Weekly server maintenance EU times?

[THAAC]

If I am perfectly honest I rather have separated servers/forums than this.

 

Please, not separate US/EU forums. WoW does that, and how many actual answers do you get from the Devs on EU forums? Never...just the blue fanboi forum police, locking every thread that criticizes anything with the game. While the US forums get all the answers and help, and the blue forum police US side are actually constructive.

 

EU players are second class citizens as it is with server down times to best suit their only important customers...do not further alienate us by giving us our own forums where our voice will never be heard.

[TheHauntingBard]

Please, not separate US/EU forums. WoW does that, and how many actual answers do you get from the Devs on EU forums? Never...just the blue fanboi forum police, locking every thread that criticizes anything with the game. While the US forums get all the answers and help, and the blue forum police US side are actually constructive.

 

EU players are second class citizens as it is with server down times to best suit their only important customers...do not further alienate us by giving us our own forums where our voice will never be heard.

 

You mean the devs post on these forums and say something useful?

I don't like most of the US forum community, I will keep it polite but I rather have a separated forum/server with a proper maintenance.

 

Besides when the servers are going down they don't even announce it in our time until 5 hours after they have been gone.

Talking about self centered.

[Mephismo]

They mean the weekends when most people have time off and evenings.

 

For those of you who don’t work it may be an inconvenience.

[TheHauntingBard]

They mean the weekends when most people have time off and evenings.

 

For those of you who don’t work it may be an inconvenience.

 

Students

Home work

Free days (some people work in the weekend)

Home study

Different work schedules.

 

I know hard stuff.

Edited December 28, 2011 by TheHauntingBard

[WhoDaresWins]

Students

Home work

Free days (some people work in the weekend)

Home study

Different work schedules.

 

I know hard stuff.

 

Most schools in the United Kingdom also finish about 3pm (GMT), which is a large chunk of your audience coming home to play only to find it offline for several hours.

[Inzil]

Enjoying the game, but if every tuesday the game is out from 12.00 to 18.00 (GMT +2) here I won't continue subbing.

[CedrionKatar]

They mean the weekends when most people have time off and evenings.

 

For those of you who don’t work it may be an inconvenience.

 

I'm pretty sure that 6:30pm is the evening . That's at least what the time was in most of the EU when the servers came back up, in some places it was 8:30pm or 9:30pm.

[elelr]

The worst thing for me is BW trying to justify this, despite the outcry, and not justifying it with any believable information or figures to back that up.

 

The whole thing about players not wanting to get the patch on different times is BS. People aren't bothered with a couple of hours difference, and guess why? Because less people are playing 1AM GMT through to 10AM GMT than they do 12PM GMT 5PM+GMT. No, I don't have the made up figures, but my experience in other MMORPG's and pretty much every single online game tells me so. I bet, that when calculating your "facts and figures", you didn't take into account that it is the holiday season, so more people are going to be playing later than usual. Guess what, that doesn't happen throughout the whole year. If we're talking about 2 days to a weeks difference to get the patches, I'd understand, but a couple of hours where the vast majority aren't playing?? A pathetic excuse.

 

As previously alluded to, there really shouldn't even be a need for this thread. Other MMORPG's and your own common sense should tell you this is the wrong thing to do.

 

 

To anyone also cancelling their subscription over this, I'd advise with a message like this, if not more!

http://www.fileupyours.com/files/251501/downtimefail.png

Edited December 28, 2011 by elelr

[Vesperr]

For me its till 8 PM. I wonder if oceanian players are able to play that day. Anyway I'm sure its possible for Bioware to change mainenance time for EU server, yet I dont know a reason why they wont. It just seems like a massive trolling from BW.

[Atroxy]

I find their maintenance time periods unacceptable. And they have to be changed.

 

We are losing a minimum of 4 days!! of play time. That is 48 days a year!! That is more than a one and a half months worth of playtime, where we do pay for!

 

Not acceptable!

[Lanilya]

Well, some lessons to learn:

 

- Do not do maintenance during daytimes, you can split the server park in 2 (EU and US servers) if you really want to.

 

- EU players won't mind if they get their patch 16 hours later, if that allows them to play during the day.

 

. Never make a patchday during a holiday.

 

- Have a rollback plan. If during a patch one hour before the deadline something is wrong, do a rollback and patch another day. It's better than having a patch be delayed until the peak hours (19:30 is considered peak hour, holiday or not).

 

- Improve communication - people want to know what went wrong with their favorite game. A simple "No ETA yet" is unsufficient. Especially since it was announced that the next information would come out at 13 CST (20:00 CET) and the servers came up half an hour earlier. I personally noticed it 13 minutes later only, and there was already a 10min queue, which increased to 40mins while I was waiting.

