Vary Maint times PLEASE!!!

[Babekeke]

So another Maint Update, and what a surprise... 17:00 GMT.

At least this one is planned ahead, but when you look back through the history of maint, even all of the All Worlds Emergeny Maint is carried out at 17:00 GMT.

I sometimes can't believe it when I see the announcements 10 hours in advance that so-called "Emergency Maint" will be carried out at 17:00 GMT. If it's that much of an emergency, it should be done immediately!

But yeah, many people have had this rant before, and I'm sure many will have it again, but for the couple of months following an expansion release, it's almost impossible to plan anything for in the evenings GMT as it's almost guaranteed to be interrupted by more maint.

All that I ask is that SE stops being racist and waiting for the beloved JP players to go to bed so that maint doesn't disrupt their play time. We all pay to play! Spread the maint out and have maybe 4 6-hour rotations for the maint.

eg. you do 1 at 17:00 GMT, then the next one will be at 23:00 GMT, the next at 05:00 GMT then the 4th at 11:00 GMT, then do the rotation over again.

[Zarchery]

These maintenances last like 3 hours tops. Is your life really so empty that you can't find something else to do for 3 hours every few weeks?

The racism accusation is a real gem. It's most likely that because the servers are physically located in Japan, and have Japanese people working on them, that they do the maintenance in the middle of the night because that's when good network admins do server maintenance.

[Babekeke]

These maintenances last like 3 hours tops. Is your life really so empty that you can't find something else to do for 3 hours every few weeks?

We have a static that meets every Monday and Wednesday. Every other Monday lately there seems to have been Maint during our static time. It's getting annoying. We play to be able to play, yet us EU players get more than our fair share of downtime. Of course if you're American, then this likely doesn't affect you, unless you work strange shifts, or not at all.

As for accusations about how empty my life must be, I shan't bite.

[Sfchakan]

Yes, all of us Americans are lazy and unemployed. Oh, and SE is racist.

Sounds like someone's got some issues.

[Imakun]

17 GMT is actually a rather recent trend for SE. If you really go and look up the old maintenance times you'll see that they were almost always right in the middle of EU prime time (especially if you were part of an End Game LS), around 19/20 GMT, and lasted for more then 2h and a half.

My only real problem with that was that it reset the HNM timers to be in our time, and I hated camping lol

[Tamoa]

Wasn't aware that europeans are considered a race.

[Alhanelem]

Why should SE's NOC employees write their schedules around you, OP?

They're going to piss somebody off no matter when the maintenance hits, so there's no point in complaining about it.

"hey, they have us scheduled to work on the servers at 3AM JST."

"Yeah, I saw that. Screw em, they don't pay us enough to ruin our beauty sleep."

[RAIST]

I would hazard a guess that part of the planning may be based on the diversity of the playerbase as well. As in, try to take things off line when it is most likely to affect the least number of players. At least, that's how we used to plan things when we had to take a webserver down for a client. Often times when you are crossing time zones, you have very narrow windows to work in when traffic is lightest, so a lot of thought goes into these decisions (usually).

[Glamdring]

if there's an update involved it screws everyone's statics anyway, server congestion to download updates is a big problem, often kills the night entirely.

[Riggs]

This has been discussed a number of times before and always the same responses, SE will not comment at all, all the US players who are not effected will call the op a whiner for complaining although they are the first to bitch about anything that effects them. the EU player base will agree with the OP and nothing will change.
We need to face the facts, we represent the lowest segment of the player base and by holding the maintenance when they do they effect the lowest number of players.