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

[Mcclaine]

You refuse to address the point, which is on topic.

 

They did the maintenance as soon as they had it ready. As you suggest they should.

 

But without enough notice or testing. Which you are complaining about.

 

Which is it? You can't have it both ways.

 

You don't honestly believe they conveniently had it ready just when American off-peak time starts do you? At the exact same time Weekly Maintenance starts?

[Skoobie]

Yes and as a result of BW's decisions regarding maintenance times that are inconvenient for certain group of customers, we have this thread here. I hope you can see the pattern there.

 

Of course I do.

 

This thread is no different then I've seen in other MMO's.

 

Players from other nations play a game that's American based, and they want the company to change just for them.

 

And then when the company says they will look into it, the complaints still keep coming.

 

Oh yes...I'm familiar with the pattern....

[C-Bee]

Of course I do.

 

This thread is no different then I've seen in other MMO's.

 

Players from other nations play a game that's American based, and they want the company to change just for them.

 

And then when the company says they will look into it, the complaints still keep coming.

 

Oh yes...I'm familiar with the pattern....

 

And this would not be acceptable if the game was released only in NA. However the game was released in NA AND EU. This means that customers from both locations should be able to receave equal service.

 

I also do not understand why you need to come in this thread acting all hostile. We are simply discussing the matter here... That is what forums are for.

Edited January 29, 2012 by C-Bee

[Additc]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2280995#edit2280995

 

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.

 

First post in the dev tracker. Take it however you want to.

[Mandrax]

Of course I do.

 

This thread is no different then I've seen in other MMO's.

 

Players from other nations play a game that's American based, and they want the company to change just for them.

 

And then when the company says they will look into it, the complaints still keep coming.

 

Oh yes...I'm familiar with the pattern....

 

I'm also familiar with the pattern of EU customers playing on EU servers receiving maintenance at the best times for EU players in a game that was officially launched in Europe. Many other games have this. I'm surprised BioWare didn't do it, if they are serious about the longevity of this game, they will change it.

 

If I'm playing a game which is housed on US servers, I'll always accept that maintenance will be carried out at the best times for US players. This is not one of those games however.

 

If this is a global product as BioWare would have us believe, they need to start thinking and acting as a global company. There is a world outside of the USA.

Edited January 29, 2012 by Mandrax

[Jigsaw-Complex]

Bioware has made it quite clear that US customers are given preferential treatment when it comes to scheduling downtime.

 

I feel for the euros, i really do.

 

It makes no sense whatsoever that BW does downtime during the time it does now. I'm sorry, but 2-3AM Central and Eastern time is the last few hours of gaming i do in a night. That means downtime happens at midnight PST time.

 

This is without a doubt the most infuriating and ignorant thing i've seen done by a MMO company. Screw messing up and double billing people. Screw unpopular revisions. How si it acceptable at all to shut down the game and have it be during playable hours for so many people?

Edited January 30, 2012 by Zoggel
Rude

[corbanite]

Of course I do.

 

This thread is no different then I've seen in other MMO's.

 

Players from other nations play a game that's American based, and they want the company to change just for them.

 

And then when the company says they will look into it, the complaints still keep coming.

 

Oh yes...I'm familiar with the pattern....

 

Haven't seen this thread in Trions MMO Rift.. I wonder why that is.

 

Look serverside only patches.. run them at different times..

regular maintenance.. run them at different times..

 

client side patches you need a proper versioning system in place.. one that could switch back and forth through client versions would be cool in line with whatever the server requires. Patch released at same time and could be designed and implemented as a wrapper the the existing client. these can be released and updated at the same time. I mean this should all be pretty trivial to implement tbh.. you know what you are changing and what has changed from patch to patch exactly line by line of code.

 

 

oh look what you have there. Why the hell do they need to take down US and EU together?

 

You want UML diagrams of how this would work?

Edited January 29, 2012 by corbanite

[Terrahero]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2280995#edit2280995

 

First post in the dev tracker. Take it however you want to.

 

And ill be looking forward to seeing how they adress this issue. So far maintenance has been scheduled when it best suited the American playerbase, regardless of how much it screwed over the European playerbase.

If you think about it, last saterday was a patch to benefit the US side. They got their maintenance in a period that the servers are quiet and when they get back to playing they'll have some of their issues resolved with no inconvenience at all.

