On Tuesday January 10, the YC119.1 Patch was deployed to Tranquility during the normal server downtime. The patch contained several small gameplay changes neatly summarized here. Despite the smooth deployment of the patch, Tranquility began to experience issues after being brought back up after the normal downtime window. A thread on Reddit started by Haro_Mr_Jakku listed several complaints about the performance of the game that boiled down to symptoms of a large increase in network latency, commonly referred to as lag. Other posts were quick to corroborate the issues as well as add new ones.
CCP Falcon stepped in with a post on the official forums stating that Tranquility would be taken offline to allow for investigation of the sharp increase in lag. Falcon continued to update the thread, eventually stating that CCP would be rolling Tranquility back to the previous version, 118.10, about thirty minutes after Tranquility was taken offline. Updates continued through the next hour while CCP tested and redeployed 118.10. At 13:15 UTC, Tranquility was brought back online and normal functionality resumed. Falcon’s complete timeline has been reproduced below.
CCP did an excellent job of keeping the playerbase informed of the steps being taken to rectify the issue and addressed the problem swiftly. The patch notes page now reads that 119.1 will be deployed at a later date. With some of the tweaks, updates, and new content contained in 119.1 it is still eagerly awaited. One of the changes in the patch is to the voice lines used by Aura when an object is out of range to perform a function on. 119.1 removes these voice lines which have gathered some dislike from the playerbase. A reply on Reddit by ltdspacepig speculated, perhaps humorously, on a possible cause that relates to this removal.
“this is what happens when you try to silence Aura.. she strikes back!”
For the sake of CCP Falcon and his co workers, we should all hope that Aura has her behavior subroutines fixed when 119.1 makes its way to Tranquility in the future.
Falcon’s complete update timeline:
UPDATES:
11:56 UTC – TRANQUILITY TAKEN DOWN FOR INVESTIGATION INTO ONGOING ISSUES
12:05 UTC – ISSUES ARE STILL ONGOING – INVESTIGATION CONTINUES
12:25 UTC – DUE TO ISSUES WITH THE 119.1 RELEASE, WE WILL BE REDEPLOYING 118.10
12:40 UTC – TESTING IS CURRENTLY ONGOING FOR REDEPLOYMENT OF 118.10
13:00 UTC – PREPARATION FOR THE REDEPLOYMENT OF 118.10 IS ONGOING
13:15 UTC – TRANQUILITY IS NOW BACK ONLINE AND ACCEPTING CONNECTIONS, RUNNING 118.10