Too Many Server Maintenances!!!!

Dude,
With all of the server maintenances that are absolutely wiping my time available to play this game, I think we should get a discount!
Why is server maintenance always at the same time? Why do you screw the same people out of being able to play the game every single time?
How about doing it during prime time so that the majority of people can see how ridiculous it is? And the 2nd and 3rd shift people can actually be able to play the game they pay for?
It's absolutely ridiculous.
You'll kick me out of a RANKED pvp match to pay for my subscription but you don't care about how you can't even keep your servers up.
The developers should be ashamed. It makes me hate this game and everyone involved in making it

*looks at join date and post count*

I see what’s happening here.

I agree I don't really even know any other game that locks you out for longer then a hour for maintenances in the first place, it's kind of ridiculous how some have been 24hours/48hours. And having random short maintenances.

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

*looks at join date and post count*

I see what’s happening here.

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What? That I came here to express my ill feelings towards the way this game is ran on this one topic?
Should I have been coming here already praising the game in endless topics?
What's the point of your post?
What is it you believe that I should have been doing this whole time?
I didn't realize I needed to have created 100 posts before my point of view could be taken seriously.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I agree I don't really even know any other game that locks you out for longer then a hour for maintenances in the first place, it's kind of ridiculous how some have been 24hours/48hours. And having random short maintenances.

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Thank you.
It's too much. It shouldn't take so long and it continuously targets a certain group of people because it's always during the same times. That's the *only* hours I have to play on those days.

I agree. Anybody who works in New Zealand can't play any day that they have a 4 hour maintenance. And it's for tiny things. No one can use these tokens until 7.4 anyway. We could have lasted with using Google to translate one line of text for two months. The Forked Tower raiders wouldn't have had to wait more than one month. They're all stupid and tiny, and if players could have a little patience, New Zealanders would get to play more.

Did you know that you can only play Frontlines for one hour a day on Materia? And that hour is smack bang in the middle of 4 hour maintenance each time? Did you know this is the only time Alliance Raids pop or fill? Did you know this is the only time we have the slightest chance of filling the Cosmic Exploration fates? We are tiny, and you set us back every time you do this.

You are paying for a service. You are paying for it to work correctly. If something is broken, Square is going to fix it so you get your money's worth.
Are you implying they shouldn't do daily/emergency maintenance and let things fall to pieces?

All MMORPGs do it at this time and the reason is because, quite frankly, most people do not play at this hour:
- NA are sleeping.
- EU it is very early morning and if they are awake, they are probably at work/school.
- JP it is not quite peak hours yet. Almost is.
- OCE peak hours would be in an hour or two.

So this time cleverly avoids those peak hours and the timing itself makes sense.

SE did say there have been too many emergency maintenances though. They wanted to put a stop to that. Unfortunately they didn't succeed yet and the patch has had a lot of bugs from what I've seen people say in the game. Whatever they are doing to address their internal QA issues, it hasn't worked yet.

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Originally Posted by madmonk1008

Thank you.
It's too much. It shouldn't take so long and it continuously targets a certain group of people because it's always during the same times. That's the *only* hours I have to play on those days.

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As someone from EU who usually is up very early yes... It effects me a lot sadly.

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Originally Posted by madmonk1008

What? That I came here to express my ill feelings towards the way this game is ran on this one topic?
Should I have been coming here already praising the game in endless topics?
What's the point of your post?
What is it you believe that I should have been doing this whole time?
I didn't realize I needed to have created 100 posts before my point of view could be taken seriously.

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If you were serious, I apologize. Your post read like parody regarding something that is extremely common in the MMO world.
EchoingPulse and Jeeqbit answered things sufficiently though. Maintenance for MMOs is normal, and Emergency Maintenance is especially normal after content updates.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I agree I don't really even know any other game that locks you out for longer then a hour for maintenances in the first place, it's kind of ridiculous how some have been 24hours/48hours. And having random short maintenances.

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I have said this years ago, and the white knights rushed in to defend saying: "You know nothing about software engineering," even though I don't know any other MMOs that have a lengthy maintenance time like FFXIV. I don't even remember the time other MMOs take for expansion release maintenance because it's so short, I don't even need to pay attention to how long it takes.

Meanwhile, I can remember many times I tried logging in and had the reaction: "Meh, it's locked for many hours yet"

...

Oh look, another essential server maintenance, another complaint that gametime is being lost from self-entitled players upset that they lost what... an hour of potential gametime, if that?

SE are entitled to take the game offline for maintenance whenever they like, for however long they want. It's in the Terms of Service you agreeded to when you signed up, and you continue to agree to every time you login to the game. It's been like this since the beginning and will always be so.

This particular maintenance was to fix a serious bug that was actually crashing the servers in certain circumstances, among other things. So it's completely essential.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by madmonk1008

Thank you.
It's too much. It shouldn't take so long and it continuously targets a certain group of people because it's always during the same times. That's the *only* hours I have to play on those days.

