Soo should we strap in for weekly maintenance at this point or...?

This is the 3rd time servers have gone down for maintenance in 3 weeks, just wondering if this is going to be the new normal going forward. Feels like every other time I've sat down to play I've had to cut it short due to maintenance. It doesn't help that the time chosen for maintenance is peak hours for east coast, when everybody is back from school/work.

They seem to intend to keep rolling out hotfixes for Pagos, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had weekly maintenance for a bit, then more weekly maintenance following 4.4.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnJacobAstor

It doesn't help that the time chosen for maintenance is peak hours for east coast, when everybody is back from school/work.

---

Considering it's a Japanese game, one could be surprised this doesn't happen more often.

I remember in the early days of Warcraft that the servers would be down for the better part of every tuesday. And this happened for years! I don't even remember when they phased that out. But I'm sure someone somewhere is getting a good chuckle at how FFXIV is having more downtime in the middle of their expansion cycle than WoW did just dropping a new expansion.

I wouldn't count it as 3 times. The one for the 6th was literally patch 4.36 itself. Surely you can allow them to give us new content (regardless of whether you like it or not).

This is only the 2nd hotfix, though I would imagine this actually might happen again as I'm sure they're getting LOTS of Pagos feedback for things to fix up.

Personally it doesn't bother me. I used to play WoW during WOTLK when they'd have 12+hour maintenances every tuesday. I'll just play another game for a while, or watch something.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnJacobAstor

This is the 3rd time servers have gone down for maintenance in 3 weeks, just wondering if this is going to be the new normal going forward. Feels like every other time I've sat down to play I've had to cut it short due to maintenance. It doesn't help that the time chosen for maintenance is peak hours for east coast, when everybody is back from school/work.

---

It is normal for them to come out with a few hotfixes after each patch - they have done that pretty often. We don't get new patches every month though, so between each patch there isn't much other maintenance.

What gets me shows NA has a bigger player base than Japan player base does. So why they pick prime time for NA player to have there maintenance.

ITT: people who didn't play through early 2.x

Didn't even need an expansion or a patch to see the servers going down once a week for hours at a time, sometimes more!

It's a good opportunity to catch up on other games, maybe some shows... our usual time works best but I don't see an issue with them spreading the pain now and then. Maintenance windows are tricky when you have a 24x7 global operation.

Japanese game? So what. Pretty sure the server I play on is still located on the North American continent, where North American people are employed to monitor and maintain these servers, and typically work at normal North American business hours. There is no excuse for maintenance during North American prime time unless there's an emergency game breaking bug.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Macleod

Japanese game? So what. Pretty sure the server I play on is still located on the North American continent, where North American people are employed to monitor and maintain these servers, and typically work at normal North American business hours. There is no excuse for maintenance during North American prime time unless there's an emergency game breaking bug.

---

Do you want to tell SE that they have to coordinate three separate maintenance windows for patching? Will you be there to make all the adjustments to the deploy methods to account for this? If you can do it better without costing them a fortune, I'm sure they'd love to hire you!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hynaku

What gets me shows NA has a bigger player base than Japan player base does. So why they pick prime time for NA player to have there maintenance.

---

While its true that the NA playerbase is bigger than the Japan one (...even though not by a lot, accoding to the census of active players in july 2018: 267,629 vs. 231,677) you need to keep in mind that the maintenance time falls into japanese work hours, so its convient for them.

...and before anyone argues how they dont care about their western playerbase: Please remember that we europeans exist aswell! Our playerbase might be a lot smaller than either NA or japan (120,959 active characters, accoding to the census), BUT that makes those maintenances actually convient for both Japan and Europe (the maintenance started at 3 am for me and while I'm normally playing at that time, its also a perfectly fine moment to go to bed).

Even though the main reason is probably japanese buisness hours, not picking a time thats convient for europe - they'll always inconvience someone anyways.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nixxe

They seem to intend to keep rolling out hotfixes for Pagos, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had weekly maintenance for a bit, then more weekly maintenance following 4.4.

---

Yet another reason why they should just delete Pagos and pretend it never happened.

Weekly maintenance is nothing new to mmos. Hotfixes, patches, server maintenance, etc. And its only a few hours a week so its not like its long, abnormal or extended by any means. I really don't understand how the loss of 3 hours means someone cannot get anything done in the remaining 165 hours in that week. Esp given the fact we get at least 2 to 3 days warning ahead of time.

And it may be peak time for NA but its a JP game so you need to expect it to be more on their schedule anyway. When you are dealing with something global and timezones its what happens. Someone, somewhere is always gonna get the short end.