 

Lani

[Shai-Huluud]

yeah i can kind of see the logic in wanting everyone to get the patch at the same time and I also understand an unspoken desire to avoid players from one timezone creating alts and flooding another (This i suspect is the real main reason)

 

however, for what its worth, I'd be happy getting a patch a few hours later than our fine American cousins if it meant that downtime was off-peak for EU too.

 

just my 2 creds.

[Farbauti_GER]

Hi Chris,

 

Firstly, in the past, we've talked on a number of occasions about how we will run a global service. Many players raised concerns that patches/updates would land later in the EU than in the US. We stated that as we're running a global service, we'll do everything we can to make sure the updates go live in both regions as close together as possible. For this to be achievable, we need to run maintenance at the same time.

I don't see (or understand) a reason for this decision.

I do understand that BW doesn't want a large gap. But starting in EU at let's say 01:00am local time and then starting in US at 01:00am local time would keep the gap at minimum and more users happy.

 

Secondly, although many of you are able to play at this time, this is actually one of the times in the day (and the week) when we have the lowest number of players in game. It's certainly far from peak. Given that many of you are still on holiday, today's maintenance may feel a bit more out of place than usual, but in the future, the number of users impacted will be even smaller.

 

Are you talking about the EU players or the US players, or worldwide?

For the EU players I simply doubt your statement. I have the feeling that in the very early morning hours (european time zones) there is "the lowest number of players". Similar to US I'd guess.

 

Thus all we Europeans ask for is to adapt EU maintenance times to EU needs.

Thanks a lot for taking this into consideration.

 

 

Best regards, Fabauti.

[Phuzzi]

I can't say 10am-4pm weekday patching windows really bother me as I'll be working (as I guess most others will be, or at school). But doing it yesterday was a complete joke, the only major change seemed to be nerfing slicing, was it really that game-affecting they had to push out the patch on a holiday? Even if it was I'd have thought it better to temp disable slicing for 1 day and postpone the fix until today.

[McRuffles]

I can understand the reasons behind a single patch update of all servers in an MMO this young.

 

1. They may only have expertise to implement these upgrades in their US studios at present.
   
2. They may want to tie down their upgrade procedures and be thorough over their implementation especially on the first 2-3 patches
   
3. I suspect they will at some point change their mind about this, especially once their Irish base of operations is running smoothly
   
4. Their argument about peak times is valid, for the majority of the year a 10am - 6pm slot is when most people will be working / at school / etc
   
5. They actually do acknowledge that this is the holiday season and the down time was likely to cause upset for EU players
   

 

So, my thoughts are that once the game has been running for 3 months or so, BioWare will be confident enough to have the Irish IT team patch servers on an EU schedule. You guys have to understand that the patch procedures are not necessarily fixed in stone and may require a lot of communication. Transcontinental communication is fun but not necessarily the easiest way to get finer points across.

 

Whilst yesterdays downtime was painful, it did give my friends and I a good opportunity to catch up and discuss what we did for Christmas.

[Jamus_Divinus]

This is not SWG 2.0 however...

 

SWG had EU servers and those servers had maintenance during the early hours of the morning. The US servers had maintenance early AM also (different times to the euro servers obviously).

 

When a patch came out BOTH servers went down at the same time but at least the majority of the maintenance was at a seperate times.

 

It's doable and after 7 yrs of EU server maintenance being seperated from NA maintenance SWG shows it's easily feasible.

 

TL;DR

 

Standard maintenance at different times?

Patch inclusion at the same time?

Content would be given to us at the exact same time but normal weekly maintenance would be on a seperate schedule.

[Pompeia]

I toke 2 weeks off has I do every Christmas, and intended to play swtor during most of it. Now, yesterday, I gave up waiting for the servers to open when my clock displayed 6PM, wich is the time I have to start making dinner. After that its time to eat, do the dishes, and have some quality family time.

 

So yesterday, I was left with 0 hours of gameplay. If next week I also have 0 hours of gameplay on tuesday, it means in the end of the 60 days gametime I bought, I could only play 52. Of course for personal reasons I wont be playing all the time, but its a mater of availability.

 

If this maintenance time is to keep, the euro players should have compensation time like wow offered. I gave up other games before because I was annoyed with their maintenance times - and the games in question went up at 2 PM.

 

I see no reason why europeans should get to enjoy this game for less time then the american ones. If the game wasnt so adictive I wouldnt care.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Pompeia

[Atroxy]

yeah i can kind of see the logic in wanting everyone to get the patch at the same time and I also understand an unspoken desire to avoid players from one timezone creating alts and flooding another (This i suspect is the real main reason)

 

 

That is not a good reason. WoW is doing their maintenance during the off peak hours, why can't bioware??

