Why does every holiday have horrible servers???

[cantankerous--]

Man, every time you guys take a day off the servers plain suck. That's all I got. Just letting you know.

Signed: Disgruntled guy who keeps buying all your tables on multiple devices and wants to be able to access online gameplay and leaderboards without having to wait for minutes each time to access anything.

[grenadier]

Servers

Servers seem broken again. No tournament access.

If you can't get someone to work holidays, how about at least scheduling a daily automated reboot?

[jkp0317]

100% Agree

Weekends, Holidays, nights would likely be high traffic periods on their servers. You would think we could get increased focus during these times. Added things like android, steam sales where they are generating more revenue would get even more attention. Poor server performance for hours on end is not great customer service.

[wildhagen]

And again everything seems to be down.

Would be nice if we could play for at least 1 day without extreme slowness or complete unavailability....

Why do we pay for this game if we can't use it during a lot of days?

[OU7CAS7]

Yeah, I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed with this either. Either showing "No scores found" (when there should be), or messages about maintenance or loss of Internet connection.

At first I thought it was my Internet connection, as my Wifi connection would often drop out to our modem 12 metres away. Recently, I went and bought a wireless repeater / range extender, which fixed the drop out problem with websites. However, it doesn't seem to have done much to fix the issue with accessing scores in Pinball FX3. Which leads me to the conclusion that it isn't my Internet connection, but Zen's servers.

Zen could probably benefit from optimising their database queries from and to each client. I will admit that I tend to alternate between checking my own rank / score, and checking other people's. But I don't always need to see everyone else's scores and ranks.

At the moment, the rank / score viewing mechanism alternates between "Friends" -> "My Score" -> "Overall" lists. Clicking / pressing the list type button again changes back to "Friends", and so on. So, what if you just wanted to switch between the "My Score" list and "Friends" list, but didn't want to see the "Overall" list? Currently, since you can't simply skip over the "Overall" list, the game would still send a query to the server to ask for the "Overall" list, even if it isn't what you wanted. Multiply this by the number of players trying to access rank / score data at the same time in a similar fashion, and you get slow, laggy servers. Performance wise, it's a poor design choice, plain and simple.

The better method would be to let players choose the exact list type that they wanted to view, right off the bat. It may not improve the situation by much, but at least the servers wouldn't be so tied down with so many unnecessary queries to the server database.

Also, caching the results (temporarily storing them) would also go a long way, as there would be far less queries being made to the server. Why ask the server for a fresh list every time the user requests it? Why not instead have recently cached score and rank information that would be available at the instant a player requests it? It obviously wouldn't provide the absolute latest rank and score information available across the board at an instant, but this wouldn't be as important for the normal single players modes, as it might otherwise be for "Matchup" or "Tournaments" modes. Having said this, a timeout value could be set for the cache to retain the data it retrieved in the first place, before getting a fresh list. Say, 5 minutes for "Matchup" and "Tournaments" modes, and 30 minutes for everything else. Note that this doesn't have to mean that if you set a new highscore and want to see your name with the new rank and score, that you should have to wait for it to come up. Rather, an exception could be made in that instance, and the cache cleared with a fresh update on the list, resetting the timer for the next normal refresh if you fail to improve your score.

[rmaultra]

Utter Incompetence

Honestly, I thought that my Wi-Fi was not working New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I called my cable provider and set up an appointment for today January 3 for them to come out and take care of the problem because I could not get matchups to work tournaments or classic scores to load with Zen's server. My son told me that the cable TV provider that provides our Wi-Fi was not the source of the problem he went to the Zen forums and sure enough people were complaining about the servers not working. This has happened in past holidays whereby you are really looking forward to your time off and playing pinball and you can't do it because the company that you bought the pinball from haven't fed the hamsters that are running the wheel that keeps the server up and running. I simply do not understand the customer service aspect of this company and how they treat their clients. Does the CEO of the company do you think monitor things or is just callous as to how their company markets themselves or provides a really good quality product to those who have bought their product bugs and all. Don't get me started on the upgrades that they did to the Williams Bally tables to make them allegedly more playable.

[tfhfony]

Well, I am glad that they at least took this questions seriously and have promissed to do something about it....

Oh wait... that was sarcasm! It's just with these cases where the "community managers" tend to ignore certain threads....

[grenadier]

Down....again!

I had slow load times on tournaments earlier today, and now the servers are reporting down for maintenance. Some consistency would be nice here. If you're not going to police the leaderboards for cheaters, the least you can do is keep the servers online.

[cantankerous--]

I had slow load times on tournaments earlier today, and now the servers are reporting down for maintenance. Some consistency would be nice here. If you're not going to police the leaderboards for cheaters, the least you can do is keep the servers online.

They are slow now, but functioning.

[cantankerous--]

Servers not working again.................well, on Nintendo Star Wars, I haven't checked my ps4, but assume it will be unresponsive as well.

[cantankerous--]

I mean, is today secretary appreciation day or something? Usually I only see outages on holidays or weekends or sporadic weekdays................oh, nevermind, I get it, it must be one of those days

[ZREXMike]

I mean, is today secretary appreciation day or something? Usually I only see outages on holidays or weekends or sporadic weekdays................oh, nevermind, I get it, it must be one of those days

thanks, thought it was me, is not.

[wildhagen]

I have the same issue via Steam. Quite annoying, this seems to happen more frequently lately...

Why is Zen not doing anything about this problem, which is happening for the last few months?

[ZREXMike]

I have the same issue via Steam. Quite annoying, this seems to happen more frequently lately...

Why is Zen not doing anything about this problem, which is happening for the last few months?

back up 2day.

[grenadier]

Server issues....again

And problems again today. Sluggish or not response when navigating tournaments. Took multiple retries to even bring up the list of tourneys.

Zen, you need to fix this. Aside from FX3 being sold on the promise of community and competition, which is tough to have with servers not working, this is going to hurt your DLC sales. No one wants to put money into a game that doesn't work on a regular basis.