That maintenance is conducted as conveniences Japan seems quite besides the point. The US East Coast is a sizable portion of the game's subscribers repeatedly inconvenienced not only by the baffling decision to not rotate maintenance timings in a sane, responsible manner that, if not equalizing the impact across the board, at least offers an occasional reprieve to the one group of players saddled with the worst of the maintenance burden, but also by frustratingly poor routing that too often causes East Coast players to have worse ping to US servers than do players connecting from Southeast Asia. It is not as if the revelation that Square Enix is a Japanese company - quelle surprise! - somehow eases these concerns. Nor does it satisfactorily explain them.

I also understand that programs like Slack, Skype, Discord exist to help large teams communicate that may not be located in the same region or time zone, and co-ordinate efforts like server maintenance. For that matter, if real-time communication is an issue across time zones, a still older technology known as Email may be used to schedule the operations of a multinational company such as is convenient for ALL of their customers, without requiring they co-ordinate in real time maintenance of servers that, despite not sharing players, content, or physical server space, must go offline simultaneously.

I don’t think anyone in NA or EU handles maintenance... pretty sure the servers go down and they send the patched files from Japan to all 3 databases. Thus, doing this during normal company hours in Japan seems pertinent.

I’m just assuming here though.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnJacobAstor

That maintenance is conducted as conveniences Japan seems quite besides the point. The US East Coast is a sizable portion of the game's subscribers repeatedly inconvenienced not only by the baffling decision to not rotate maintenance timings in a sane, responsible manner that, if not equalizing the impact across the board, at least offers an occasional reprieve to the one group of players saddled with the worst of the maintenance burden, but also by frustratingly poor routing that too often causes East Coast players to have worse ping to US servers than do players connecting from Southeast Asia. It is not as if the revelation that Square Enix is a Japanese company - quelle surprise! - somehow eases these concerns. Nor does it satisfactorily explain them.

I also understand that programs like Slack, Skype, Discord exist to help large teams communicate that may not be located in the same region or time zone, and co-ordinate efforts like server maintenance. For that matter, if real-time communication is an issue across time zones, a still older technology known as Email may be used to schedule the operations of a multinational company such as is convenient for ALL of their customers, without requiring they co-ordinate in real time maintenance of servers that, despite not sharing players, content, or physical server space, must go offline simultaneously.

---

You've clearly never done maintenance/ops work for a large company. I agree that in an ideal world no one would be inconvenienced and all maintenance would happen at the lowest-population times for each region. But reality dictates that you do what you can when you can, and that's often constrained by your resources (whether time, people, capacity, or some combination thereof). Not to mention the sheer number of people you need to coordinate with. The individual components of MMOs and the infra that serve them don't operate in vacuums- what you do to one section affects the whole ecosystem, and taking that all down so it comes back up nicely is hella complicated. An earlier poster's recollection of how long it used to take Blizzard to perform maintenance compared to the four hour outage we have tonight shows how much better things have gotten IMO. (I know they don't shut it all down for quick maintenance like this, but the point is, even taking some of the services offline is more complicated than most realize.)

Trust me, if e-mails and Skype were sufficient, my job would be a heck of a lot easier! :P If you can find a way to 1) coordinate effectively across timezones, organizational units, and knowledge gaps and 2) get people to read my friggin' emails, you will be a very wealthy person.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnJacobAstor

This is the 3rd time servers have gone down for maintenance in 3 weeks, just wondering if this is going to be the new normal going forward. Feels like every other time I've sat down to play I've had to cut it short due to maintenance. It doesn't help that the time chosen for maintenance is peak hours for east coast, when everybody is back from school/work.

---

https://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/im...753/3steps.jpg

however, maintenance doesn't concern me much since I have other things to do and games to play. As long as they fix that thing they call Pagos I'm okay with it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nixxe

They seem to intend to keep rolling out hotfixes for Pagos, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had weekly maintenance for a bit, then more weekly maintenance following 4.4.

---

Let's be clear here, SE rarely does hotfixes in this game. The word hotfix specifically refers to fixes performed while the system is still live.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alistaire

Let's be clear here, SE rarely does hotfixes in this game. The word hotfix specifically refers to fixes performed while the system is still live.

---

Not necessarily. From google:

A hotfix or quick-fix engineering update is a single, cumulative package that includes information that is used to address a problem in a software product. Typically, hotfixes are made to address a specific customer situation.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Not necessarily. From google:

A hotfix or quick-fix engineering update is a single, cumulative package that includes information that is used to address a problem in a software product. Typically, hotfixes are made to address a specific customer situation.

