Aussie Server Maintenance

[Aussiedroid]

Well if they go down at 2am US time, then why not move this forward 3-4 hours. Yanks still get your play time till say 10pm-ish and then we would also get to play on that day from 9-10pm at night. EU I think would also be earlier morning which may be preferrable for them ... Win-Win right??

 

The comment on this page saying 'You should get over yourself' .. what a joke ! Can't say I am surprised by that sort of attitude though as long as its not affecting you it cant be important or relevant right? Open your mind mate.

 

I understand the limitations of doing separate server maintanence but maybe being a global game it should better cater for the global market??

 

I cant see this changing any time soon but its a valid concern to raise that should be noted by Bioware to see what improvements could be made.

[Hygric]

Only fair solution, extend the maintenance to a full 24 hour period.

 

Only way to be fair apparently...

[utio]

Here.

 

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=356019&page=2

 

 

 

 

See above and move on.

 

Even if they remotely manage them, they have their reasons for not taking them down at different times. Dry your tears and move on already.

 

You sir, are just posting on here to antagonise. You 12 years old or sommit? How about you move on and let people air their views? Not that you will, you'll come out with some oh so witty(sarcy) comment, and keep coming back to see if someone's taken the bait so you can then reply with another comment, thus dominating the Internet and proving to yourself how amazing you are.

[ConradLionhart]

All of you who have a problem with the current maintenance schedule, have a think about this.

 

BW does not care (they are most likely prioritising fixing the game, not the maintenance), you complain but continue paying them a subscription. What's going to happen when you cancel your subscriptions as a sign of protest? Do you think BW will still not show a care in the world when their bottom line is being affected?

 

Power in numbers - if enough of us cancel our subscriptions BW will be forced to make a change. I've already cancelled my subscription and I'm aware of a few others who have done the same.

 

Look at what we did to the retail industry in Australia - we got sick of paying them their inflated prices so we turned to buying online and caused them to go south with their revenue. The result? Bigger than normal sales and some retailers even closing. Bottom line - we were unhappy with their treatment of us and decided to do something about it (conciously or not).

 

So yeah, please think about cancelling your subscriptions if you are adversely affected with the current maintenance schedule. I for one will not be paying them and waiting for 3-6 months so they can fix the issue.

 

Another one of those "Bioware doesn't care" posts?

 

Bioware has given to aussies in 3 months, what Blizzard still won't give after 8 years.

 

Real aussie servers on aussie soil.

 

Look, I don't like maintenances on asia-pacific prime time, but to say that Bioware doesn't care is false.

[Micksteroo]

Another one of those "Bioware doesn't care" posts?

 

Bioware has given to aussies in 3 months, what Blizzard still won't give after 8 years.

 

Real aussie servers on aussie soil.

 

Look, I don't like maintenances on asia-pacific prime time, but to say that Bioware doesn't care is false.

 

Feel free to disagree. It's great that they gave us servers on Aussie soil. But the fact that they screw us over with their maintenance schedule even though they have servers physically over here tells me they didn't put enough thought into it - it's a job half done.

 

Hence my feeling why they do not care. If they go all the way then yes they will get my respect. I refuse to believe that they can't accommodate specific maintenance schedules for regions; I do it every day in my job.

[GrimAce]

Er...doesn't europe gets the same treatment? Anyone who didn't take that into consideration and expect otherwise for down under hasn't been paying enough attention.

[Micksteroo]

Er...doesn't europe gets the same treatment? Anyone who didn't take that into consideration and expect otherwise for down under hasn't been paying enough attention.

 

Of course Europe's in the same boat as us, and I completely empathise with them. I would recommend all the Europeans to cancel their subscriptions for a month as well, show BW they aren't happy. And BW will take notice, it will affect their bottom line after all.

[Warouth]

Coming from Germany I can tell you that it's not as bad for us as it is for aussies. For people with "normal" working schedule (morning till late afternoon) it is ok, our school kids might be affected, but I'm not sure about that. I think usually mainenance ends around 3 pm, which is ok. Early morning would be best but I'm not complaining (too much ).

[utio]

Of course Europe's in the same boat as us, and I completely empathise with them. I would recommend all the Europeans to cancel their subscriptions for a month as well, show BW they aren't happy. And BW will take notice, it will affect their bottom line after all.

