Stepmania Online

This isn't really a feature as much as it is just making things seem more organized for players on SMO. Up until now, updates have been rather random in terms of when they will happen, and they probably catch quite a lot of people off guard while playing. I would imagine for quite a lot of people, it would be chalked down to a server that just dropped a connection in the middle of a song. I feel like if there was a certain time of day designated for updates (or if there was a global announcement at least 30 minutes to an hour before an update was made) people would be guaranteed to notice this, and not think the server just randomly dropped.

It's more of a nice thought than anything, and plus if people know when updates / resets are coming, actual drops can be easily determined by players if they ever happen. I believe Houkou did some 5 minute warnings of this kind before sometimes, although considering the length of a lot of steps, I'm not sure if that is enough.

The disconnects are likely server crashes. I have pretty much been the only one doing update to the server-side code that requires it to restart for the last 8-9 months. I usually only do them in the early AM PST time and I always message everyone on the server that it will be going down in X minutes (usually 5-10 so they can get another song in or two) before I shut the server down.

Any other disconnects in the middle of the day/song with no message are server crashes which the updates are trying to fix. The server crashes usually once every 1-2 days currently but I am trying to get it more stable with my recent updates.