EQ FIREFollow

Ok, first off I want to wish everyone that has been, are currently, or will be affected by the fires in Southern California the best. You all are in my thoughts and my prayers. I hope that everyone can go home soon and return to normal life. May whatever God you believe in, see you through this disaster safely and securely.

In general chat the other night, people were discussing what affect the fires would/could have on the game. Some of the things being said and asked, made me do some thinking about it myself. I know that some of these questions might not belong here exactly, but any thoughts some of you had might be helpful.

There is a big threat of loosing the building (least from my understanding )which houses the servers for the game and whatnot. I am curious to know if the game is backed up so if something happens, the game itself is safe. Not to mention, information about our characters. I dont know too much about how the system works exactly, so if someone could enligghten.....

Along those lines, if the sytem goes down, how long would it take to come back online, or would they not bother? Speculate here I guess.

If the game dies because of this, or Sony doesnt think its worth putting back online, what will most of you do? I havent decided yet, I shudder to think of it going away.

Granted real life is more important than some game. But, to some people, EQ is all there is ( I know a few of those ) and I am sure they are curious.

Yeah. Seriously. Where did you hear that the building the servers are in was threatened by fire? They're located in the Carrol Canyon area, which is between Miramar road and Sorrento Valley (technically Mira Mesa at that point). Um... The fire is absolutely nowhere near there. More importantly, it was nowhere near there 2 days ago when there was actually concern that the fires might break through and into the more heavily structured parts of the county. It's definitely not a danger today.

Heck. I was posting monday and tuesday from my office, which is in a building about a half mile northeast of SOE's offices (ie: closer to the fires). That area was not in an evacuation zone and was really never in any danger of being in one. I went there because it was a nice air conditioned and climate controlled place to be while I couldn't be in my own home (which was in a mandatory evacuation area). While I love my sister and her family to death, I'd have gone bonkers just sitting at their place all day long for two days straight.


On the more hypothetical side of things, I would assume that SOE has regular backups just like any other large data site (which includes off-site vaults to hold that data in the event of catastrophic loss). I'm not sure if they have backup servers to take over in the event they lose the building though, but they could probably get a server or three up pretty quick from the backups using systems at other sites. It's not like Sony only owns one building in the whole world. A "server" is just a set of data and code running on a set of computers. That can be duplicated pretty quickly, its just a matter of having the cpu to put it on and time to do the work.

EQ still makes an awful lot of money to be given up the first time it burns down.

I would hope that a company as big as Sony would have a disaster recovery plan. But on the slim chance that EQ went up in flames never to recover, I would really miss my friends, but not playing the game wouldn't be a catastrophe in my life. I would just take an MMO break and then look for something new later.

Are you back now? Is everything OK?


It would certainly be a disaster if lives were lost and what-not, but come on, SoE is a gaming company. I think the country would survive.

Seriously though, I can't imagine SoE doesn't have all their servers backed-up in a different location.

Yeah. For much the same reasons, I wasn't particularly worried about my home. I was just barely inside the far corner of the mandatory evac area and figured I'd head out just for peace of mind.


I got what groogle was saying as well. There are just locations that can't burn down from a wildfire unless massive portions of the county burn first. We're talking about 5+ miles of nothing but packed in homes and offices between where SOE's buildings are and where the fires were. It would require an utter failure of our firefighting system for that to happen (and it would be a *huge* disaster).

Yeah. But it would be a ***** to get high speed internet access to a location like that. Tradeoffs...