Excessive maintenance is starting to piss off the casual, non-raiding players.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Duskane

they will get over it.

---

*look at what other large companies like Ubisoft, EA, Bamco, ect. are getting away with*
Yeah... the average person will probably get over it... again... :/

I trust they know when maintenance is necessary. So we’ll just have to have some patience.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deceptus

Most of the maintenance is in the middle of the night US time (don't know your timezone). It won't affect the majority of the playerbase.

---

This is a troll thread but just on this specific point, 7pm to 10pm isn't the middle of the night. The latter half of the patch gets into that, but a big part is prime NA time.

Maint's gonna maint so we just go play something else. I'm Eastern so I get a bit more time but I feel sorry for the Pacific folks who may or may not even be home from work yet.

Maintenance is going to happen friend a lot of times it doesn't happen when we want it to and we just have to go with the flow and move on. Just remember they give ample warning usually when it's going to happen at least 24-48hr notice before.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by FireMage

And XIV. XIV regularly goes without maintenance for weeks

---

Server typically goes down for a little while every week here recently. I can't think of a time it hasn't.

*extended* maintenance is reserved for patches. Hell, I didn't even know there was a patch til this morning and I'm just like "meh"(I'm in EU, downtime goes til noon).

I vote for more maintenance. I get to log off and read random thoughts from you people.

'member when text based games had daily hour-long maintenance's?

A certain farm members.

maintenance is trying to make the game better. Who do not want the game you play get better?
Why getting pissed off to causal player is not fine, but raider is ok?!!! The is really weird concept

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

I'm a hardcore player and I raid, therefore my opinion on the matter holds no value.
However I have some friends who don't raid or play as often as I do

We have had in the last 3 weeks, 3 maintenance periods, and it started to affect those casual players too.
They don't play every day like I do but they also have goals they want to accomplish
For example, one of my friends missed out on getting his island bike mount because he couldn't retrieve granary materials or animal droppings in time to start the new cycle this week due to last week's maintenance.

I do not believe this is a good idea.
It is acceptable to fuck over raiders since they are not worth anything to the game, but pissing off the casual, paying audience is going to paint a really bad picture of the game to them.

---

This is a game as a service. It is to be expected that we get maintenances. We do not deserve any compensation. What we do deserve is shorter bugfix maintenance times. We used to see 2-3 hour hotfix maintenance timings. Now we are starting to get closer to FFXI 5+ hour maintenances.

Tonight's changes to HP and damage values should not have had to be 5 hours.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by niwaar

This is a game as a service. It is to be expected that we get maintenances. We do not deserve any compensation. What we do deserve is shorter bugfix maintenance times. We used to see 2-3 hour hotfix maintenance timings. Now we are starting to get closer to FFXI 5+ hour maintenances.

Tonight's changes to HP and damage values should not have had to be 5 hours.

---

As the game is getting bigger, the complexity of code increase dramatically. Do not forget there is resolved issue changes as well, not just those two major changes. Even that is the case, you need to ensure the code you deployed work and also the infrastructure is all good before release to the player

Maint. Tonight is the patch and Infrastructure work. Thats why its longer then normal.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Imora

Server typically goes down for a little while every week here recently. I can't think of a time it hasn't.

*extended* maintenance is reserved for patches. Hell, I didn't even know there was a patch til this morning and I'm just like "meh"(I'm in EU, downtime goes til noon).

---

It's a new patch release. Additional maintenance down time for hotfixes is normal.


Doesn't take much to work your way back through the Maintenance Notices on Lodestone to see when servers were down.

Sept 12/13 (right now) - patch

August 31/Sept 1 - emergency hotfixes

August 28/29 - normal post-patch hotfixes

August 22/23 - patch

July 24/25 - emergency maint NA worlds only (Data Center Travel and cross world difficulties)

July 12/13 - normal post-patch hotfixes

July 4/5 - patch to add Data Center Travel, addition of new EU worlds

June 6 - patch

May 23/24 - patch

May 16/17 - housing lottery fix

April 24/25 - patch

April 13/14 - emergency hotfixes

April 11/12 - patch

So about half the maintenance down time in the past 5 months has been to add new content/system updates to the game and half of the rest to apply the normal hotfixes that end up needed. (Yo, SE! Stop adding new content and system improvements to my game, you're interrupting my game play. /s-heavy)

Out of about 3700 hours in this time period, servers are down for about 120 hours. Most players aren't inconvenienced for more than 20 of those hours because the maintenance is occurring outside of when they would normally be playing the game.

You genuinely find that worth complaining about?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by niwaar

This is a game as a service. It is to be expected that we get maintenances. We do not deserve any compensation. What we do deserve is shorter bugfix maintenance times. We used to see 2-3 hour hotfix maintenance timings. Now we are starting to get closer to FFXI 5+ hour maintenances.

