Why couldn't tonight's patch wait til next Tuesday?

[ShadowOfVey]

If this was any other game, they could afford to leave the matrix cubes alone until the next maintenance.

 

But they've screwed up so consistently lately that even a minor thing like matrix cubes is enough to make people go "you know what, screw this game". The straw that broke the camel's back. It was in their best interest to fix it asap.

[Zeghrem]

All this wahhhhhh.

Why do you even care? You spend few hours on the fleet doing nothing or few hour in RL doing nothing. Not like anything is happening in game that you need to be on RIGHT NOW. You'd think there has never been emergency maint. before. I'd rather they do more, maybe this game wouldn't be so underwhelming.

[Malstrades]

seriously, this crap patch downtime today was for the useless matrix cubes? no fix for custom gear, no removal of expertise, no implementation of ranked wz? THEN WHY THE DOWNTIME!?

 

EDIT: and no fix of the huge amount of bugs? no fix for the masses of hacks?

Edited May 10, 2012 by Malstrades

[Lakhesis]

All this wahhhhhh.

Why do you even care? You spend few hours on the fleet doing nothing or few hour in RL doing nothing. Not like anything is happening in game that you need to be on RIGHT NOW. You'd think there has never been emergency maint. before. I'd rather they do more, maybe this game wouldn't be so underwhelming.

 

They've done 2 maintenances per week for 6 out of the last 9 weeks. Look at the patch dates. The point is that they have done "emergency" maintenances before. Constantly. Endlessly.

 

Precisely how many more do you want? Push it up to a 3 per week average?

[Skolops]

Seriously? OK, lets have a fact check here. Leaving out the tuesday "regular" maintenance & just looking at the "extra" six maintenances in the last 9 weeks:

 

Patch 1.2.3a - Fixed the relics

 

Big deal. These items are an ultimate equip in an important slot, one which many people put a lot of effort into obtaining and which cannot be replaced by the user. To some it may seem like a minor item, but to others this seems like a very big deal indeed.

 

Patch 1.2.1a - Fixed an "item-related economic exploit"

 

Obviously important

 

Patch 1.2.0c - Looks like normal patch, whereas the one on that tuesday only fixed a codex entry & some item stats.

 

I'd say that I agree on this one, except for the fact that people were making a huge fuss about the codex entry. Strictly speaking, it was not necessary and could have been put off. The public reaction, however, made this into a gigantic issue and they seem to have felt bound by that to fix it.

 

Patch 1.2.0a - Fixed an issue stopping characters being deleted. "Improved the ticketing system".

 

Big deal. Very big deal. The character deletion stuff, not so much (though again, there was much complaining going around about this.) The ticketing system, on the other hand, was very important in the wake of a large number of bugs showing up and many people being unable to get their game to function properly at all. In order to fix these as quickly as possible, it was absolutely necessary to get a ticketing system which could handle the needs.

 

Patch 1.1.5b - Corrected the accidental extended free weekend pass[/quote

 

I can understand this from a business perspective. They were giving away free what they did not intend to. It's not necessary from the consumer's point of view, but if you were sitting in an executive's office at BW it would seem important to you.

[BJWyler]

Sure but BJ we need to go back to is it gamebreaking? If you can login and you can play, then it's not gamebreaking and the fix should wait until the next regular maintenance window. Plus, BW is causing these problems because their coders suck, their QA is incompetent and they don't properly test a patch before pushing it out to the production environment.

Do you have some evidence of this, other than you anectodal hyperbole? It doesn't have to be game-breaking in order to require a fix. Look at all the patch notes, just not the one item you want to complain about. There are many other fixes included in a patch that can prevent someone from being able to do something in the game. Perhaps they would be more willing to test patches on the PTS first, if more players would actually play on the PTS - I do, do you?

 

 

I live near Chicago so the system goes down for maintenance every Tuesday at 2.00AM CDT...which happens to be right when I get home from work....

 

Ahh, now we get to the root of the issue. The servers are down when you want to play. I am sorry that it interferes with your RL schedule, but the maintenance window for the down time is perfectly acceptable for the US. I wholeheartedly agree that they perhaps should stagger the downtimes for EU and APAC to coincide with their "Quiet" times, but ultimately, the downtimes will be an inconvenience to someone's available play time. Fortunately there are seven days in the week - at least 5 of them don't have down time. Even I, as hardcore as I am in the game right now can afford to take a day or two off (or work around the maintenance schedule).

 

BJ

[Blistrich]

I just don't get it.

 

People angry that there are 4 hour downtimes and regular patch deployments...

 

Do you guys have any idea how much I would have killed for this level of maintenance in other games? Do you have any idea that this is exactly the level of service that most subscribers demand? And all this whining... because for 4 hours... you couldn't play Star Wars... because they were fixing something.