 

I cancelled for this reason. I know some will say it's throwing a hissy fit, but it's not. I don't believe favouring one region at the expense of the others is good customer service. Rather than get wound up about it, I decided to unsub. No strop involved lol. I do wish many eu and oceanic customers would do the same, but it's their choice.

Edited March 16, 2012 by utio

[FenLore]

I believe BW do care about their service to everyone and I am loving the latency with these Australian servers.

 

And because they do care about giving us the best experience possible it's important that we share our opinions on this matter so they can improve the service. Right now it is not the best service possible even though the servers are great.

 

It is not helpful to say that "it has been this way in other MMOs for ever". This is it's own game run by a company that has nothing to do with other MMOs, that wants to provide the best it can for all its customers. If you sell something globally and delay the sales in a certain region stating that you want the best experience for said region, then shouldn't you be providing that region with the best experience possible? ie. not taking servers down at 6pm.

Edited March 17, 2012 by FenLore

[Shaanow]

Has anyone given any thought as to what would happen if BW staggered the maintenance times?

 

US Player: "Oh bugger, it's maintenance night - guess I'll roll a toon on 1 of the 3 already overpopulated Asia/Pacific servers".

 

A/P Player: "I can't log in, the servers are full of Lvl 1-10 toons..."

 

Whilst I agree the timing of our maintenance in Australia sucks, it sure beats the alternative...

Edited March 17, 2012 by Shaanow

[Micksteroo]

Has anyone given any thought as to what would happen if BW staggered the maintenance times?

 

US Player: "Oh bugger, it's maintenance night - guess I'll roll a toon on 1 of the 3 already overpopulated Asia/Pacific servers".

 

A/P Player: "I can't log in, the servers are full of Lvl 1-10 toons..."

 

Whilst I agree the timing of our maintenance in Australia sucks, it sure beats the alternative...

 

There are perfectly reasonable ways of making staggered maintenance work without causing any more problems.

 

However an easier way would be to start the maintenance at say 3 a.m. PST (10 p.m. AEST) and go till 11 a.m. PST. That will mean it doesn't cut into our prime time and it only cuts into a few hours of the American mornings, not their prime time either.

[johnhughthom]

Has anyone given any thought as to what would happen if BW staggered the maintenance times?

 

US Player: "Oh bugger, it's maintenance night - guess I'll roll a toon on 1 of the 3 already overpopulated Asia/Pacific servers".

 

A/P Player: "I can't log in, the servers are full of Lvl 1-10 toons..."

 

Whilst I agree the timing of our maintenance in Australia sucks, it sure beats the alternative...

 

This simply means the ability to play with players from across the world has been deemed more important than a fair distribution of maintenance times by Bioware.

[AurakaSith]

....Simply change to the logging screen for the client with a message which informs you that:

 

"The patching cycle has started with US servers at<Stated time> EU servers at<stated time> Oceanic Servers at<stated time>, you may upgrade your client now but should you choose to do so, the other server groups will be unavailable until the end of the upgrade/patching cycle. If you want to play on a server that is not yet reached its patch time simply select NO and continue, please be aware that you will not be able to play on patched servers until you have upgraded your client. this will be indicated by "incompatible version" in the server status column"

 

Doing it this way would keep everyone happy - and if by chance there are people who play on 2 servers from different regions then they would have at least one server available for play 100% of the time - I cant see how it can get any better than that...

 

 

Thank you!!! ....after posting in previous threads, and after reading through many more; i was wanting to post something like that (though i would most likely have done a war n peace novel haha).

 

 

But i dont want to some up what is appearing in every thread on this topic::

 

Using the argument "it doesnt bother/effect me, so its not a problem" is selfish and arrogant...

Using the argument "majority is in another region; so rather lose minority" is beyond arrogant (thats still $4 million / month in subs being risked).

Using the argument "use the time to get a life..." is ignorant - ever thought maybe people are busy 'getting a life' on other days/nights in the week?

Finally... using the argument "its techincally not possible" - that is dangerously ignorant.....

 

 

So some subscribers will not be impacted at all, some will be slightly inconvenienced, while others will be majorly inconvenienced.

 

Sadly, the majority of posters who have no sympathy and / or empathy with those inconvenienced fall into one or more of the arugment types above....

 

Sadly they also fail to recognise that those inconvenienced actually like and want to play (and PAY) for this subscription, however if continued to be inconvenienced will move on to something else...

