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madmojoman avatar image
madmojoman asked

Legacy Server Sunsetting

So, I just now saw the little pop-up added to the Legacy server tab stating Sunsetting was happening on March 1st. I'm surprised you didn't send out any notifications directly to people still using the Legacy servers about this before now, and just hoped people looked at all of your Blog posts for that information until now. But is there any possibility to have more time for this transition so our game doesn't just get shut down on March 1st?

Is anyone else just now learning about the Legacy servers being shut down? Or am I the only one who doesn't religiously follow the blog posts? This is a bit stressful.

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Matt avatar image Matt commented ·

I received an e-mail about the sunsetting sometime last year, at least several months ago. Perhaps yours got thrown into spam.

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Brian Jordan avatar image
Brian Jordan answered

No, not the only one, also extremely stressed because of this. We've had a team member working for months to cobble together a solution to migrate to Matchmaking 2.0, but as there is no clear 1 to 1 migration path, you have to basically re-architect a new matchmaking system to be Matchmaking Ticket instead of Searchable Lobby based, and change how your server build is prepared and shipped. We're finally close to a solution but it's got so many edge cases and subtle bugs with Backfill ticket management still to sort out we're likely to have downtime if the shutdown is still March 1st.

We asked for extra time and were told unlikely, but that would be a life saver in our case too.

If I may be excused for venting (as I've been crunching while terribly sick for a week to keep our game alive now) - I'd like to also register my frustration at the lack of proactive notification, sufficient lead time, and tooling and documentation support around migrations from Legacy to future offerings. madmojoman just noticed it is happening, I had to randomly learn about it from a friend doing their own migration.

Beyond this, we were told just over a year and a half ago this would never happen (a year before the blog post). From October 2020: https://community.playfab.com/questions/46224/how-easy-to-migrate-legacy-server-to-servers-20.html

- Are you planning to remove the legacy server in the next few years?

For developers who are still using the legacy server, it would not be deleted.

I've recommended PlayFab to so many colleagues in the past because it was such a nice set of tools for new devs to get up and running with new backends quick. And I want to be able to trust going with PlayFab for future projects. But we're approaching my limit of late and sleepless nights that would have been avoidable were more dev-considerate platform decisions being made. The customer implementation support staff are incredible but they're being asked to support us in impossibly challenging situations.

In this case I can only add my beg to the pile, please please allow us the extra time needed to not have more downtime.

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madmojoman avatar image madmojoman commented ·

Thank you for the response, Brian. After a few months of working with the Azure Multiplayer 2.0 documentation, tech stack, and getting a solution up and running for local testing, we ended up deciding to go with hosting on a bare metal servers solution instead and scrapped it entirely. The nice flat-rate fee per month (even if more expensive) for as many instances a box can hold is pretty awesome with better performance. And they just grab binaries to work, which makes testing and updating so much easier. None of the silly problems of having to update computer firmware, OS software, installing Docker bloatware to get things to even test locally, or dealing with the extremely confusing documentation PlayFab provides and never updates for this Azure stuff. I wish our new network stack was ready to go before this was shut down, but at least I feel a little better knowing we're not the only ones being hurt by this PlayFab forced shutdown. I like PlayFab for a lot of reasons and regularly direct people to use their services, but now I guess multiplayer features isn't one of those reasons anymore. Who knows how long until they sunset this new solution. :/ Thanks again for the response!

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Gosen Gao avatar image
Gosen Gao answered

Sorry for the inconvenience, but we cannot provide additional time. If you have any questions, you can reach out to Multiplayer Servers team on the PlayFab channel in our Game Stack discord.

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Dimitris-Ilias Gkanatsios avatar image
Dimitris-Ilias Gkanatsios answered

FWIW, @madmojoman Docker is *not* required for local development and debugging with LocalMultiplayerAgent since you can use process mode to test your game servers. On the same context, you can use PlayFab Multiplayer Servers on process mode so no containers involved.

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madmojoman avatar image madmojoman commented ·

Yes, I see they've removed most of the Docker references in the latest versions of their documentation.

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