GameSpy Matchmaking Services Maintenance Tonight
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been deploying Powered by GameSpy titles using our matchmaking services over to a brand spanking new matchmaking architecture, developed from the ground up with greater scalability, flexibility and maintainability in mind. One of the immediate benefits you’ll see as an end user is less downtime in those cases when we use our routine maintenance periods on Monday/Tuesday nights. Our developer partners can look forward to some great new matchmaking features soon too.
Tonight, we move one last batch of games over to this new backend, and with that final migration, users may see some disruption of service one last time. Many of our biggest titles, including games from Nintendo and several top tier game publishers with thousands of concurrent players each have already migrated over and are running without any hitches. With this last deployment, several hundred mid to lower tier games will be migrating over, under the careful eye of our deployment engineers.
We will be performing this update during our normal Tuesday morning maintenance window, which runs from Midnight to 3 AM Pacific time, and using our status page to keep you updated. Because this requires a DNS change, some users will be split between the old and new backend for up to an hour or more as DNS catches up in some territories where our low ‘time to live’ isn’t immediately honored. You’ll stil be able to matchmake, but just not see as many players as you’re used to for a short while.
Both gaming end users and developers need to do nothing to prepare for tonight’s changes. In fact, if you’re in the middle of a game, you will be able to keep right on playing. Our advice is to settle down on a nice, comfy server at 11:50 PM Pacific and sit tight for a nice long match! Our publisher partners may wish to notify their network operations staff that some lobbies and server lists may seen a little ‘light’ for a while tonight.
None of GameSpy’s other services, like our ATLAS stats system, Presence & Messaging buddy and account system or our Sake persistent storage system will be affected by tonight’s work either.
All the testing and previous deployments we’ve done to date leads us to believe everything will go smoothly tonight. If you notice any issues after today, please use our contact page to get in touch. Licensed partners can also use our established developer support contact system to notify us.
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