4h. downtime... a SATURDAY???

[Lorealin]

id rather they do maitenance and fix stuff rather then let broken stuff slide. Stop QQ and let them do their JOBS!!!

 

I think the point joker...is that why should they have to take them down for 8hrs every other day. That is a disgrace and a completely unacceptable.

[Maidel]

Prime time? Doesn't start at 3, 4 or 5. At least 7pm, usually 8PM onward is the standard definition.

 

ITS THE WEEKEND.

 

We are not talking about week nights - most people are off at weekends! The entire weekend is prime time for goodness sakes.

[RakeHoxven]

no patch is worth 4 hours of my prime time entertainment on the weekend. Focus on the costumers please when you make such dicisions.

 

imagine if you had a car and every weekend your car brand mechanic drove over to your house to take your car out of the driveway and disallow you to use it. Your car off limits on Friday night and Saturday morning (midday saturday for european people). Then imagine the insanity is going to happen again 3 days later for 8 hours.

 

 

Get off my car!@

 

 

If you want to fix something make sure you work it out with users so it is not inconvenient.

Edited January 29, 2012 by RakeHoxven

[jonobiwan]

Shouldn't the patch already happened?

[Srilania]

This is currently unacceptable.

 

1. There are MMO's out there that EITHER have no downtime, patching things live, or cycle, setting aside a portion of servers, so that players pinched in the downtime can at the very least play.

 

2. Constantly taking the servers down at the peak playtime for enough people that Bioware seems to be worried we will pitch a fit, and closes the forums off to us.

 

3. 4 hours for one fix? get that down to 15 minutes if you really have to patch on non patch days.

 

there's no excuse. there's MMo's that have server cycles, taking a third to half the servers down, patching them, then so on, instead of merely taking them all down.

 

At the very least, leave a small handfull up, on the test server buffer, so that people can at the very least have SOMETHING to do while you all are waxing blaster barrels and lightsaber hilts on us.

[jonobiwan]

This is currently unacceptable.

 

1. There are MMO's out there that EITHER have no downtime, patching things live, or cycle, setting aside a portion of servers, so that players pinched in the downtime can at the very least play.

 

2. Constantly taking the servers down at the peak playtime for enough people that Bioware seems to be worried we will pitch a fit, and closes the forums off to us.

 

3. 4 hours for one fix? get that down to 15 minutes if you really have to patch on non patch days.

 

there's no excuse. there's MMo's that have server cycles, taking a third to half the servers down, patching them, then so on, instead of merely taking them all down.

 

At the very least, leave a small handfull up, on the test server buffer, so that people can at the very least have SOMETHING to do while you all are waxing blaster barrels and lightsaber hilts on us.

I disagree. If there is an issue big enough to fix it on a SATURDAY then I'd rather it be fixed and weekly maintenance is normal for MMOs.

[C-Bee]

I disagree. If there is an issue big enough to fix it on a SATURDAY then I'd rather it be fixed and weekly maintenance is normal for MMOs.

 

Obviously this was not the case since BW were in NO rush to start patching untill AFTER U.S. peak hours. If it was important enough to be patched during weekend, they would have started patching as soon as they got it ready instead of 8 hours later. There is no excuse...

[Asiyah]

I find that the need to take the servers down on any other day but the regular weekly maintenance is not kind.

 

If it was for something urgent I would expect transparency, instead the servers are taken down, no patch was applied and no clear indication of what the need was for has been supplied.

 

Communication to your community is paramount, I am still waiting for the reason the servers went down yesterday for 'maintenance'.

 

Oh and disabling posting on the forums every time maintenance occurs is just ridiculous.

[Rhynien]

I will put this preface to what I'm about to post:

 

I'm a US player. I'm dead asleep by the time of most maintenances, including the one in question here. So before anyone tries to throw out the often used 'do something else' line, this actually isn't personally impacting me. I've also played plenty of MMOs, stretching back to FFXI (long, long before even ToAU and WotG) and SWG, and others between here and there, so this is not a 'lolnew to MMOs' thing, either. I merely have comments to add.

