Weekly server maintenance EU times?

Aethyriel · February 7, 2012

Maybe someone who lives in Europe can confirm this next part (which I already know the answer to):

Don't Europeans (Western/Northern at least) regularly take 2-4 hour long lunches as opposed to the customary 1 hour lunch here in America? If so, it is indeed conceivable that a lot of Europeans do in fact play during the day time, if only for shorter periods when compared to your average night time sessions.

This is why a lot of people around the world dislike Americans. So many of us can be completely ignorant of the culture and societal behaviors of other nations. Hell, we can even be completely oblivious to our own culture as east coasters seem to think that they are the center of the world and can't seem to comprehend that midnight is actually still peak time for a lot of PSTers.

Even worse, we sometimes are actually arrogant enough to automatically apply our standards onto the rest of the world as if our way is the best or only way. *Rolls eyes at American Exceptionalism* The era of American unipolarism is over, get used to the idea. And yes, this does transcribe to the gaming world as well.

In Germany at least most people work shifts that change weekly/monthly whatever, so sometimes people would work the "former sandart" 8am - 4/5pm or 12am - 8/9pm or 4pm12-pm.. you get the idea I guess.

On top of that, in order to make germans look better or whatever, our politicians decided to make 2 or more people share 1 job, so you could be stuck having half day of and workin the shift from 4pm to 8 pm or something, so yeah, maintenance cuts in on playtime for some, but probably most of them are actually university students, don't know bout you, but we often have classes or what you call it in the afternoon and none in the morning and students are probably a huge part of the player base.

For the other part of your post I won't say much but... people in europe look down on you and your way of life, political system etc most of the time... like that time you elected Bush.. and then you did it again... we were all like *** dude? Your politicians are actually a real laughing stock round here :x

oh, and btw: Blizz had server downtimes from 3am - 11 am in Europe and afaik it was the same for the US, you just got every patch 1 day earlier (you had maint. on tuesday morning and we had it on wednesday morning) which nobody really cared about, at least it didn't cut into playtime for most of people. I srsly don't know why BW can't do the same thing, it's not like their a tiny company... even Trion could do it in Rift (although they didn't even do that much maintenance.. and if, it was 2 hours max.. BW should just buy Trion, srsly, best programmers in the business).

Edited February 7, 2012 by Aethyriel

Tralesh · February 7, 2012

Another week of downtime during the day, so myself and my wife are back off to EQ2, where they do manage to do seperate patch times.

Two more accounts closed.

Silversable · February 7, 2012

Maybe someone who lives in Europe can confirm this next part (which I already know the answer to):

Don't Europeans (Western/Northern at least) regularly take 2-4 hour long lunches as opposed to the customary 1 hour lunch here in America? If so, it is indeed conceivable that a lot of Europeans do in fact play during the day time, if only for shorter periods when compared to your average night time sessions.

That mostly depends on the job you have.

My personal case (I work in France) : typical lunch break is less than an hour (45 minutes is the norm).

However, standard work hours are arranged around a two-hour lunch break, because a number of people commute home and back to have lunch. It's not convenient in very large urban areas like Paris / London or such, but in medium-sized cities (around 500K or so), it is perfectly workable since the one-way trip usually takes less than half an hour.

But for those who have lunch at or close to their work place, one-hour lunch break is fairly standard.

It must also be understood that this varies acording to company, branch, or national social agreements - so you might have one place where lunch break is 50 minutes and strictly regulated, while the company next to it has much more flexible work hours allowing people to take anything between one and two or more hour breaks for midday nourishment and rest.

It varies from country to country as well. My colleagues in Germany, for instance, tend to check earlier on the average (I'm an early bird, far from the norm ) but also tend to check out slightly earlier as well; shifting their work hours towards the morning instead of the evening. In Spain, the midday break tends to be much longer and work hours shift towards the morning and evening. Work patterns also tend to vary according to societal factors (employment of women, existence of child care, and so on), which, once again, varies from one country to the next.

