Whew, glad we all survived Chatageddon.
Last Tuesday evening while playing my favorite space MMO Eve Online I noticed that YoungPuke was following me into every system I entered. At first this wasn't unusual. Sometimes people follow me, either on purpose or because they happen to be going the same direction. But then I also noticed it wasn't limited to Mr YoungPuke - an entire fleet of people were following me. And yet, mysteriously, nothing was on d-scan. Ahh, here we go again - is literally what I thought.
Local chat was borked. And it only got worser as the week slowly churned along. By Friday Eve had, at least for me personally, become un-playable. The reasons for this are more complicated than simply missing local chat. This is not a case of "Blackout 2.0" as some people started calling it, or of a Wormholers wet dream. For one thing this affected much more than just local chat - fleet chat was also borked. As were channels like Corporation and Alliance - at times all of my private channels vanished. We had reports of bookmarks not saving, or market orders being weird, and then the d-scan problems started appearing. Essentially the fundamental tools for intel gathering had gone and become unreliable. That is just one side of the problem however.
The other side is that other players stopped playing, or undocking. We went on a null sec roam on Thursday and noticed a distinct drop in the amount of players out doing things. Although we still managed to snag some solid kills - things were not normal. Ships in belts vanished. Weird things started happening. And, in my line of work, if you can't trust your equipment - you can't do your job.
For those of us who have been around for a long time this most recent spat of trouble is no big deal. We've been through much worse. These days these issues are few and far between. Trust me. There was a time when these sort of problems were much more frequent. I can remember a time when you jumped through a gate and couldn't entirely be sure where you would land, in the next system or twelve jumps away. I once FC'd a fleet while half of us landed twelve jumps away from each other after jumping. I could go on with old-guy stories.
I decided to cancel my Saturday Rixx Roam and take the weekend off. And place my trust in the combined abilities of Those Who Code back in Iceland/England. And sure enough, eventually, they fixed it. At least it was working yesterday. Fingers crossed that it stays that way and that they can find a solution that helps it from happening again.
I'm certain this was driving them just as nuts as it was us.
Chatageddon came and it went. We survived.