 

Why is it that any maintenance for this game is 4+ hours without fail? Even the scheduled well-in-advance weekly kind? Rift is probably the best at keeping downtimes small that I've seen in my MMO career, and I loved them for it. Is the engine for Rift really that much better optimized that they can have maintenances that seldom are scheduled to last longer than two hours, and nine times of ten, they manage to get it done before the projected time?

 

I honestly can't see a reason for the servers for this game to be offline for 4-8 hours (depending on what's going on in any given maintenance) every week. Is the engine for that game that difficult to patch compared to Rift's? Is it the number of servers? I haven't been on Rift in some time, several months, and as I understand it there are (or should be) mergers. Still. It seems like it's taking much longer for what -with the exclusion of 1.1- has mostly been bugfix patches than any other game I've played. Except maybe FFXI. But...yeah, Square-Enix.

 

I empathize with the EU players so far as the time goes, because I've been playing on EU servers for several years now, starting when I joined Laurelin on LotRO. I migrated to TOR with most of my friends from there, so naturally I just hopped on an EU server here, too. My work schedule leaves me playing in a ghost town a lot of nights, but I don't mind it because when I am off, I have my friends around. But it also meant maintenances cutting into my playtime, which I was content with, because it worked for the actual EU people, and it was an EU server. I'd be just as happy to deal with it now if they went for separate times.

 

If they aren't willing to move/separate maintenance times for the EU, they need to look into a way of streamlining and cutting down the amount of time the things last. If they were only two hours for fixes, 4 or more for major updates, I think that would alleviate at least some of the hard feelings. I'm also fine with alternating maintenance times. One week US primetime, one week EU. One client, separate patching times worked fine on Rift so far as I could ever tell, just you had to basically 'rollback' if you wanted to switch a patched client to an unpatched server group, but it wasn't some major to do. Not so sure why that wouldn't work here, as well, if all else fails.

[Kuhboose]

Sigh the generation of players now that expect everything to be perfect is quite a sad one to say the least. The game isn't even 2 months old and all this whining over them trying to fix things.

 

I can see it now though...*Patch and downtime American servers* *Patch doesn't go as planned so they postpone on EU servers till correct* *EU players rush forums to demand they receive the patch that the American servers got and they didn't*

 

Same dance, different tune. Thus why I generally stay away from the general forums haha.

 

Edit: Oh and if Bioware truly didn't care about what you guys are saying, I'm sure they would have just shut down the thread once it reached it's limit and start deleting the new ones..just saying..

Edited January 29, 2012 by Kuhboose

[SlingerX]

I agree with the OP that Saturday is not a good day to do patches. Also in the UK it's 6 hours ahead of where I am. Do it on a weekday at say 2am here, when most folks are asleep, and 8am there, when most folks are going to school or work. Or break the patches up into smaller bits and distribute them evenly across time zones. I dunno, I just think it should be fair. I've never had one patch happen during my after work playtimes and these guys are getting too many.

[Ralidyn]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=242968

 

first parragraph what i understand is that tomorrow morning (saturday!) there will be a patch and 4h. downtime?

 

are we crazy or what? you don't screw EU enough already with weekly maintenance schedule, now you're gonna screw us over half a saturday too?

 

Read a book.

[Mcclaine]

Honestly everyone, you are all acting like this is some new and shocking thing. Every MMO I have played, Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, WoW, LotR, etc., have all done there maintenance at the same times. Saturday is not all that much of a shocker either

Just because others have done it. Doesn't mean BioWare should. Plus most, if not all of these "others" learnt from their mistakes and changed to separate maintenance times.

I would love to hear your qualifications that enable you to make that statement.

And i would like to see some constructive comments from you. Instead of just bashing what people say.

Oh, billing engines... well then you are obviously qualified to make judgments on how a worldwide mmo can do updates. My bad.

There you go again.

Many people keep saying this.

 

How do you KNOW they can do it? Because other games do?

 

Here's an idea... maybe they don't WANT to do separate times.

 

Whatever the reason, they do it. Either accept it or cancel your sub.

Because other MMO's that a "Free-to-play" with a tiny budget compared to BioWare (remember they spent 200 Million on this game) are able to do it. If they can do it. Why can't BioWare? And the fact that we don't know why is a problem in itself. What could be so important that they would risk losing their EU player base and not even tell us what that reason might be?