 

/sigh...

[ivanhedgehog]

Regarding 30-60 minute downtimes. I don't think their servers are capable of rebooting in an hour. Consider they have to bring down more than one server for a realm. I imagine they have a server for a realm, another for the associated pvp instances, another for the ops, another for the fp's. Possibly yet another for some sort of server hub or even planets. The probably have a dependency list as well. Bring down server 1 and then you can bring down servers 2, 3 and 4. Consider how long it takes for you to simply shutdown your client and shutdown your pc. Now compound this by a server which has tons of client data. I would not be surprised if it takes an hour to bring a fully running server to a complete stop.

 

There is also the terminology problem. The restart the servers(hardware ) that it all runs on..not a quick process.

They then restart the game servers(software) including the database servers, fp/wz/ETC. not like restarting solitaire...

They then have to make sure that all the resources are available and talking to each other.

 

I would hate to see the server become available and any of these processes not working. Can you imagine the screams if people logged on and all characters were missing? or had been dumped off the map into oblivion? or had no gear? or were reset to level 1?

[Lakhesis]

Do you guys have any idea how much I would have killed for this level of maintenance in other games? Do you have any idea that this is exactly the level of service that most subscribers demand? And all this whining... because for 4 hours... you couldn't play Star Wars... because they were fixing something..

 

It's not 4 hours. 6 double maintenances in 9 weeks means that prime time play in Oceania is shut down for roughly 7 daily prime times out of every 30. So when we come home from work, we've got about a 1 in 4 chance the server's down.

 

If it was stuff like server stability issues, fair enough. The regular maintenance also doesn't thrill me, but again, I can understand the logic so fair enough.

 

But when it's due to slipshod quality assurance on stuff which should've either (a) not been messed up in the first maintenance anyway, or (b) could wait until the next scheduled maintenance, that's no good. Skollops & I disagree somewhat on what falls into important/unimportant, but I think most of us could agree on that general principle.

 

More maintenances are not fundamentally a good thing - the right solution at the right time with appropriate quality testing is always going to be superior to a greater number of rush jobs.

 

Frankly, the problem is that Bioware care too much but are going about their caring poorly. It gives me hope for this game, if they can clean up their approach.

Edited May 10, 2012 by Lakhesis

[Darth_Acherus]

In the end this just is not a big deal at all. I didn't even notice there was maintenance.

[Zeghrem]

They've done 2 maintenances per week for 6 out of the last 9 weeks. Look at the patch dates. The point is that they have done "emergency" maintenances before. Constantly. Endlessly.

 

Precisely how many more do you want? Push it up to a 3 per week average?

 

So? Did you have something critical to do when there was a maint.? Probably not. You were planning on doing what everyone else was doing. Mindlessly leveling an alt cause of uninteresting endgame content or spending 40mins waiting for a pvp queue. SO MUCH EXCITEMENT HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. BIOWARE HOLDING ME BACK! QQ. It doesn't matter when the downtime, nothing important/major is happening.

 

I would love a rift style quick patching to be honest. 30 mins of downtime every couple of days to fix things quickly or as they became issues.

Edited May 10, 2012 by Zeghrem

[GnatB]

they need to take the servers done and keep them down until they add merges or transfers. I could care less about peoples matrix cubes wahhhhhhhhhhh

 

How about all the people who can't even play cuz they are the only one on there server

 

How does that stop you from playing? makes it way easier to do quests and such. I LOVE being on an underpopulated server. ('course, I'll also readily admit to not particularly liking MMO's, and would have probably preferred if this was simply a single player KOTOR III)

[KilmarFyrewynd]

To all those who says Matrix Cube is not as good as other 50 relics, what kind of drugs are you on? Sure, maybe if you're a tank you'd probably like the the Campaign Relics.

 

Let's compare these two for everyone EXCEPT a tank:

Matrix Cube M7-R3 (30 minutes of running around) - 50 Endurance, 58 Willpower, 24 Critical

Campaign Relic of the Kinetic Tempest (200 daily commendations) - 84 Endurance, 30% chance to do 184 more kinetic damage

 

As a non-tank, which would you prefer?

 

I agree it's not game-breaking, but it was a pretty bad bug. Everyone I talked to agreed that it would be good to have an emergency patch to fix it. I for one wholeheartedly approve BW of fixing before next Tuesday.

Edited May 10, 2012 by KilmarFyrewynd

[GnatB]

Stop making the assumption that just because you don't care about a particular issue means no one does.

 

You may not care about Matrix Cubes but judging from the huge number of posts on this forum about it, a lot more people do.

 

There are far more posts about missing Matrix Cubes than server maintenance.

 

There's a difference between "caring about" and needing an extra server downtime so the issue can be resolved 4 days earlier.