Tonight's changes to HP and damage values should not have had to be 5 hours.

---

The laundry list of Resolved Issues was longer than the rest of the patch notes, which is what the patch was likely for overall, they just added some balance changes into it to make it a worthwhile .x1 patch - this wasn't a hotfix. The biggest fixes I saw in there was the fixed achievements for Island Sanctuaries and the fact that if you had a full or close-to-full glam dresser, trying to /isearch could crash your game. People had workarounds in place before it was patched, but the patch means that it's actually fixed.

While I'm not a dev, some googling because I was curious how rollouts like this work (did you know it's called a "patch" because you used to cover holes in the tape the computer used to fix problems? I didn't, and now we all know!) it seems like the process is, fairly simplified:

- pull servers offline. Since all the servers are in different places, I imagine coordinating this is lots of fun. Not pulling them offline runs the risk of the patch not deploying properly.

- upload and deploy a script to modify files. Depending on how big the file is - it's compressed prior - decompressing and deploying can take maybe a handful of seconds to hours.

- running checks to make sure everything was deployed correctly, everything that needed to be deleted was deleted, and that nothing needed to be rolled back. At least for one game, they have a scoreboard to make sure that the script is running bug-free for what they were trying to fix. I don't know if they do dev debug live while servers are down if something minor happens where a bug that should have been fixed isn't or it is but not without creating a different problem created by the same issues, however - again, not a dev just someone curious about it all.

If there was infrastructure work (which it sounds like there was,) everything is going to take longer, especially if it's swapping parts around. I know enough about that to know that you want to make sure nothing is lost after swapping parts out, and those checks will add more time into the time taken to deploy patches. Checking each individual server I would imagine takes some time, plus communication between each site - NA has 24 servers, EU has 16, JP has 32(!), and OCE has 5. I don't imagine they have that amount of people for each individual server checking its status for an all clear, either, and fewer people means it goes slower, despite all of the server clusters for each region being in one place. Restarting everything to clear caches, putting everything back online to test everything for a clear of everything being patched would also take time. Maint even ended early by about 70 minutes, but I'd rather they give themselves enough time to patch and check than patch, check, and then have to extend out because they lowballed how long it would take (looking at you, Elex, and patching a mobile game.)

Generally, hotfix times are a few hours. Bigger patches take more time, as this one was an actual "named" patch and not just "hotfix 6.208642756354732" or whatever. "Named" patches are always bigger, and it's why xpac releases are always a 24 hour maint period, content patches .x1-5 are usually 8, and the content patches' patches are anywhere from 4-8 depending on what is being done. That's all from my looking at patch times over the course of 9 years and noticing a constant in the way they deploy and time out their patch times. They also have to make sure everything is kosher on Sony's side for the PS4/PS5 clients, and Steam's own clients. The servers don't generally come up before server rollovers for the week, and they will never come up early when housing is released.



If any software devs want to chime in on how the process could work (it seems every company is different too, so SE may have their own methods that are kept under wraps) if I missed anything, I'd love to learn, especially if something goes wrong in patching :) for what I looked up, this article is what I read to see how a few different companies do their thing. A few years old now, but I don't doubt the process is more or less the same, but with better tech.

tl;dr: patching takes longer than you think depending on everything, not just a couple of hours.

The maintenance really isn't that bad. I came from DCUO about 7 or more years ago and over there they have a morning maintenance, at the same hour, all year long, for about 1 hour.

It's topics like these that really make me despise the self entitled forum community. You guys are the literal worst

This thread is so funny. Especially when you consider THE ONLY PEOPLE who are actually affected by these maintenances, are the raiders. They're the ones eager to wake/stay up for the reset, just so they can raid again. But the maintenance often lasts until 2 hours after the reset.

The main reason why people like doing re-clears just after the reset, is because these are the real hardcore players who often know VERY WELL what they're doing, and are usually able to 1-shot the fights. People can argue with me on this, but I've been doing it for years now. The longer in the week I wait to clear, the harder it becomes.

As for non-raiders, they literally have A WEEK, A WHOLE FREAKIN' WEEK to do their weekly content. If you waited until Monday night just before maintenance to do your stuff, you really have no right to complain.

Anyway, that's the reply I would have given if this were actually a legit post, but the fact that you said the raiding playerbase means nothing to the game makes it obvious you're just a troll. :')

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Packetdancer

I get why they do it, mind you; it's a lot easier to make a compelling/exciting trailer and patch summary when you have the MSQ chapter and raid tier or alliance raid to include in it. A patch that only includes, say, PvP balance fixes and a new Deep Dungeon is harder to make an exciting trailer for. So it makes sense that they like to make a trailer for 'the next MSQ chapter, and all that content that's coming up from now until the chapter after that'.

