November 20, 2012

The Darkest Black Friday Shop

Battle the crowds to get these epic items!

This Friday, once you've come out of your Thanksgiving (or Thursday) dinner food coma, login to AQWorlds and check out the Darkest Black Friday shop ever! Grab your favorite gear from the shop and then rock it shadow-style!

The Darkest Black Friday shop will have:

• Black Witch
• Black Paladin 
• Black DragonSlayer
• Black Symbiote
• Black Necro
• Black Renegade
• Black Katana

Find the Fiery Fall shop in Battleon this Wednesday!

Releasing this Wednesday:

• The Thief of Hours Class  
•  NEW Thanksgiving event with returning Seasonal Rare items!
• /join TheSpan for WAR!
• War Rares, a War Merge shop, and member-only farming quests!
• Fiery Fall Shop!

AQWorlds servers offline last night for maintenance!

AQWorlds servers were taken offline last night for database optimization. As we head into the holiday season, we wanted to make sure all your battle-victories are as epic and FUN as possible!*

Coders deciding which database tables to clean first.

* Extra-thorough oiling of the server hamsters' wheels will also be performed tonight.

Why do we need to do this, you ask?

Good question! This will help the game run better overall. Every database needs to be cleaned every so often, just like a closet that keeps getting rusty swords and dirty armor tossed into it. You forget all that junk is in there until one day you open the door and a whole armory of gear comes crashing down on you.

Tsukumo-Gami NEVER optimize their databases.

When the database is full of junk, it makes all the different parts of AQWorlds - logging in, loading your inventory, finishing a battle - run a little more sluggishly than they should. That's because every time you do something that makes the game talk to the database (like finishing a battle or purchasing an item from a shop), your game needs to talk to our database to trade information.

And with millions of messages a day coming from Sir Ver, Cysero, Twilly, and all the other servers, the database could use a good shake-up and dust-off. We're getting all those stray bits of data out of our DB tables and into the recycle bin where they belong.

Good database hygiene is important!

We run the database cleanup queries regularly to make sure the game works well (those happen in the middle of the night when the fewest number of players are usually online), but there are certain cleanup processes that need to be run when the servers are offline.

So... no playing AQWorlds tonight?

Not until around 4 or 5AM, server time. So why not try our other games at Artix.com? And once AQWorlds' servers ARE back online, there's a whole world to explore while you wait for Wednesday's