PLEASE - Try to think when scheduling maintenance, please! :)

[Nyarlko]

Odds are good that this was not planned months ago. It doesn't take that long to order hardware. They most likely care less about ROE scheduling and more about labor scheduling.

[IBHalliwell]

Odds are good that this was not planned months ago. It doesn't take that long to order hardware. They most likely care less about ROE scheduling and more about labor scheduling.

An one day delay in this case wouldn't cause to many issues, would it? Wednesday versus Tuesday!

As for the planning time, I said weeks or months.

FFXI runs on high-end blade servers and these run into the hundreds of thousands (I suspect millions of dollars for all worlds). A company doesn't spend this type of money on the spur of the moment (a few days). SE would set this upgrade during the budget cycle for this year, which would occur during last year's budget cycle.

If you look at the length of the outage, it clearly shows SE is doing major hardware upgrades! This isn't cheap PLUS the coordination of getting hardware out, in, and tested in the window means they started planning this a good while ago.

I worked for two computer hardware manufactures - IBM and Cray Research - and seen what it takes to do this type of work. It is not quick and requires detailed planning. Adding in some customer consideration, as I'm suggesting, is not asking too much.



I'm just saying if SE management could think about us, it would be a benefit!

All I am asking is two things:

1) Schedule between the 1st and 10th (or 1st and the monthly maintenance) all non-monthly / non-urgent maintenance. In simple terms: maintenance you know is coming and isn't the once a month one.

2) Avoid popular Limited Time Challenges, such as "Gain XP." The times of these are well known and can be factored in during the planning!