 

Also OmegaMayham you come from America (i checked your bio). You have no idea how annoying this is for us EU players. Come back when they start doing the Maintenance during the day in the US.

 

 

 

The thing that gets me is, all these people that make excuses for BioWare's bad customer service. If BioWare where to have amazing Customer Service this game would be more popular. More people would buy it. Making them more money. Giving us more people to play with, while ensuring we have a lot less to complain about. Makes sense to me. No one whats to work in a bad environment so why would we want to pay to play in one.

[SilverWF]

Because the previous thread has exceeded our normal threshold for thread length, we've started this new thread for the community to discuss maintenance times.

 

As always, we ask that the community keep the following things in mind when responding:

 

• Stay on Target - Please keep discussion on topic.
  
• Insults - Please do not resort to or use them in any way in your posts. Posts should be productive, not destructive.
  
• Trolling - Please do not post messages that are purposefully designed to provoke, antagonize, or otherwise elicit a negative emotional response.
  
• Agree to Disagree - Be respectful of others' viewpoints even if they are opposite of your own. Discuss disagreements constructively.
  
• Flag, Don't Fight - Utilize the Flag Post feature to report possible rules violations, rather than responding to or fighting them.
  

 

Thank you and enjoy the discussion!

 

Lol, they kidding!

We dont wanna "discussing"!

 

We want answers from the community manager!

[Dewota]

I do not understand why they havnt seperate times.. EU players pays more a month, more for digital deluxe version and then we get smacked in the head right after. i really hope its a beginner fail and they will fix it very very soon!

[LaVolpex]

nobody is saying they should not fix stuff.

 

EU players just say we want it to be at hours where *most* of us are sleeping. same treatment US players are getting. not more, not less.

and certainly NOT on weekends, at ANY hour at all.

 

but i guess, that this little concern of ours, escaped your attention through last 105 pages, hum?

 

umm.....pardon me but exactly how is this possible?

 

your "sleeping hours" are our "Awake" hours, so how do you propose them to do it?

 

take servers down a few at a time? then mantianance will take the better part of the week, they cant have a devoted team 24/7 doing maint just so lil jhonny free on weekends doesnt have to go 3 hours without gaming the game that according to the masses sucks (gimme a friggin break)

 

i dont want an infraction but the pointless complaining (seeing as no amount of QQ is going to make the maint go any faster)that i isometimes see on these forums is disgusting, bioware guys are doing a good job and all people do here is throw poo on bioware and each other here...

 

bah

Edited January 29, 2012 by LaVolpex

[ShotByBothSides]

Pardon me in return.

 

Your reply, whilst factual, is clearly from someone who is not at all affected by these maintenance times, and you do not seem to appreciate that we are now living in a global marketplace that has to consider all customers, not just those that happen to live in the same time zone as the parent company.

 

By the way EA have dozens of offices around the world, so it is not as if they do not have the local feet on the ground, which really are not necessary given that today’s data centre operating methodology is predominantly carried out remotely. So this is about shifts and therefore some cost, and that should have already been built into the operating model for TOR. However I am afraid that EA’s track record does not bode well for them to have budgeted for this, more like the opposite.

 

Yesterday’s outage was yet another straw for me and I have now joined the growing numbers of players who are enjoying TOR, but are not intending to pay for a further sub until Bioware address this issue; at least they could come up with a statement, but even that seems beyond them.

 

The Oceania launch of TOR will be interesting, for the current outage times hit their prime time. So I am keeping my fingers crossed that Bioware have something up their sleeves to deal with Oceania and at that time we will see a different schedule for Europe too.

[Triss]

I am very shocked to see, after 99+ pages in a thread that was viewed over 80k times, there has been no word from the team we spoon feed out money to.

[Dewota]

Originally Posted by Kalantris

First of all I'd like to point out, that it's me paying you not the other way around. Therefore my feedback can be as much as "this system sucks. Fix it". Negative feedback of this sort is all a company can expect. I don't have to tell you how to fix your game. It's your job to fix it then and come up with ideas, that actually make sense. Which you so far often fail to do.