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you shouldnt have accepted the terms of service, if you dont like them

Quote:

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Originally Posted by madmonk1008

What? That I came here to express my ill feelings towards the way this game is ran on this one topic?
Should I have been coming here already praising the game in endless topics?
What's the point of your post?
What is it you believe that I should have been doing this whole time?
I didn't realize I needed to have created 100 posts before my point of view could be taken seriously.

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madmonk1008
Player

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I honestly don't think it would be entirely awful on the customer end of the fence to receive a small discount for potential loss of play-time. Same with any subscription service.

However... I imagine that would be extremely costly to maintain and facilitate on the other side of that fence, to the point it likely wouldn't be worth it - so it's one of the few cases, PENDING THE AMOUNT OF DOWN TIME - that I'm willing to not opt in favor of the consumer.

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Originally Posted by Haru304

I honestly don't think it would be entirely awful on the customer end of the fence to receive a small discount for potential loss of play-time. Same with any subscription service.

However... I imagine that would be extremely costly to maintain and facilitate on the other side of that fence, to the point it likely wouldn't be worth it - so it's one of the few cases, PENDING THE AMOUNT OF DOWN TIME - that I'm willing to not opt in favor of the consumer.

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It's a true fact of the matter but your comment made me wonder, how much harder would it be for them to segement off data center updates based on the average player prime time?

I almost feel like that should be pretty doable, with exceptions to major patch updates. Like idk im just riffing here, but I feel like this would be especially fair for them to have to figure out considering some of the bugs in these emergency patch updates are things that they should have been able to catch through quality testing. I think the unreal tomb drop rate not working properly comes to mind in the previous patch.

I could be completely off in my assumptions here so feel free to correct any dumb opinion I just had lol.

I wouldn't mind if they at least tried to do some maintenances during other time periods and not almost always when I've gotten home from work and settled down for some FFXIV. Heavens forbid they pick a JP evening slot for maintenance now and then...

You must be new...

Every single major patch for the last 11 years has been followed by a hotfix server maintenance.

It's very easy for other regions to just say it's the best time to do things. We get screwed over every single time. 4 hour maintenance? Oh, its not that bad. Except it falls between 6-7pm and 10-11pm (if NZ) for us, so that's basically that night gone. So yea, over time, it gets frustrating. We are paying customers too, so those of us who are impacted want to complain about the time and occurrences of maintenance/hotfixes/patches whatever, just let us complain.
Is anything going to change? No, but at least we can vent a little and find some support. But nah, we just trolling amirite?

It's weird times for us, but aren't most maintenances during standard work hours in Japan? So, the devs are working on it during their workday?

Then, that's fine.

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.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Nah, I'm not hoping for any compensation out of this, it's just annoying that these things always land in the most inconvenient spot for me because I can typically only play late at night, lol.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

- OCE peak hours would be in an hour or two.

So this time cleverly avoids those peak hours and the timing itself makes sense.

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I said in my post before, this lands smack bang in the middle of OCE peak.

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Originally Posted by jomas_45

I said in my post before, this lands smack bang in the middle of OCE peak.

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Define peak then. I define it as 7-10pm or 8-10pm. Maint was scheduled to end at worse by 8pm in AU time and an hour earlier JP time. In practice they end it earlier than that usually.

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.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Define peak then. I define it as 7-10pm or 8-10pm. Maint was scheduled to end at worse by 8pm in AU time and an hour earlier JP time. In practice they end it earlier than that usually.

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Add 2 hours for NZ. It's not just AU that plays in OCE

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shinku_Tachi

If you were serious, I apologize. Your post read like parody regarding something that is extremely common in the MMO world.
EchoingPulse and Jeeqbit answered things sufficiently though. Maintenance for MMOs is normal, and Emergency Maintenance is especially normal after content updates.

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Stop.engaging.with.trolls.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

Stop.engaging.with.trolls.

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You're right, 100% right. I gave the benefit of the doubt for a moment, which proved to be a mistake.

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Originally Posted by Ephremjlm

It's a true fact of the matter but your comment made me wonder, how much harder would it be for them to segement off data center updates based on the average player prime time?

I almost feel like that should be pretty doable, with exceptions to major patch updates. Like idk im just riffing here, but I feel like this would be especially fair for them to have to figure out considering some of the bugs in these emergency patch updates are things that they should have been able to catch through quality testing. I think the unreal tomb drop rate not working properly comes to mind in the previous patch.

I could be completely off in my assumptions here so feel free to correct any dumb opinion I just had lol.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Haru304

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.

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Yeah fair enough, I see your point.

Too many server maintenances?
https://i0.wp.com/media1.giphy.com/m...3ayQ/giphy.gif

the idea of the tokens being unusable until later is comical to me, as someone who usually does 99 tokens + all weapons. you're playing a japanese video game. the issue isn't maintenance time, it's poor handling of DC travel.