 

 

 

But hey... I am not an American... so who cares if i am inconvenienced, and who cares if i take my $15 else where ???

 

Its not like me and my 279,999 counterparts will have any impact what soever on the future of this game if we take our $15 else where....

...none what soever

[Micksteroo]

Calling all Australians and Europeans,

In spite of the continued complaining from both Europeans and Australians BW does not seem to be concerned about this issue, merely stating that they have no plans to change the maintenance window (no commitment on when or if they will fix it and no reason for such an answer).

 

The argument that we are the minority and therefore don't need to be catered to is full of contempt and no logic, as are the arguments that we should play on another day of the week and find something else to do.

 

We amount to 280,000 players. What happens if we take our $15 elsewhere? That's a mere $4.2 million lost in a month. Not a big deal surely? I mean, that obviously has no impact on the future of this game. This is just Aussie numbers; Europeans amount to 740,00 players, that's another $11.1 million per month.

 

I cancelled my subscription last week for this very reason (why should I pay a company $15 a month when they give me such apalling service?). Don't get me wrong; I for one am happy that BW gave us those excellent Aussie servers. However I cannot fathom how they can give us such a maintenance window and then treat us with such disdain (we are paying customers after all).

 

So I call on all Australians and Europeans to cancel their subscriptions and tell BW exactly why they are cancelling. If the maintenance does not affect you, great; thank you for stopping by.

 

If you have already cancelled please add your name to this thread. My apologies for the length of this post, but I felt it was necessary.

 

Whether you cancel or not is up to you. However cancel and know that you will be responsible for forcing Bioware to ultimately act responsible to all their customers.

 

Thank you.

Edited March 18, 2012 by Micksteroo

[Seifz]

There are perfectly reasonable ways of making staggered maintenance work without causing any more problems.

 

However an easier way would be to start the maintenance at say 3 a.m. PST (10 p.m. AEST) and go till 11 a.m. PST. That will mean it doesn't cut into our prime time and it only cuts into a few hours of the American mornings, not their prime time either.

 

The original patch time was later (I forget if it was 2am PST or 3am PST), but the European players didn't like it because they wanted to start playing earlier in the afternoon. So, BioWare moved the patch time back a few hours.

 

Look, it's a world-wide game. No one time is going to work for everyone. The US gets priority because we have more players and because BioWare Austin is located here.

 

If you would prefer locked regions like WoW has, then you can have staggered maintenance times. If that's the case, then certainly you should make BioWare aware of it. However, I don't think that they're likely to change the system any time soon. After all, players in all regions already have characters on servers that are located in other regions.

[VulcanLogic]

While I respect my brothers from down under, I have to say as a

West Coast US player that I absolutely loathe the midnight shutoff for maintenance. Some of us work 2nd shift, and we know that nearly no one plays weekday mornings.

[utio]

Look, it's a world-wide game. No one time is going to work for everyone. The US gets priority because we have more players and because BioWare Austin is located here.

 

Exactly, it's a worldwide game. No one region should be favoured over the others. That's an outdated way of looking at things, it's easy excuse to use. Doesn't make it right though.

I manage a store, all my customers are treated the same, the regulars, the once now and then shoppers, the ones that's spend alot, the ones spend less. They are ALL my customers, and I value each and everyone if them.

All that's being asked is that they rotate the night downtime so each region gets the same treatment.

[themacr]

Its not just about taking down the servers, weekly maintenance almost always has at least a small patch associated with it. How is the server supposed to know when to push a patch to your client if you can play on any region's servers (i.e., I live in Ireland, I could decide to play on the Oceanic Servers). I do have friends from the States who play on my EU server. That basically leaves them the option of region locking players. Not a good plan.

 

Because its so hard to have a version check on servers, aka "your version of the client is not patched to the same version of this server, if you want to play on this server please update your client by clicking on [insert link]. Please note, once patched you will not be able to play on servers with an older version of the game"

[Halofax]

Hahahahahahaha

 

Maybe when there are more than 3 Oceanic servers there will be devoted aussie maintenance windows.

[Draflorin]

Because its so hard to have a version check on servers, aka "your version of the client is not patched to the same version of this server, if you want to play on this server please update your client by clicking on [insert link]. Please note, once patched you will not be able to play on servers with an older version of the game"

 

exactly - i've posted this same thing many times only to have my thread closed and directed here.