 

Second of all you really need to tone down your expectations. From day one you disregard any constructive feedback whatsoever, literally [self-censored] your customers in the face. The rage, insults and rude behaviour is the effect of your doings, so deal with it. Dealing with it by deleting posts and closing threads will only hurt you, as people need to vent their rage somewhere. They'll either unsubscribe or start venting on other forums, which are read not only by your current customers, but also the potential ones. That's how black PR works.

 

Third of all there is no constructive feedback to give in the subject of the maintenance system. It's obviously and carefully planned to cater your american customers disregarding Europe entirely. Server statistics show, that EU servers are a couple times busier during maintenance hours than the american ones. You could at least have the balls to admit it instead of feeding us with your worthless [self-censored] about "performing maintenance in off-peak hours". There's nothing worse than lying to your customers in the dumbest possible way and expecting them to believe it. We feel like you think we're [self-censored]. We are not. Therefore stop pissing us off with your pathetic lies and admit, that you don't give a flying [self-censored] about your european customers, which are basically half of your playerbase (based on server stat graphs). We'd have a clear view then, unsubscribe and watch your pathetic game crumble to dust while playing something we can actually play whenver we want.

 

Fourth of all today's maintenance was a bad joke. There are no critical updates in your patchnotes, I can see no fixes like "fixed an exploit, which allowed the attacking side to leave their spawn area before the game begins" or "fixed an exploit, which allowed players to run with the speed of light carrying the ball in huttball games". All I see are quest fixes and some class balancing changes. This could have been done any other day, but you had to pick saturday, which is, for a lot of us, the main part of the week we can play the game.

 

Last but not least you will not tell me how to give you feedback and I'd strongly advise you (trying to be constructive here) not to control the community on your forums like that, because that will only cause people to create unofficial forums, where they can flame you any time they feel like they need to do it. Accept the fact, that forum is a place you can actually check how the playerbase feels. In case you can't see it alread I'm going to give you a clear message: We're pissed off.

 

Shame I bought 60 days in advance.

 

Regards,

Kalantris

requoted from orginal thread

[JessianKaaneo]

So for the GMT +2/+3/+4 people playing legitimately in Europe, having the servers down from 10/11/12 until 3/4/5pm isnt prime time how exactly?

 

 

 

Because this patch didnt actually PATCH anything and didnt make the game better for 99.99% of players.

 

 

 

Which is an utterlty ridiculous thing to say. People cannot possibly play for 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, they pay to get access for a precious few hours a week, for a lot of people those 5 hours were in fact 1/8th of their entire months play time.

 

Going to fix your points here..

 

Im based in Scotland, (good part of the UK, until independence in 2014) and i woke up at 815am due to my appendix opp woke me up in pain... i showered popped onto the PC to get the server message saying game is down for maintenance until 12pm.

 

Okay i can live with that, popped back to bed read some more of my book whilst popping some painkillers. Got back up at 12pm and tried again, this time, ooops something went wrong when we tried to patch.... hamster 13423 died on the wheel... need to fix it...no scheduled up time as yet.

 

Again fair enough the servers are down nothing I can do about that... so i went fired up my 360 and done some guitar work on rock band 3... by this time its 1630pm. (still PEAK time for us here in UK) and at that point servers were roughly going back up.

 

So from 8am >>> 1630pm relates to 8 hours LOST time players in the EU lost...

 

lets look at the US player base.... 8am here in the UK would relate to 3am Eastern time, Pacific time (san fran) would have been 12am in the morning.

 

So here basically the servers go down during 12am midnight and 5am in the USA... so all the Americans can sleep.

 

We wake up and LOSE 8 hours downtime, yet the Americans wake up around 8am and jump straight into the game...

 

So we know here and now how bioware are going to treat us 2nd class denziens so as a community how are European players going to react if this happens again? Do we all start flame wars. Or do we take our genuine issues to OTHER websites and complain bitterly about the sub par treatment of EU players ????

[GrumpySwe]

I am very shocked to see, after 99+ pages in a thread that was viewed over 80k times, there has been no word from the team we spoon feed out money to.

Just wanted to post that they actually have responded just not in this thread.

 

Hey everyone; I appreciate everyone's views on this topic and I can understand the feelings being expressed here.