---

There's also the benefit of giving the players a roadmap of what to expect that cycle, ie all of 6.2X up to 6.3, etc.

Pull the server down for like longer get all the stuff done, instead of this 4 hrs stuff weekly,
We will wait for a polished thing and SQ i think forgets that.
Also the server lag after patches just isn't worth it.

No master piece is ever rushed.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by rainichan

NA has 24 servers, EU has 16, JP has 32(!), and OCE has 5.

---

I just wanted to add to this. There are multiple physical servers for each World.

This is what one section of the new North American data center looked like when it was moved back in 2017:

http://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/t/3b9...5a9d7a14_1.jpg

(Source: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ter-Relocation)

I just wish this maint didn't cut into people's time to finish their weekly stuff. That was a long maint for just some fixes

I'm not mad about weekly maintenance and I'm pretty casual 😂

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by IkaraGreydancer

I just wish this maint didn't cut into people's time to finish their weekly stuff. That was a long maint for just some fixes

---

From your perspective it was "just some fixes", however from the maintenance warning, it affected the server infrastructure which is typically not a minor a minor patch. The length of the maintenance downtime would also indicate the number of tasks/impact of the work.

It's unfortunate sometimes if people have work that is left until the end of the week, however I don't think that there will ever be a time that is picked that will be convenient for everyone, everywhere.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DPZ2

I just wanted to add to this. There are multiple physical servers for each World.

---

Moreover, different physical servers often handle different things.

For instance, you likely have one specific server (or pool of servers) which handles your inventory, and which other servers speak to; you want a central 'source of authority' for something like that.

Dynamic instance servers that do not need to persist data (e.g., dungeons, where the state of a dungeon when you leave it has no bearing on the state of the dungeon the next time you enter) are likely set up differently than dynamic instance servers which do need to persist data on teardown (e.g. housing interiors or Island Sanctuary... which is probably why Island Sanctuary seems to share the housing interior server pool).

Etc.

I come home from work at 9 PM EST and I agree that maintenances are getting annoying.

Not only are they twice as frequent as they've been in the past, they always occur between 11PM and 3AM, Could it not take place from 2 to 6 AM? I imagine it's even worse if you're on the West Coast.

They haven't gotten more frequent, but there were a couple of actual emergencies this year and the addition of new worlds. If you're this concerned about the updates they run, then you definitely need that brief time off.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deveryn

They haven't gotten more frequent, but there were a couple of actual emergencies this year and the addition of new worlds. If you're this concerned about the updates they run, then you definitely need that brief time off.

---

Did you not read the part where I said I can only play after 9PM EST because of work? It's not like I don't understand they must do their own thing, but it doesn't mean I can't wish they would push maintenances to 2 AM.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Petite

Did you not read the part where I said I can only play after 9PM EST because of work? It's not like I don't understand they must do their own thing, but it doesn't mean I can't wish they would push maintenances to 2 AM.

---

The game is japanese, they have to do maintenance during japan office hours.

Yes, we can wish none of us were affected by maintenance, but you'll have the dude that comes complain saying they can only play from 2am to 6am each day. Truth is, no time would satisfy everyone. We've had this conversation every odd year where maintenances stack up.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Imora

Server typically goes down for a little while every week here recently. I can't think of a time it hasn't.

---

I can, go actually review maintenance times, it's only "frequent" when around a patch

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Imora

Server typically goes down for a little while every week here recently. I can't think of a time it hasn't.

---

Okay, I'm a programmer, and I'm curious, and I'm waiting for a hardware validation test to run. And I like data. And the Lodestone is available as a feed.

So, let's snorf in the Lodestone entries, and filter for the Maintenance category, and anything that has 'All Worlds' or 'Some Worlds' in it. (To exclude Lodestone, Mog Station, etc. maintenance.)

Assuming my incredibly-hastily-written Python code is correct in how it filtered things, this gives us 10 planned Monday-evening maintenance windows -- many of which are associated with a patch or a hotfix immediately after a patch -- and 8 emergency maintenance windows (mostly to do with datacenter travel, the housing lottery, or the rollout of the Materia datacenter).

