CCP has released a new devblog today about the state of the chat system. For the last 11 months, the system has been having issues, including incorrect population count and incorrect pilot data in the local member’s list. These issues stemmed from problems connecting to the chat cluster.
Last month on January 9, CCP released a New Year update covering the new chat system and their future plans. In that devblog, CCP promised to see how well fixes could be applied and how much progress could be made before the end of February. That would inform the decision to either roll back to the old chat system or to press forward, knowing that enough progress has been made to expand and stabilize the new chat system. Today’s blog focused on the strides taken since then.
On the 8th and the 16th of January, two major updates were applied in an attempt to bring stability to the chat cluster and improve performance, primarily dealing with how the system works with pilot switching channels from one system to another and how initial presence is delivered when pilots join large chat channel such as Jita. After deployment of the second update, there’s been a decrease in the number of bug reports and support tickets which dropped to an old baseline since the new system was initially deployed in March 2018.
Issues surrounding chat have brought up a lot of questions and discussions within CCP. These focused on matters from how the new system was developed and deployed, to how communication was carried out between the players and the developers. As a result, CCP feels like they have failed on multiple fronts and now understand the gravity of the situation and how it affects pilots on day-to-day activity. They confirmed that considering the amount of progress in stabilizing the chat server, and the reduction of ongoing ticket issues, it is their intention now to continue using and developing the current chat system. This is because of the future-proofing abilities of the XMPP chat system with how it expands the possibilities in future development.
However, CCP is also offering a bit of reimbursement for the difficulties players suffered. In the coming weeks, the highest skill point character on every account that held Omega clone status as of the start of daily downtime on March 20th, 2018 (the day the chat system was deployed) will receive a gift of 500,000 skill points in their unallocated skill point pool. For characters in the 15 million+ skill point range, this is the equivalent of over 3 Large Skill Injectors’ worth of SP. INN will endeavour to let you know when skill points are released.
CCP asks that any feedback be made in the associated thread, and encourages players to continue reporting any issues with the chat system or other parts of the game.
