Update 2] As of 2:45pm EST, Xbox support page is now saying the service is down, with the same message as quoted above.
Loot Ninja – Now with More Threaded Comments
We made some back end changes here at Loot Ninja today. There’s a lot of plans that will be set into motion over the next month and the first piece of that plan is to bring you threaded comments.
You can now reply directly to someone instead of using @name or whatever you used before. We have it set to go 3 levels deep for the replies, so go ahead and tell people what you think of them.
More new features are coming soon, including some new stuff in the forums. And a former monthly thing around here will be making a triumphant return. Stay tuned!