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

[face_hindu]

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

 

 

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

 

He said "To those of you in Europe". He's not talking about Australians.

 

Also - before the patch - no d/c's to Character Select. Today - 1 d/c to Character Select.

 

So, for me, personally, the "fix" made my gameplay experience worse.

[ShotByBothSides]

He said "To those of you in Europe". He's not talking about Australians.

 

Also - before the patch - no d/c's to Character Select. Today - 1 d/c to Character Select.

 

So, for me, personally, the "fix" made my gameplay experience worse.

 

I understand that the game launches in Oceania around March time. I would really expect that Bioware will have picked up some important messages about maintenance from their experiences with the European debacle that they have ignored until it bit them in the backside. Or more likely thier pocket.

Edited January 30, 2012 by ShotByBothSides

[Mcclaine]

Do you guys want things fixed in this game?

 

Then don't complain about patches.

 

Ofc we do. We just want it done during the night in the EU too. How have you not realised this is what we are asking for after the many threads and hundreds if not thousands of posts on this topic?

 

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

You honestly believe "as soon as possible" just happened to be 2am CST? USA's off-peak time.

 

and to answer your question: Thats why they hire weekend/night staff. Like 40 billion other companies in the world do.

[GaZZaW]

Havnt read all the posts... so dont shoot me for saying...

Blizzard manages to patch and fix well for different time zones... so Bioware?? whats the difference? only one server park.. I doubt it (but i could be wrong of course)

[Kanharn]

Havnt read all the posts... so dont shoot me for saying...

Blizzard manages to patch and fix well for different time zones... so Bioware?? whats the difference? only one server park.. I doubt it (but i could be wrong of course)

 

All the servers are in Ireland not different locations.

[corbanite]

TBH there is no need at all for this problem to exist. It would take some coding to make the problem go away.

 

Somewhere along the line someone at bioware made the decision (or didn't realise the decision was there to be made) to say that the additional coding required to shift between client versions depending on server location was too much and they would prefer that everyone had downtime at the same time.

Edited January 30, 2012 by corbanite

[Anyankin]

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

 

I'll just add my support to the cause.

[Borse]

BioWare, colour me Shocked, Awed and fully Disgusted. Having a Server Maintenance during the day on a weekend. If it wasn't bad enough that we Europeans have to put up with the Weekly Maintenance being during the day. Now you are doing it at the Weekend where the vast majority of you European customers will be enjoying some free time away from work/education. Are you actively trying to lose customers? To top it all off there will be “Another” Maintenance 3 days later for 8 hours? During the day again no less.

 

Are you kidding me? You want people to pay for this abysmal service?

 

I understand that the games needs updating and fixing but doing it during the day is just bad customer service towards your EU player base once again. Why not do it during the night? Why not have separate maintenance times for US and EU? Or failing that, why not punish the US for a change, instead of it always being the EU! (Sorry Americans, Skip forward a couple of paragraphs if that annoyed you).

 

If you compare the drop in server population (at peak time) between US and EU you'll see a lot less “Heavy” and “Very Heavy” populated servers in the EU (at peak time) compared to when this game first came out. With service like this is there any wonder why? If I feel this way. I'm sure others do.

 

I'm just glad I cancelled my account. I do enjoy this game and wish to play it more but I will not stand for being a 2nd class customer while paying the same as our (favoured) US brothers.

 

And Americans. Before you post your “Good riddance” comments. Ask yourself honestly. If it was the other way around. If you where paying for a game that wasn't playable during the day, while the rest of the world got to wake up in the morning in their time zones and log straight in and enjoy the game we all love to play. Could you honestly say you wouldn't be annoyed. You wouldn't come here and post your frustration. You wouldn't ask for US/EU Server Maintenance to be separated so they where both during the night? And if it was the other way around. That this forum wouldn't explode with the amount of US customers expressing their dissatisfaction at the service they are receiving?

 

After Dragon Age 2 and now SWTOR. My faith in BioWare has been shaken. Lets all hope Mass Effect 3 can redeem them.

 

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.

 

P.P.S. "People work during the day" isn't a justifying comment either. I'd bet good money there are more people playing during a week day than during the dead of night (think students and part-time job workers).

 

What he said.

[Pootie-Tang]

Its those mtyhic tools that schedule this as well.. They arent that *********** smart mythic... Look at age of conan!!! This is ****ed i want a full refund!!

[Sigmatico]

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!