All in all, while the European Union alone includes 50% more people than the United States, considering it as a single, fairly homogeneous entity is a dire mistake. There are even significant variations *within one country* sometimes (Italy, France, Germany and Spain are fairly good examples of that).

After all, what can you expect of people who have had several thousand years of common history mostly consisting on warring upon each other ? We might have resolved some of our issues, but we, as a general rule, are still acutely aware - and stubbornly proud - of our differences

Raaveni · February 7, 2012

What amazes me and has done so throughout all of the discussion on the threads on this subject, is the American players' feel the need to support a huge multinational company instead of their European fellow players. Many, not all mind you, of you seem to think we on the Eastern side of the big A are requesting something outrageous, something you people would never do. It's so fanatic, that it would seem we are threatening your national pride or security...

Please try to see the issue from our side. We are paying for the game on a monthly basis. We would like to have the possibility (even though it's not probably wise or healthy) to play when ever we want, any day we want. Hell we'd like the opportunity to play every hour every day. I understand the game needs the maintenance as do the servers and I understand that such a maintenance cannot be done without fairly long breaks in the service. (or actually it could if all the servers were doubled/clustered, that's how it's done in IT generally anyway) So some people will suffer from those breaks always.

However I believe it's fairly safe to say that during the night hours - say 2-8am - the servers are running on low load. (that's night time everywhere, not just in Europe) Therefore a maintenance window on separate schedules for US/Canada/Mexico/etc and Europe would give the majority of us the best opportunity to play together when we want. So here's where again people opposing the idea (mostly Americans I guess) say:

"But it's so expensive to have two schedules. They'd need two teams to do it. It would be inhumane to expect European support guys to work during their night time. etc. etc."

No it wouldn't. First of all Bioware is making dozens of Millions of USD/EUR every month out of the game. They can afford it. They can afford to have two teams doing the updates. They can afford to have double amount of servers allowing them to update offline ones while the game goes on on the online ones. They can afford to pay overtime for the guys working at night.

Also. If it really is such a pain in the butt for the maintenance guys to work in the night, then why not have the European guys do the maintenance for US and vice versa? Also, they are doing the maintenance in the US during the night. Why isn't it so inhumane for them?

So please try to see it from our point of view. Having two separate maintenance schedules is not something that would hurt you, our American friends. Your service would still be as good as it is. It would simply allow us Europeans to have the same level of service for the same price we pay. Not too much to ask, is it? Other games do it, why not SWTOR?

And I'd like to say I'm sorry if I offended someone with my post. I was definitely not trying to do so.

RevansSoul · February 7, 2012

What amazes me and has done so throughout all of the discussion on the threads on this subject, is the American players' feel the need to support a huge multinational company instead of their European fellow players.

Not going to quote all of it, but very good post. The fact is, there are a lot of sad people out there who like to just give other people a hard time. Either that, or they're afraid changes will affect their own maintenance schedule.

As for BioWare, we are all their paying customers. Yet one group of customers gets better service than all the others. The US players living in the Central Standard Timezone get maintenance while they are asleep. Everyone outside that timezone gets inconvenient hours because of that. I'm pretty sure that's breaching the service BioWare offered all its customers when they bought the product. If they can't provide the same quality of service to customers worldwide, then they shouldn't have sold the game worldwide. And they know it, but they won't do anything, you see before they are considerate to the customer, they are considerate to their purse. Once that starts to hurt, they'll do something, and not a moment before, no matter who gets inconvenienced. But I'm not paying a cent to get treated as a second-class-customer. Their consistent refusal to even comment on this, or throw us some insulting generic reply, is grating on the nerves.

It would be nice to get an opinion from outside this forum though, for some objectivity. I've been contacting game review websites and magazines about this, I will not stop until I get feedback.

Aerevan · February 7, 2012

After all, what can you expect of people who have had several thousand years of common history mostly consisting on warring upon each other ? We might have resolved some of our issues, but we, as a general rule, are still acutely aware - and stubbornly proud - of our differences

Like your country's lightsaber bread fetish. And carrying that dough saber under your armpit, yugh.

