Yeah Yoshi P should do a live stream crying and saying sorry and then give us two months free would be nice. xD
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Yeah Yoshi P should do a live stream crying and saying sorry and then give us two months free would be nice. xD
Just for reference sake. This latest four hour maintenance would equate to roughly two cents. Even a full 24 hour maintenance is 53 cents. We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel to complain about this of all things.
It's because Tokyo is roughly 13 hours ahead of EST. In other words, 2am EST is 3pm the following day for the dev team. So it sucks that your availability falls in that window, but it's standard working hours for Japan.
If we didn't have fixed home worlds, they could do a rolling maintenance and take the servers offline one at a time for the hotfix. It's what we do for the duplicate servers of the software that I work on IRL, and it's what some MMOs that utilize AWS or temporary instanced worlds for their server space can do.
However, because the in game worlds for XIV are fixed and persistent on a single server cluster, they don't get that option. It's pull the servers down, apply the patch, run the post patch checks, then put them back online.
It would be fairier and imo, entirely doable. But I just can't see Square Enix, particularly, doing it. On their end, I imagine it would require a lot more scheduling than the usual Japanese working hours allow, which in turn leads to a lot of additional costs on the company's end to facilitate. I imagine based on what I've read on here before, as well, that there'd be some technical hang ups because of the limitations of the engine. Can't remember exactly how it goes, but even a small dialogue change seems to require a full on server shut down. On the quality control front, which I'm not impressed with in Dawntrail, I think it's likely that a staggered approach to updates would just lead to more clumsiness across the board.
All in all, cost wise, I really wouldn't imagine it 'should' cost that much to facilitate, but every game company across the board seems to be in constant financial straits to the point opting for a staff vending machine is probably too much of an expense. I'd like to get back to a point, some day, where player goodwill trumps such things but eeeeeh. Eeeeeeh.