 

9 AM till 2 PM is pretty prime time on a saturday, which ``just happend´´ to be the EU time for this patch.

I know its hard for you to understand, but facts are there are other places than America in the world and in these other places, we dont behave the same.

Sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but thats just a fact of life.

[Xerda]

All the servers are in Ireland not different locations.

 

As I understood it only EU servers were physically located in Ireland. The others were based in the US for the NA region.

[agomemnon]

Next scheduled Maintenance

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)

 

Well in my time zone this happening 10AM till 6PM don't get me wrong but 10AM isin't exactly early hours of the morning it is CST but i give a crap about , why you just can't separate the bloody EU maintenance from US maintenance ? atleast don't lie to your customers with lines like early morning do them at 3AM GMT and you will not see ppl complaining

[Mandrax]

As I understood it only EU servers were physically located in Ireland. The others were based in the US for the NA region.

 

This is correct. US players can choose between East Coast and West Coast servers.

Edited January 30, 2012 by Mandrax

[Voqar]

Horrible day/time for a patch to be sure. One listed item fixed. Scant few days before the next epic length downtime.

 

More annoying to me is that this is the latest and greatest MMORPG, and rather than having LESS downtime it has MORE. What I mean is, every time the servers are down for even the most trivial patch or fix, they are down for hours. (One expects a lot of hotfixes and stuff in a new MMORPG - there's lots to fix, the frequency of downtime isn't an issue, the length of downtime is beyond ridiculous).

 

This last patch had ONE line item in the patch notes. ONE. Servers were down 4 hours. It was a server-side patch only. How can it possibly take 4 hours to patch your servers in 2012? Do you use punch cards? Does one person copy the new files to each server one at a time. I work in technology and I can't even remotely fathom how making one small change to your code base and distributing it to servers can take so long. It's truly astounding.

 

BioWare, meet Trion - numerous factors lead me to think you've never heard of them or Rift despite them being quite successful (and IMO Rift > WoW but don't burst a synapse), and maybe pay them for consulting on how to do downtime without it taking an eternity. Rift has short weekly maintenance (compared to TOR's 6-8 hours) and Trion is capable of doing small fixes and hotfixes in minutes, not hours. Whatever you (BioWare) are doing, it's backwards and heinous.

 

Lastly, in order to play TOR, we have to connect to your servers. And we visit your forums. I want info available in the game, or at least on your official page, I don't want to tweet with twits and I don't facebook. I could care less about social media. Put critical info about the game IN the game or at least on your site (this assumes you can keep yoru site functioning...which so far...yeah, isn't quite the case, is it?).

 

I checked the community page the night of the last sudden patch...no mention. 15 minutes before servers down is NOT really adequate notice. Your flashpoints are tons of fun but way, way, way too long (issue for another thread) and failing to complete the last boss due to almost no warning of downtime, losing out on turning in dailies, and more, is very annoying when it could be a non issue if you just announced upcoming downtime in-game more than 15 minutes in advance (like a few hours might be an amazing concept).

 

I'm actually playing the game, not browsing the forum looking for short notice multi-hour downtime notices that suddenly pop up.

[Mandrax]

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.

 

As much as I sympathise with Aus/NZ players, you have to realise this game was not officially released over there. If I was playing a game on US servers because it was not released in Europe, I would fully expect maintenance at times to suit the US players. It was however officially released in Europe and therefore maintenance should be carried out at times convenient to European players.

 

When the game IS officially released in Aus/NZ, if BioWare stick to their current maintenance times, I will fully support any threads which request more preferable times for you guys.

 

If however Aus/NZ players get their own maintenance times, I will campaign even harder for EU to get the same. I would never begrudge you guys your own maintenance time, but I would use it as a stick to beat BioWare with in a bid to force them to do the same for my region.

Edited January 30, 2012 by Mandrax

[Neptunius]

It would be nice, if they made maintenance for EU at 00:00GMT+1.

 

Im sure most people could respect that.

 

Btw, what happend to the 100pages there use to be in this thread?

[C-Bee]

Next scheduled Maintenance

 

 

Well in my time zone this happening 10AM till 6PM don't get me wrong but 10AM isin't exactly early hours of the morning it is CST but i give a crap about , why you just can't separate the bloody EU maintenance from US maintenance ? atleast don't lie to your customers with lines like early morning do them at 3AM GMT and you will not see ppl complaining

 

This timing is still understandable since it's in the middle of a week and most customers even in EU are at work or school, etc... Not saying it's optimal solution but it's better than having it on weekend.