 

However the Europeans missed out on 5h in the middle of a saterday. To fix relative minor issues (i dont care what Bioware says, the issues noted are minor.) Causing more inconvenience then it actually prevents. Infact, i never had a "disconnect to login screen", ow thats not true. It happend today for the first time, funny as they supposedly fixed that yesterday!

 

The only people i can see saying "this is fine, get over it" are either the die hard Bioware fans who will idolize anything they do. And the US, who are simply scared to **** that Bioware might realize half their money comes from Europe and plans the next maintenance in US prime-time.

 

In closing, seperate the damn downtimes already so no one has to get shafted. But if you insist Bioware, then spread the burden around. If not, i can guarentee you're European subs will drop.

[zWolf]

Was there ever any official word on the 'what was so important' that they had to do a weekend patch?

 

I cancelled my Sub over it, and before resubscribing I just want to know;

 

a) what was the horribly important rush to patch on a weekend that just couldn't wait till NOT a weekend.

 

b) is this going to happen often.

 

it was terribly inconvenient for the weekend plans that I had with several friends to play star wars all Friday night, there are other games that don't shut down on the weekend that I can play with them. Or at least, if they DO shut down then they are super sensitive to the feelings of their customers and they communicate what's going on. (normally this happens via Forums and a dialog ensues.) but BioWare took the low road, and shut the servers off...

 

Seriously, as I type this, I really don't know if it's worth resubscribing over.

 

sigh, I really like the game - but a Weekend shut down, with no explanation as to 'why' and why it was better for us to do it 'now' vs post pone just a bit really smacks of an uncaring nature that I'd rather not deal with.

 

so, ya, I'm searching, but I don't see much of an official response as to what went on, to help me better decide if I should re-sub up.

 

Did I just miss it?

 

thanks.

[Brosephiine]

Do you guys want things fixed in this game?

 

Then don't complain about patches.

[KarmaInferno]

Was there ever any official word on the 'what was so important' that they had to do a weekend patch?

 

Yes. It was in the patch notes.

 

Short version: a significant number of players kept getting disconnected from the game every few minutes, and when they weren't getting disconnected they were experiencing constant lag spikes freezing the game over and over. Basically the game was unplayable.

 

They apparently figured out how to solve the problem for some of the affected people, so rolled out the fix as soon as possible.

 

I have a question to ask people. Does anyone honestly think the folks at Bioware ENJOY having to come in on a weekend to WORK?

 

 

 

 

-k

[zWolf]

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.

 

 

that's not 'quite ' the point, and it's not really a ' generational' thing either - I'm a long time player (since the dawn.... well not Meridian... but Since UO at least,) and I'm older now - and this particular patch, with the lack of explanation of why it was so darn important to do it on a Saturday is what got under my skin. oh, and then, if I want to ask a question - I go to the forums, just to see them turned off for users! that was a slap in the face too. lucky me there are other outlets, only, by going there, Bioware gives up the opportunity to quickly respond to my concerns.

 

Were the forums up, a better explanation for 'why' the down time needed to happen when it did, and a heart felt Apology would have soothed the wound, and I'd have gone about my evening, ToR free - BUT they would have kept a subscriber - as it turns out, the 'shut down with no real reason given, and then the inability to get any answers from the official Forums... scratch that, I couldn't even ask the question, kicked me over the edge to cancellation-vill.

 

anyway, ya, it's not the generation that's the problem.

 

oh, and I'm sure I'll re-sub before my time runs out, the symbolic cancellation was the best way for me to show my frustration with the forums being down and all.

[oakamp]

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?

 

each time the ea patch, they should return the time to users,

or return fee to users.

 

Bugs does not deserve to pay.

[zWolf]

Yes. It was in the patch notes.

 

Short version: a significant number of players kept getting disconnected from the game every few minutes, and when they weren't getting disconnected they were experiencing constant lag spikes freezing the game over and over. Basically the game was unplayable.

 

They apparently figured out how to solve the problem for some of the affected people, so rolled out the fix as soon as possible.

 

I have a question to ask people. Does anyone honestly think the folks at Bioware ENJOY having to come in on a weekend to WORK?

 

 

 

 

-k

 

ok, well here is the deal, Karma... your 'shortened' explanation totally makes sense and is very understandible, (though that said, in my guild of over 200 with many active players sever disconnects and lag spikes didn't seem to be an issue for any of them, and my own experience didn't reflect those issues either...)

 

However, the deal is, that some how, after I read the patch notes, I really didn't 'get' that shortened version, and had your shortened version been what I saw, I'd have been a lot less upset as to the patch.