 

but not hard to do at all no, need for separate regional clients and those update tourists that visit our servers while theirs are down will have to negotiate the queue - thats what the queue is for after all...

 

but even id be happy if they just did regional maintenance times to suit - that would be an improvement on now.

 

I guess there's not too many brain surgeons or rocket scientists in Austin

[Suromir]

every MMO company does this. It's easier for them to do all maintenance at once. There are many reasons for this.

 

oh and EVERY mmo has people on the forums that complain about the time the servers are down claiming bio "hates" them.

 

you're seriously clueless if you think that is the case.

 

It's one day. You'll all live.

[NevesNET]

Has anyone given any thought as to what would happen if BW staggered the maintenance times?

 

US Player: "Oh bugger, it's maintenance night - guess I'll roll a toon on 1 of the 3 already overpopulated Asia/Pacific servers".

 

A/P Player: "I can't log in, the servers are full of Lvl 1-10 toons..."

 

Whilst I agree the timing of our maintenance in Australia sucks, it sure beats the alternative...

 

This is WHY companies HAVE staggered maintenance in the middle of the night... so YOUR servers are ALWAYS available during your normal play times. Another way around this would be to have a round-robin global maintenance, ie. middle of night in Europe this week, next week middle of night in US, then middle of night Asia. This would show you ACTUALLY CARE abotu your customers in Europe and Asia, one thing is to SAY you care, quite another is to SHOW it!

 

Have a nice day, hope you learned something now.

Edited March 20, 2012 by NevesNET

[Dsan]

I absolutely understand why Bioware need to bring down all servers at the same time globally to roll out new content/fixes and perform maintenance - to have different downtimes for different zones, they would be doing the same job many times over just to patch all the servers instead of bringing them down once and patch all of them at the same time (not to mention the fact there would be a lot of people that would hop to whatever server is up just to continue playing in some form).

 

What I'm VERY annoyed about is the fact that the chosen downtime for maintenance is OBVIOUSLY aimed at providing the least possible impact for their US subscribers and let all other territories fall where they may. I thought the EU servers were getting a bad run but now it seems like the AU/NZ territories are getting shafted the most.

 

All I'm asking is for them to adjust that downtime to impact all territories EQUALLY - I understand it would be impossible to get the exact same peak/off-peak ratio for every single server/country but at the moment it's COMPLETELY biased towards keeping their US subscribers happy.

 

Their downtime is totally during off-peak times so most US subscribers wouldn't even notice the downtime is there - AU/NZ subscribers have their downtime totally during peak times. I'm not sure about the various timezones across Europe but I get the impression they experience various amounts of both peak and off-peak times.

 

Please adjust the maintenance downtime so everyone gets *some* peak time loss and *some* off-peak loss - this bias towards US subsribers HAS TO STOP!

 

Please understand, this post is not complaining about downtime in general - I understand Bioware need global downtime on all servers and I certainly don't care about missing a couple of hours of playtime each week (as many have said, it's good to have some time off to get things done), I just don't like seeing one group of people catered for while another group is given the scraps - in any form.

 

Thanks all

 

EDIT: I just read the post above mine and found this suggestion

Another way around this would be to have a round-robin global maintenance, ie. middle of night in Europe this week, next week middle of night in US, then middle of night Asia

 

I think this would be a GREAT idea - have downtime for all servers be during off-peak time for the US one week, off-peak times for Europe the following week, off-peak times for Asia Pacific the week after etc. Everyone would get an equal turn at having downtime during their peak times...

Edited March 20, 2012 by Dsan

[Warouth]

I absolutely understand why Bioware need to bring down all servers at the same time globally to roll out new content/fixes and perform maintenance - to have different downtimes for different zones, they would be doing the same job many times over just to patch all the servers instead of bringing them down once and patch all of them at the same time (not to mention the fact there would be a lot of people that would hop to whatever server is up just to continue playing in some form).

1. I don't think that it would be more afford to update the servers. Either they install an update by clicking on a button (doubt it) or they do it for every server individually. Personally I think the update process is minimal comparing to database maintenance jobs (and updates), which have a big impact on the server, but shouldn't require a person to do anything. So no big problem with that.

2. I don't think that many players would switch during maintenance. For Example: When the US-Servers go down, it's 2 am on a work day. How many people could possibly log into an other server. And why would they choose one of the three AUS-servers, there are many in Europe...

 

Warouth