[kailhun]

Your talking like they do it every weekend lol, it happened once.

 

So Emo.

 

It's happened 16,67% of the saturdays since release!

[NevesNET]

... it wasn't 4h, it ran close to 5.5h in one of few days I can play a longer period

 

... it's 2012, servers can be patched on the fly

 

... this "emergency" fix just so happens to take place during sleepy time in USA

 

... 8h "scheduled" maintenance; again in the middle of the day in Europe

 

... God, can't remember my NCSoft master account password to get ready for GW2!

[Atamosk]

it is literally one day of this game...This is the trouble with mmo's.

 

I can't understand why people get so mad. They got to fix something

 

let them do it and relax. Even if it is a saturday.

 

i know this is a non issue, since it has already been saturday, but they wouldnt do something if they did no think it was important then they would not do it.

 

it was in eu so did not effect me.

Edited January 30, 2012 by Atamosk

[Terrahero]

it is literally one day of this game...This is the trouble with mmo's.

 

 

Are you living under a rock? This isnt "one day" This kind of lengthy, middle of the day maintenance has happend to Europe over half a dozen times. And the game has been released barely more then a month!

Regular maintenance alone is always, every week, set to happen in the middle of the day.

 

Please, dont post here if you do not know whats going on and why we are pissed.

 

But it must be easy telling us to relax when you're from the US and this stuff never happens to you.

Edited January 30, 2012 by Terrahero

[Caldurjyoh]

This feels like: "The power company had to shut down the electricity in the whole country, I was in the forest cutting wood for the day and picking shrooms.

I didnt see it so it did not affect anyone am sure you are over exaggerating people! "

 

This will be what i will say on every threat we talk about maintenance and how it affected us and people reply with a "go out" or a "its a day in a week, so what?" statement. Especially when the latter is fropm US to EU players and weekly maintenance

 

BW doesnt care for the customers, so Account Cancelled

[Erevan_Kindelar]

My experience with patchiong servers is itself a little... patchy

BUt from what I recall, the SWG servers went down for 2-3 hours a week once a week for maintenance, with split maintenance cycles between US and EU.

Everquest II servers went down for 2-3 hours a week once a week for maintenance, with split maintenance cycles between US and EU.

The EVE Online server goes down once a day for 20-30 minutes, with longer downtimes (2-8 hours, typically, depending on the size of the content update and last-minute issues) occasionally (3-5 times a year).

 

SWTOR is a young game, and Bioware are not used to patch cycles for MMOs - in their traditional market, they would produce a patch for a single player game every couple of months. The logistics of server downtimes, multiple timezones, and users who expect near-24x7 uptime are a bit of a culture shock for them, and as a US-based company their focus is naturally on their domestic market.

[Jahor]

I fully suport server maintence which include patches once a week.

I don't see 9:00 to 17:00 as "primetime" as most people work/study at this time anyway.

I do suport emergency shutdowns to fix exploids/cheats.

 

But please, the weekend is the Holy Grail of gaming time which should NEVER be toucht just for "normal" maintence! Starting Saturday 5:00 ending Sunday 24:00.

 

The only exception would be emergyency patches which fix stuff like doubing or acc hacking. But NEVER normal patches or simple standart restarts.

[THAAC]

all I see is a bunch of whiny *** people that expect a company to work double the amount of time instead of just dealing with a 4 hour maintenance... they all need to grow up, if they can't wait atleast 4 hours in the morning to not play then MMO's are not for them, then again it's human nature to ***** if something isn't fair QQ this whole rant with people is pissing me off

 

ooo look, another Yank.

 

The only ones who are not complaining about the server downtimes.

 

It is easy to wonder what all the fuss is about when your servers are up when you log off for the night and back on by the time you get up. The simple fact is, it is roughly a 50/50 split between US and non-US players. And however much the non-US moan about server down times, is absolutely nothing compared to how much the Yanks would complain if the game was taken down 8am-4pm their time. BW know this and are not planning their downtimes around the fewest players affected, but basing it around the fewest complaints received.

 

SWG found this out the hard way when they cycled their server downtimes. 1 week good US times, next week good EU times.

 

Americans need to realise they are not the centre of the universe, and are not even the majority of the playerbase anymore. You are only saying these downtimes are needed and critisizing the EU complaints simply because this is not affecting the majority of American players. If/when it does, then you will see what over-the-top moaning and complaining is.