 

For sure, if there are a great many people that can't play, and your going to apply a fix that will make the game better for them that makes sense!

 

BUT like I said, That Was NOT the message that I got when I read the patch notes... they seemed like pretty much every other set of patch notes that mention 'improving optimization for a better play experience' or some such statement.

 

Bottom line, they should have had YOU write the announcement - and at the minimum they would have one more subscriber, heh, and best case, threads like these would have less posts and attention.

 

:-) I hope they hire some one like you to communicate, cause what I got out of what was provided,really didn't do the job. The salt in the wound was the 'forum shut down' where I couldn't even go to vent my Caffeine stimulated nerd rage.

 

--- in stead of post a response to this, I'm putting in an edit a few minutes after this post... ---

 

I found a web site that has the 'original post' that explained the down time, it is as I remembered - and there was none of the urgency stated in this post that you allude to, if the reasons that you stated WERE indeed them, they should have put them in their post, instead this is all it says:

 

 

--- start of maintenance post ---

 

"Hi everyone!

 

Our upcoming maintenance for January 28th will begin from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours, but could be extended.

 

There will be in-game notifications that the servers will be going down before maintenance begins.

 

In addition to this, we wanted to let you know that we will be performing scheduled maintenance for eight hours on January 31st, 2012 from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET). All game servers and swtor.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours, but could be extended.

 

For our new players, this weekly maintenance is done in order to make general improvements and to check performance of the game so that we can continue to provide a consistent, quality experience. Quite often (but not always) after a maintenance period there will a patch to download. After the maintenance, please login via the launcher to download the latest patch. If your launcher was open during the maintenance, you must close and reopen it for a fresh login.

 

Scheduled Maintenance

 

Date: Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

 

Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)

 

All game servers and swtor.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours.

 

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

--- end of quote ---

 

 

There are 7 lines of text that talk about the Weekend patch NONE of them state that it is urgent or anything of the sort. this is THE forum post that the majority of the players that were surprised by the outage were directed to for more information. I find nothing in there that you say is there, about it being a fix for many players etc. I do agree with you that such information SHOULD have been in there, even if it was a lie, it would have saved subs.

 

ok, I think I'm done investing time into this - they screwed up, and don't really seem to recognize it. I think I'll stop playing 'forum wars' and go back in game now. I just wanted to get the last of the rage out of my system.

 

thanks,

Edited January 30, 2012 by zWolf

[SolGravion]

Unsubbed due to weekend maintance for the third week in a row. Game was ok, but if I cant play the game around MY schedule its total and utter garbage. Edited January 30, 2012 by SolGravion

[Giondi]

P.S. BioWare: don't think people haven't notice how you conveniently disable our ability to post just before Maintenance commences. Preventing us from expressing ourselves and how we feel about your service and there by influencing other customers. Your tactics are cheap and underhanded. I hope more people are willing to express how they feel until you get what you deserve: A beta testing sized player base (and lets face it, this game is still in beta) that you then have to rebuild back up to retail standard through good customer service and support.

 

They didn't take the forum down the first time or two, the flood of people who came in as soon as (or shortly before) servers were taken offline slowed the site down so much that disabling forum posting was the only way to keep the site functional.

[JDTC]

this thread:

 

"my buddy phil and me, hey we never got any crashes! hey and my buddy phil, he says his entire guild never had any crashes! hey none! bioware made this BS up! so they could screw over europe! UNSUBBED."

[SolGravion]

this thread:

 

"my buddy phil and me, hey we never got any crashes! hey and my buddy phil, he says his entire guild never had any crashes! hey none! bioware made this BS up! so they could screw over europe! UNSUBBED."

 

your post:

 

"I really have no clue what im talking about but I like to kick up dirt, so im gonna ignore other people's valid arguments to throw pies on the internet."

[Zeodic]

I feel for the euros, i really do. But i have a question for you. Who the f*** plays between 6am EST and 3am PST? Not many people worth a damn imo.

 

 

 

Just want to point out that 6 am EST = 3 am PST ... so Im guessing technically anyone on plays then since its the exact same time ...

[nomaddamon]

Canceled my subs.

 

I really loved the game, but when you have time to play only once or twice a week (on EU prime-time, when you'd expect the EU servers to be on-line) and 50% of times you see "sorry we are patching, please come back in 5h" message then what can you do....

 

Will probably come back when they understand what the "European" in "European Servers" means...

[zWolf]

I had asked if anyone knew if there had been any 'official' response as to why the servers were patched on a weekend.

