A Stability Danger Indicator

[Peter]

Many counties and towns in California, the wildfire capital of the world, have "fire danger" signs erected in public areas which show how likely a large wildfire is at the moment. Of course, there's places that these are never less than "RED-High" and normally hover between "CHARTRUCE-Extreemly elevated danger" and "FIRE-Actually burning at the moment". But I digress. My point was that a similar system on the H&H homepage would greatly improve the user experience. I imagine it would have indicators showing how likely a system crash or shutdown is, and be affected by how long it's been since the last crash or update, or if there is a known crash bug. Further, the indicator could say "Development in progress- expect update soon" or "High winds may cause power outage".

With this information, users could decide to put off that big building project until fairer weather or stability has improved.

[Hamel]

and be affected by how long it's been since the last crash or update, or if there is a known crash bug.

Or if someone is walking towards the edge of the map.

With this information, users could decide to put off that big building project until fairer weather or stability has improved.

And when to grab their valuables and save their characters.

[Laremere]

It's basically impossible to predict crashes due to bugs, except for when the server shuts down, as there is a bug hidden in there that they have been having trouble tracking down. I don't know of any other case when a server crashing bug hasn't been fixed before the server started up again. I started playing when the first wave of lots of people started playing (I was the 75 person, and there were something like 200 players before the end of my first week) when server crashes happened very often due to the sudden increase in players doing stuff and finding crashing bugs, and I can tell you, it has gotten dramatically better stability wise. As for the update, they give server wide announcements when they're about to update. You can actually take advantage of it, as my friend quickly grabbed a few battleaxes, and got them duplicated today when they fixed the protocol problems.

[Peter]

NO! I want a list of all future system failures and crashes- and I want it a fortnight before tomorrow!

I suppose that you have a point. Still, we know that for at least a day after any software or hardware change there's a good chance of crashes, plus there's things like weather and, say, political insurrection that might cause other service disruptions.

So, perhaps a kind of bulletin board on the main page that in addition to giving warnings like "Whatever you do, don't [something] any [something] or else [something] all over the place" but could also give us "Adding a secret surprise update today".