 

IT COULD EASILY HAVE WAITED.

[wessik]

datacron matrix cubes? What's the stats on those again anyways? Gamebreaking, truly gamebreaking item. This is the comedy I come to the forums for, ty so very much for the good laugh

 

i like my 72 Cun, 48 End, 7 Crit

[wessik]

i can understand those that have their primetime cut short by maintenance have issues, and i think that bioware should have the server maintenance at 2am wherever local time is so it's fair for everybody... or else reimburse them the 8 cents they are due for not being able to play...

 

however, maintenance is over, the game is playable again, time for everyone to move on to the next cryfest...

[G_Vega]

Why aren't they testing these patches before implementing them?

 

good question

[NoFishing]

First, I wholeheartedly agree that the problem with the matrix cubes should not have happened, and if they were actually pushing patches to the PTS the weekend before pushing them to live, it certainly would have been caught before affecting the entire player base. BW deserves no compassion for their insufficient quality controls and testing process.

 

However, this patch was pretty much critical for me. I mostly raid now, and missing the cubes was enough of a DPS loss (5-10%) for us to hit the enrage on Karagga, which we haven't seen since the week 1.2 went live. For me personally, my sage was down at least 100 DPS from last week. I'm actually surprised the cube makes that much of a difference, but I don't have any other explanation at this point.

 

So without this patch, we would be stopped cold on our EC progression. I don't like downtime for anybody, but making the game unplayable for me for an entire week would have been worse. And no, being able to log in and do dailies is not sufficient to call the game "playable". If I can't do the activities I want to do in the game, I call that unplayable.

[Ignicity]

Let's compare these two for everyone EXCEPT a tank:

Matrix Cube M7-R3 (30 minutes of running around) - 50 Endurance, 58 Willpower, 24 Critical

Campaign Relic of the Kinetic Tempest (200 daily commendations) - 84 Endurance, 30% chance to do 184 more kinetic damage

.

 

Keep looking down the list, there is one that puts out more damage than that. 268 IIRC.

[Nightfalll]

Look, heres the bottomline...................REGARDLESS whether or not it needs to be taken down because of blah blah blah, THE TIME THEY ARE TAKEN DOWN IS THE KEY ISSUE MOST OF US ARE IRATE ABOUT.

 

Do I need to draw a picture? Speak slower? Break out a megaphone?????

 

 

 

The time they take them down needs to be addressed. Again, the time they take them down needs to be addressed.

One more time? The time they take them down needs to be addressed......

 

 

PUSH THE SERVER TIME MAINT OUT ABOUT 3 HOURS AND A MAJORITY OF US WOULD BE OK WITH IT.

 

But thats pretty freaking hard isnt it Bio? Its bad enough you guys break your own game, but can't work with us on something we've been asking for since day one...

 

 

One more thing......Where is Bio regarding this issue? Are they reading this? Do they even give a gddmn????

 

 

No wonder they have a reputation like they do. And its only getting worse. Their silence speaks volumes..........

[ZORG]

Seems every week we have this same issue pop up.

 

Weekly scheduled maintenance occurs. They implement a new patch. That patch breaks something. We get a second maintenance period for the week.

 

Week after week after week.

 

To top it all off, for both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, they take the servers down during peak oceanic play times. Now before everyone attempts to school me in the fact that this is an american game, which I clearly already know, lets have a think about the root issue here.

 

Why aren't they testing these patches before implementing them?

 

 

 

One maintenance period per week should be more than enough.

 

The reason is that my matrix cube helps me when doing OPS and HMs.

[DarthPravus]

At least they fixed the crashes that were introduced in 1.2..... o wait no they didnt. nm.

[OrYcle]

To put things into perspective, WoW had 8 hours of maintenance last Tuesday.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4877377912

 

SW:TOR only had less than 4. With today's maintenance, it will still be less than WoW's maintenance for this week.

 

woo-fricking-hoo, wow was down 8 hours and swtor was only down for 4. The problem is that the WEST COAST gets SCREWED every week, not just once but most often twice. Ya that was only 4 hours of downtime... right in the middle of west coast (and I would add Hawaii's) standard play time... Seriously getting old Bioware. Love the game but damn. Stagger your maintenance so West Coast doesnt eat it all the time.

[ConradLionhart]

Servers are already up. Why are people still complaining? Just go play the game and have fun.

[Phlem]

Personally, I'd prefer they take the servers down for 8 hours at a time once a week, if it is going to eliminate the problem. Sadly, I doubt it will.

 

Personally I'd prefer they put the smaller patches on the PTR for a day or two before deploying them. I'd also like to see them put the larg per content patches on the PTR longer to help iron out more of the bugs. I guess losing 400k subs prompted them to rush 1.2 out.