 

Yes. It was in the patch notes.

 

Short version: a significant number of players kept getting disconnected from the game every few minutes, and when they weren't getting disconnected they were experiencing constant lag spikes freezing the game over and over. Basically the game was unplayable.

 

They apparently figured out how to solve the problem for some of the affected people, so rolled out the fix as soon as possible.

 

I have a question to ask people. Does anyone honestly think the folks at Bioware ENJOY having to come in on a weekend to WORK?

 

 

 

 

-k

 

I also found this thread which is kind of what I was looking for:

 

http://starwars-republic.de/devtracker.html

 

It details some of the back story and such... I'll re-post a bit of it here, for the curious.

 

--- start quote ---

 

General Discussion -> Lack of communication is unprofessional

Beitrag von StephenReid am 28.01.2012 um 23:41 Uhr

 

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:

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Demorgoth

1: You post a warning less than two hours before the servers are brought down. Ok, if this is an emergency, tell us it's an emergency. Don't call it 'maintenance' when you decide to pull down all the servers on a Friday night with less than 2 hours notice.

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.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Demorgoth

2: The post is highly ambiguous. If you're pulling the servers down on a Friday, put Friday in the title. If you're pulling the servers down today, in 2 hours, put that in the title to get the word out. The title gives the overwealing impression that the Patch + Maintenance are on Jan 31st.

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.

 

---- end Quote ---

Edited January 30, 2012 by zWolf

[Morthaur]

The patch hit Australia at 6pm Saturdaynight, after an hour of waiting for the Jawa Baloon it was all we needed. A 15 min in game warning is not sufficient warning of maintenance, I appreciate that you might of posted a warning in the forums 5 hrs before scheduling the maintenance but currently I still have enough confidence in your company not to alt tab out of your game every hour to check whether you think your system is failing, am I wrong in this assumption?. In the future give players an hourly flash that the servers are going down if it is irregular maintenance so that we can better plan what we are doing on a saturday night.

[Cats-Eye]

I've cancelled my sub and will leave it that way until they change the European maintenance times.

BW made the business decision to do a global maintenance window, even though they have split the server base to the US and Ireland. Being an IT head now for over 20 years, I assume there are good reasons for this decision.

That said, I don't like it. Especially if something goes wrong, like it did on Saturday when they had to extend their maintenance. If all the servers were based in the US, I wouldn't say a word, but they aren't.

Therefore I expect the same service the US customers are getting, which is a maintenance window that is really in the off peak hours around 2 AM onwards.

As long as I am not getting that service, I won't be paying any money to BW. For me it is as simple as that. It's a shame, because even with its flaws I really like the game.

 

 

Btw, I *really* feel for Oceanic guys atm. Talk about being shafted.

[RubberKal]

I'm confused as to who's prime-time game play this affected.

 

It wasn't in prime time for the US, not for the EU... maybe for Oceana give or take, but they aren't an official region yet so BioWare may not be considering that.

 

Why wouldn't you want as many patches are you can to make the game better?

 

At just 50 cents per day, it works out to just over 2 cents an hour. Meaning this morning's down time cost you 10 cents. It really should be a non-issue in every way!

 

Yes, this was certainly my prime time in Oceania - 7pm onwards. I was pretty fired up about it, and of course the ability to post on the forums is disabled at that time too, so I couldnt even vent about it .. and when I logged the next day, there was no patch downloaded by the launcher .. I was even more upset - take it down on a Saturday night, and you didnt even fix anything? Eep.

 

RubberKal

[Aerevan]

I've cancelled my sub and will leave it that way until they change the European maintenance times.

BW made the business decision to do a global maintenance window, even though they have split the server base to the US and Ireland. Being an IT head now for over 20 years, I assume there are good reasons for this decision.

That said, I don't like it. Especially if something goes wrong, like it did on Saturday when they had to extend their maintenance. If all the servers were based in the US, I wouldn't say a word, but they aren't.

Therefore I expect the same service the US customers are getting, which is a maintenance window that is really in the off peak hours around 2 AM onwards.

As long as I am not getting that service, I won't be paying any money to BW. For me it is as simple as that. It's a shame, because even with its flaws I really like the game.

 

 

Btw, I *really* feel for Oceanic guys atm. Talk about being shafted.

I did the same; Somehow I get the feeling a lot of people did this, because finally, finally, BioWare stopped 'ignoring' it and posted

 

By Stephen Reid

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.

I guess they just lost subs and finally started to get off their arses.