Status pages and telling players

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Is it just me?

When weed races go down, Kai watches hundreds of players ask the same question on Discord: "is it just me?"

A status page answers before they ask: a public page that shows the state of each part of the game.

Components and their states

In Atlassian's Statuspage, components are "each of the separate infrastructure or functional part of your service". Shard Garden's are Login, Gardens and saves, Weed races, and the Shop.

Each component always has one of five states: Operational, Under maintenance, Degraded performance, Partial outage, or Major outage.

Quick check

Races still start, but it takes 10 seconds instead of 2. Which state does Kai set for Weed races?

  1. Degraded performance
  2. Major outage
  3. Operational
Show the answer

Degraded performance

Races work, just slowly. Degraded performance says exactly that, without scaring players.

An incident in four steps

Each update on an incident has a status:

Write the update

The fix is deployed. Failed saves are falling, but not yet back to normal. Which status?

  1. Monitoring
  2. Resolved
  3. Investigating
Show the answer

Monitoring

The fix is in, and the team is watching the symptoms fade. Resolved comes when everything is back to normal.

True story: the status page that needed S3

On 28 February 2017, a member of Amazon's S3 storage team ran a command to remove some servers. One input was typed wrong, and many more servers were removed than intended. S3 in its US-EAST-1 region was disrupted from 9:37 am until 1:54 pm, Pacific time.

Amazon's own status dashboard depended on S3, so for two hours it could not show the problem. Amazon posted updates on Twitter instead. Its tool now removes servers more slowly and won't go below the minimum each part needs.

Source: AWS: Summary of the Amazon S3 service disruption (28 February 2017), aws.amazon.com

Quick check

What does Amazon's dashboard teach about Shard Garden's status page?

  1. Run it apart from the game, so it works when the game does not
  2. Run it on the game's own servers, to save money
  3. Update it only after the outage
Show the answer

Run it apart from the game, so it works when the game does not

A status page is needed most when the game is broken. If it shares the game's servers, it breaks at the same moment.

What to write

Each update says what players see, what they should do, and when the next update comes: "Weed races are slow to start. Your gardens are safe. Next update by 18:30 UTC."

Bolt says: Next: learning from what went wrong.

Fact-checked 12 October 2026