Urdnaxela · February 7, 2012

1. Why is it that the maintenance and all the other downtime period happen during European mid-day (which is a long way from off-peak hours)? Each week, each end of the month the European players have to "suck it up" and stay cool about the fact that even though they pay more for a service, they receive less than the Americans.

2. Has any Bioware employee ever heard of Time Zones?

3. Do you realize that most of Europe are GMT+1 and GMT+2, and not GMT?

4. I do realize that it's really trendy to say: "well, just get out for a couple of hours" but most European players would really like to just sleep while you "maintenance" the servers (and the forums of course - what a shocker) or put an "emergency - fix some fonts" patch, just like the American players do. So where is this discriminatory and offensive behavior towards your European customers come from?

5. Why are the forums shut down each time there's some scheduled (or not) downtime?

6. Where is the fabled "highest Quality of Service" you promised, advertised and marketed?

7. How does this "highest Quality of Service" that you so much strive for gets achieved when:

a) the European servers are in the worst possible location in Europe (bar Iceland maybe) from a Quality of Service point of view

b) the European players, while paying substantially more for this service, receive less then their American counterparts.

c) the Bioware employees, even the British one(s), seem to fall into the, obviously mistaken perception, of American ignorance and stupidity by not realizing that saying "the downtime will happen in the early hours of..." when the service/product is sold all over the world (note: all over the world != Bioware's definition of worldwide).

8. What does the "highest Quality of Service" translated into for the Russian players, who were from the start giving the lowest service (by refusing them the CE edition, by choosing the location of servers in Ireland etc.) since every maintenance and any other downtime cuts right into their peak time (Russia is mostly GMT+3, GMT+4)?

9. How come you say that the current maintenance schedule is affecting the least number of people when this schedule is present since the start of the game and allegedly that was the time you base your "statistics" on?

It's just like me saying that people sleep in every day based on the number of people that do sleep in during the weekend.

So, has any Bioware employee ever heard of statistics? how can u claim to have an accurate number based on which you set the painful maintenance schedule since your statistics were made over a short time span (less than a month), during holiday season (not representative for a whole year), during Early Access (not covering all players) and so on and so forth?

Mandrax · February 7, 2012

What amazes me and has done so throughout all of the discussion on the threads on this subject, is the American players' feel the need to support a huge multinational company instead of their European fellow players. Many, not all mind you, of you seem to think we on the Eastern side of the big A are requesting something outrageous, something you people would never do. It's so fanatic, that it would seem we are threatening your national pride or security...

<snip>

For many, I think it's just an opportunity to troll, for others, they fear that by changing EU times it will somehow have an impact on their own times.

Ultimately, it's very easy to support a terrible feature if you are not affected yourself in any way.

XionoraSoulfire · February 7, 2012

The way they do it now, does affect the least amount of people though.

the majority of the US is sleeping, and the majority of the EU is working right now.

Technically the time is best if you consider they apparently only have 1 team on the servers. rather then the usual separate ones.

Though i do hope at some point the downtimes will get split between time zones, and us Europeans have our own downtime during the night when we are asleep.

I think right now they simply don't have the people to maintain 2 separate schedules on server maintenance.

And if we get our own downtime, that would mean we get all the content sooner then the US too, which will cause issues and people whining about it, more so then the people expressing their frustration with the EU downtimes.

pzljug · February 7, 2012

And if we get our own downtime, that would mean we get all the content sooner then the US too, which will cause issues and people whining about it, more so then the people expressing their frustration with the EU downtimes.

Or a day later mind you. This whole thread is just one big assumption!

XionoraSoulfire · February 7, 2012

Or a day later mind you. This whole thread is just one big assumption!

Well if it would be a day later then the EU would whine about it =P

In the end it's pointless right now to debate this entire issue of EU downtime.

As far as both the USA and EU is concerned, if the downtime has to be at the same time for what ever reasons, then the time they have now seems best suited.

Urdnaxela · February 7, 2012