 

There is no excuse for this. Don't forget that you lose 48 days a year. Bioware has to respond and react with a acceptable solution to this problem. Which will only get more protest as it continues.

[Atroxy]

 

If this maintenance time is to keep, the euro players should have compensation time like wow offered. I gave up other games before because I was annoyed with their maintenance times - and the games in question went up at 2 PM.

 

I see no reason why europeans should get to enjoy this game for less time then the euro-american ones. If the game wasnt so adictive I wouldnt care.

 

Couldn't have said it better !

 

I'm with ya all the way!

[Leruse]

Firstly, in the past, we've talked on a number of occasions about how we will run a global service. Many players raised concerns that patches/updates would land later in the EU than in the US. We stated that as we're running a global service, we'll do everything we can to make sure the updates go live in both regions as close together as possible. For this to be achievable, we need to run maintenance at the same time.

Really, that is a concern? "I got an update 7 hours later than the Americans!!11"? I see ... this is a HUGE deal Apparently this is an advantage ... if there is a huge bug in the update, you will be able to fix it before we get the update. That's actually very nice

 

Secondly, although many of you are able to play at this time, this is actually one of the times in the day (and the week) when we have the lowest number of players in game. It's certainly far from peak.

I guess that far less player are in the game between 3am and 11am than between 11am and 5pm.

 

Finally it's also worth noting that today's downtime was a little longer than usual and in the future, shouldn't be the case.

But IF that is the case, the maintance suddenly takes place in the after-work time.

 

So, Chris. Please try again

 

(German)

Edited December 28, 2011 by Leruse

[Andf]

I toke 2 weeks off has I do every Christmas, and intended to play swtor during most of it. Now, yesterday, I gave up waiting for the servers to open when my clock displayed 6PM, wich is the time I have to start making dinner. After that its time to eat, do the dishes, and have some quality family time.

 

So yesterday, I was left with 0 hours of gameplay. If next week I also have 0 hours of gameplay on tuesday, it means in the end of the 60 days gametime I bought, I could only play 52. Of course for personal reasons I wont be playing all the time, but its a mater of availability.

 

If this maintenance time is to keep, the euro players should have compensation time like wow offered. I gave up other games before because I was annoyed with their maintenance times - and the games in question went up at 2 PM.

 

I see no reason why europeans should get to enjoy this game for less time then the american ones. If the game wasnt so adictive I wouldnt care.

 

I'm going to ask for a refund as well if they keep doing their maintenance during EU playing hours.

[bloomfireblade]

this maybe offtopic but why is the items offered on the gtn so poor as for eu servers it was very displeasing hope on the NA server things are better No offence if i can afford good items i want to buy them maybe its a server based but so far i have not found a server that has the items i need if however someone knows a good GTN on his or her server send me a mail please also things would be much easier if Bioware would finally implement a hood down option for the hooded chest pieces cause the none hooded chest pieces are very rare if you can make a Temple Watchman's Vest with a hood down it should be possible to do the same with the hooded versions of the medium armour chest pieces hopefully a moderator takes this request serious and forward it to a developer who can do the adjustments I tried it with a hooded chest piece and i do not like it so an improvement would be very welcomed

[Vegetian]

While I can understand the plight of our European cousins, it is premature to assume that this benefits all Americans...or rather seperates us. I can't speak for everyone, but I work midnight shifts on my job..thus my playing time is exactly the time you would be playing. Well at least for the hours that I would be up before going to sleep (usually 11am EST). So I feel your pain there.

[Bluesavanah]

A really simple solution to this would be to rotate the maintance on a weekly basis do it US time friendly one week and GMT friendly the next.

[Noerra]

I hate it how some posters have been implying that people who are home on daytime don't have decent jobs. Many really important jobs are done 24/7 like for example police, firemen, emergency personel, doctors, nurses just to mention few. How about shops, public transport, gas stations and such services, would you like them to be open only untill 5 pm and only on monday to friday? Also lot of invisible professions like cleaning and maintenance is done nighttime or weekends. If your own work is done in office hours, don't assume 'most people' do the same.

 

I am working on such industry that my free days are often on middle of the week instead of weekend. For me it is big deal if maintenance is done daytime, cause it means i might not be able to play at all on my freeday. In my timezone maintenance time is 12pm to 6pm so it really takes big chunk of the day, especially if its extended like last time.

 

If maintenance times stays like it is now, i will not be subscribing this game after free month ends. There is no points paying on service that is not available when i need it.