Okey, the website is not exactly broken, but the content is. The content is not broken anymore.

On February 6th, some major issue hit GameSpy‘s website – specifically, its SQL server. As a result, their stats page is not working anymore; the main stats page haven’t been updated since that day, and the specific game pages (for example, Half-Life 2) only say “error: Couldn’t connect to SQL Server!”.

As mentioned on the About page, this website gathers data from GameSpy stats to generate the graphics. What this means is that, since GameSpy is broken, the data this website gathers is also broken, and the graphics generated by look broken as well – games and mods are starting to look like they have 0 players on.

I don’t have more information on this issue, so I can’t really say what has been broken, whether they know it’s broken or not (I tried contacting them but haven’t received any response), and when will that come back to life, if ever. What I can say, though, is that I’ll wait to see if it gets fixed. If it does, I’ll probably do an interpolation on the missing data to make sure the graphic doesn’t look too strange in the future, making sure the ‘fake’ days are mentioned somewhere else. If it doesn’t, however, I’ll either have to stop updating the website (leaving the graphics online for historic purposes only), or switch my data mining script to some other website like Game-monitor (something I didn’t want to do as they also have inconsistent results for some games).

More on that in the future. For now, sorry for the mess.

Update: As of February 14th, GameSpy stats is working again. Graphic lines will be interpolated soon.

This entry was posted Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.