 

Our Live team took the decision to roll out today's 1.1.0c patch during Friday night/Saturday morning with the knowledge that it would affect a higher than usual number of players. Unfortunately, we had to make changes that required server downtime. The Live team felt those changes were urgently required and that was why the maintenance was scheduled. Generally speaking, we try and ensure all required maintenance happens during our weekly maintenance period, but this was one situation where we had to move forward quickly; to not do so could have led to severe performance issues across the service as a whole.

 

I want to address a couple of other points from the OP:

 

 

This is a little inaccurate. I'm not sure where your timing comes from, but our original post regarding the downtime was posted at 5:10PM CST (Austin time). At that point, we were unsure of the start time for the maintenance so posted without it. The post was updated with the exact timing of the maintenance at 8:54PM CST, which would give just over five hours notice of the exact timing.

 

Five hours is not a generous window of notice, and for that we apologize. In this instance, we updated with the precise timing as soon as we could, but we'll strive to improve.

 

 

Overall, this is a fair point. Generally speaking, every Friday we post details of our upcoming maintenance period to give plenty of advance notice. Because of the timing of this patch, we thought it might be easier to roll both notices into one. We didn't feel the ambiguity was too extreme, as the upcoming patch was detailed up front, but I can see how it might have confused some. We'll improve.

 

As stated, the patch was deemed necessary and urgent enough to be rolled out on a Friday night/Saturday morning (Austin time). We didn't take this lightly, and don't expect or wish it to be a regular occurrence.

 

To those of you in Europe, I want you to know that we'll be discussing maintenance windows and how we can improve their timing this coming week. We may not have an update immediately (and not before the scheduled maintenance on January 31st) but we have been paying attention to your opinions.

 

Thanks again for the feedback - it helps us know where to improve.

[Leggomy]

Going to fix your points here..

 

Im based in Scotland, (good part of the UK, until independence in 2014) and i woke up at 815am due to my appendix opp woke me up in pain... i showered popped onto the PC to get the server message saying game is down for maintenance until 12pm.

 

Okay i can live with that, popped back to bed read some more of my book whilst popping some painkillers. Got back up at 12pm and tried again, this time, ooops something went wrong when we tried to patch.... hamster 13423 died on the wheel... need to fix it...no scheduled up time as yet.

 

Again fair enough the servers are down nothing I can do about that... so i went fired up my 360 and done some guitar work on rock band 3... by this time its 1630pm. (still PEAK time for us here in UK) and at that point servers were roughly going back up.

 

So from 8am >>> 1630pm relates to 8 hours LOST time players in the EU lost...

 

lets look at the US player base.... 8am here in the UK would relate to 3am Eastern time, Pacific time (san fran) would have been 12am in the morning.

 

So here basically the servers go down during 12am midnight and 5am in the USA... so all the Americans can sleep.

 

We wake up and LOSE 8 hours downtime, yet the Americans wake up around 8am and jump straight into the game...

 

So we know here and now how bioware are going to treat us 2nd class denziens so as a community how are European players going to react if this happens again? Do we all start flame wars. Or do we take our genuine issues to OTHER websites and complain bitterly about the sub par treatment of EU players ????

 

Ok first off not all Americans live on the east coast. Second not all Americans are jobless and therefore do not get up at 8am to play games. Get up at 8am to go to work school etc. Also UK is GMT -5 if I remember right so thats not 3am on west coast. The servers go down at 3am EASTERN TIME and come back up at 10am EASTERN time. So they do not go down between midnight and 5am for anyone but west coast people. There are 3 other time zones in the usa.

 

They are not going to cater a pay to play game to people who dont work and sit at home 24/7 playing the game. It doesnt matter when they do downtime someone will always be affected. Most people work at 8am they do not jump into a video game. You get home in the evening eat dinner play some then bed time. Thats how 99% of the world works. 1% sits home at 8am on a video game. Thats why the maint schedule is like it is.

[Dewota]

uk is gmt.. wauw..

[Leggomy]

uk is gmt.. wauw..

 

You know what I mean UK is -5 GMT to eastern time in the USA. Sorry I didnt think id have to explain that part lol.

[Kanharn]

What was so important that it couldn't wait until the already scheduled 8 HOUR maintenance?

 

Is your life so unimportant you can survive without SWTOR for 8 hrs lol.