---

Minor quibble: hotfixes imply that the systems are live, available, and in use while the change is being deployed. If you take it down, it's not a hotfix- it's maintenance.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hestzhyen

Minor quibble: hotfixes imply that the systems are live, available, and in use while the change is being deployed. If you take it down, it's not a hotfix- it's maintenance.

---

It doesn't anymore. It was originally used, but word usages change constantly.

The term "hotfix" originally referred to software patches that were applied to "hot" systems; that is, systems which are live, currently running, and in production status rather than development status. For the developer, a hotfix implies that the change may have been made quickly and outside normal development and testing processes. This could increase the cost of the fix by requiring rapid development, overtime or other urgent measures. For the user, the hotfix could be considered riskier or less likely to resolve the problem. This could cause an immediate loss of services, so depending on the severity of the bug, it may be desirable to delay a hotfix. The risk of applying the hotfix must be weighed against the risk of not applying it, because the problem to be fixed might be so critical that it could be considered more important than a potential loss of service (e.g., a major security breach).

Similar use of the terms can be seen in hot-swappable [2] disk drives. The more recent usage of the term is likely due to software vendors making a distinction between a hotfix and a patch.

Also, maint is over.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnJacobAstor

That maintenance is conducted as conveniences Japan seems quite besides the point. The US East Coast is a sizable portion of the game's subscribers repeatedly inconvenienced not only by the baffling decision to not rotate maintenance timings in a sane, responsible manner that, if not equalizing the impact across the board, at least offers an occasional reprieve to the one group of players saddled with the worst of the maintenance burden, but also by frustratingly poor routing that too often causes East Coast players to have worse ping to US servers than do players connecting from Southeast Asia. It is not as if the revelation that Square Enix is a Japanese company - quelle surprise! - somehow eases these concerns. Nor does it satisfactorily explain them.

---

Um....I am on the east coast and generally the maintenance for us is not during peak hours but instead, in the middle of the night, its really not often we have it this early, so they do seem to be rotating it somewhat so the same group isn't always effected. How you came to the conclusion that we as east coasters are always the ones inconvenienced is beyond me, since we have it easier than even the west coasters. Also I have 0 ping issues and neither do any of my friends around here for that matter. It may exist for some but its not like they just don't care and shrug off the entire east coast of NA. I am not white knighting either, you can read my past posts, I can be really critical of SE and FFXIV. But if I am going to be critical it's going to be with an actual issue. Maintenance times, are not one.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JohnJacobAstor

This is the 3rd time servers have gone down for maintenance in 3 weeks, just wondering if this is going to be the new normal going forward. Feels like every other time I've sat down to play I've had to cut it short due to maintenance. It doesn't help that the time chosen for maintenance is peak hours for east coast, when everybody is back from school/work.

---

I see no harm with a weekly maintence. It always accure during my zzz time or going to work so all good! /EU

So NA player base is bigger than JP and EU combined?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Neri

So NA player base is bigger than JP and EU combined?

---

According to latest (un)official census NA have aprx 30k more active characters, so it margins.
People have to understand their people is located in Japan and they can't please everyone.

I know this maintenance started earlier than normal but normally it's 10:00 p.m. - 3:00 a.m. (PDT)
Now I don't know how this affects East/West Coast in NA and your various timezones but to me it don't seem that bad?


Edit: numbers

Active characters
NA 267,629
EU 120,959
JP 231,677

https://ffxivcensus.com/

Yeah, and I think there's also time zone difference between east and west coast too right? Prime time on east coast could have been not-so-prime time in west coast, I think?

So overall, I thought people already know this already that no matter when the maintenance is going on, it will screw someone's time zone up. Perhaps, it's all about mememe.

9pm on the west coast is midnight on the east. We have 4 time zones pacific-mountain-central-eastern

So now we're also complaining when they try to fix things a little?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LyraKuroneko

So now we're also complaining when they try to fix things a little?

---

Yes. No fun allowed!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

9pm on the west coast is midnight on the east. We have 4 time zones pacific-mountain-central-eastern

---

Then I don't get the crying. If It happend say 6pm-10pm pdt every week (assuming that would be your primetime?) but it not like that always the case and being offline a couple hours once in awhile - is it really that bad? lmao

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alistaire

Let's be clear here, SE rarely does hotfixes in this game. The word hotfix specifically refers to fixes performed while the system is still live.

---

First of all, SE called the latest update a hotfix, so a hotfix it is as far as discussions here are concerned.
Besides, the word hotfix covers a bit more than you claim. It is often used to refer to any fix that is considered urgent enough to apply outside the normal update schedule.