Breaking it down for the year so far, week-by-week, striking out the weeks with maintenance:

• December 28 - January 3 - Planned (Monday)
• January 4-10
• January 11-17
• January 18-24 - Planned (Monday)
• January 25-31
• February 1-7
• February 8-14 - Emergency/Hotfix (Tuesday) - Materia DC only
• February 15-21
• February 22-28
• March 1-7 - Planned (Monday)
• March 8-14
• March 15-21
• March 22-28
• March 29 - April 4
• April 5-11 - Planned (Monday)
• April 12-18 - Emergency/Hotfix (Wednesday)
• April 19-25 - Planned (Monday)
• April 26 - May 2
• May 3-9
• May 10-16 - Emergency/Hotfix (Sunday) - Housing Lottery Fix
• May 17-23 - Planned (Monday)
• May 24-30
• May 31 - June 6 - Planned (Monday)
• June 7-13
• June 14-20
• June 21-27
• June 28 - July 4 - Planned (Monday)
• July 5-11
• July 12-18 - Emergency/Hotfix (Tuesday) - Datacenter travel
• July 19-25 - Emergency/Hotfix (Sunday) - Datacenter travel (NA only)
• July 26 - August 1 - Emergency/Hotfix (Tuesday) - Datacenter travel (4 EU worlds only)
• August 2-8
• August 9-15
• August 16-22 - Planned (Monday)
• August 23-29 - Emergency/Hotfix (Sunday)
• August 30 - September 5 - Emergency/Hotfix (Wednesday)
• September 6-12 - Planned (Monday)

That gives us roughly a 50/50 of weeks that have some maintenance and weeks with none.

But the bulk of the 'Planned (Monday)' ones that happen right before reset are either a patch, or a hotfix in the week or two right after a patch. And taking out the 10 planned windows (e.g. things necessary to actually roll out a patch, or the immediate aftermath thereof) gives us only 8 instances of emergency maintenance over the course of the year so far, despite all the disaster surrounding both the housing lottery and the initial rollout of datacenter travel.

And it's worth noting that three of those eight -- the Materia DC one, the NA-only one, and the time when four specific worlds choked and died on datacenter travel -- only affected some people, not the entire playerbase.

As someone on Primal, only 16 of these maintenance windows affected me. And if you're an EU player and not on one of the four worlds that had to be taken down on July 26th, you were only affected by 15 -- of which ten were the rollout of patches/new content, or hotfixes for just-rolled-out new content.

Honestly, I've seen many live services with far worse uptime and maintenance records. That said, I will grant that between the DC travel issues and the rollout of 6.20, 6.21, and hotfixes for 6.20, we've had 7 of the past 10 weeks be ones that had maintenance windows. (Though unless you play on both NA and one of four specific EU worlds, you were affected by at most 6 of those.) Given the human tendency to grant far more weight to negative experiences than positive ones, it's not surprising a few people would feel like maintenance is constant.

Not really bothered. They usually 4am to 10am for me.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Petite

Did you not read the part where I said I can only play after 9PM EST because of work? It's not like I don't understand they must do their own thing, but it doesn't mean I can't wish they would push maintenances to 2 AM.

---

You can be frustrated but at the end of the day, they're doing it during the JP work hours and asking them to push maint & stay late at work just so you can get a couple hours in before bed is pretty entitled. Play something else on those nights and enjoy FF the next day, you'll survive.

Laughably, with this thread in mind, my friends who still play the MMO I quit in favor of FFXIV tell me that said game was taken offline for maintenance and a content update.... and when, after several hours of downtime, the servers did come back online the proverbial hit the fan. The new episode was laughably bug-riddled and anyone who was fortunate enough to reach the end of it found that it concluded by taking them back to the start! Said episode also involved playing as an NPC, with the unfortunate byproduct of the player's ability tray being empty when they returned to their own character.

Complain about FFXIV's downtime all you please, but with the above display of cartoonish incompetence in mind I'd say that S.E's approach to quality control is the correct one.

https://i.imgur.com/Ee9cp8N.gif



Really though, I don't care about the maintenances. :P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Carin-Eri

Laughably, with this thread in mind, my friends who still play the MMO I quit in favor of FFXIV tell me that said game was taken offline for maintenance and a content update.... and when, after several hours of downtime, the servers did come back online the proverbial hit the fan. The new episode was laughably bug-riddled and anyone who was fortunate enough to reach the end of it found that it concluded by taking them back to the start! Said episode also involved playing as an NPC, with the unfortunate byproduct of the player's ability tray being empty when they returned to their own character.

Complain about FFXIV's downtime all you please, but with the above display of cartoonish incompetence in mind I'd say that S.E's approach to quality control is the correct one.

---

It works for every other AAA dev. Why finish what you started when you can push out a 1gb day one update~!

It's a live service, what do you expect?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by NightHour

It's a live service, what do you expect?

---

the service to be live

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

the service to be live

---

It is, 99.99% of the time.

Just play something else lmao

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

the service to be live

---

and in order for that to continue to be live, it needs to have breaks every now and then for maintenance.

Excessive?
Where

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

and in order for that to continue to be live, it needs to have breaks every now and then for maintenance.

---

And then you have a game like GW2 where it stays online during just about all patches and what not. It's quite nice.