Define prime time!

I see so much bitching about maintenance being done in prime time. The latest maintenance was done in:

6am to 8am Tokyo time
10pm to 12am London time
5pm to 7pm New York time
2pm to 4pm Los Angeles time

Why are there so many North Americans bitching about maintenance hours being in their prime time? Is 5pm to 7pm considered your prime time? Are your prime time news aired between 5pm to 7pm?

Some people like to believe that whenever they are playing is what they consider being 'prime time'. Since, after all. They can't play.. It's the old 'sun revolves around me' syndrome.

For me I don't care when they have maint.. I have other things I can do during it..

If by last maintenance you mean the one just gone it was 12am to 2am (just after 2am) BST (British summer time, daylight savings in london)

That's generally about it. Whenever, where ever someone is, and can't log it, is Prime Time. If maintenance never happened at all, most of these people probably wouldn't even sleep. Its a fine time to get up, take a shower, and go outside.

If you are talking about the maintenance today 9/19/2013, you really need to learn how to convert time zones. The maintenance today was from 7 pm to 9 pm EST. Which last I checked was considered by the entertainment industry as prime time.

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Originally Posted by Hippo

I see so much bitching about maintenance being done in prime time. The latest maintenance was done in:

6am to 8am Tokyo time
10pm to 12am London time
5pm to 7pm New York time
2pm to 4pm Los Angeles time

Why are there so many North Americans bitching about maintenance hours being in their prime time? Is 5pm to 7pm considered your prime time? Are your prime time news aired between 5pm to 7pm?

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Primetime News is 6PM.

SE has already said, multiple times, the grand majority of players are NA -- not JP. Scheduling an NA/EU mait during NA primetiem is assinine. These downtime/maits don't have 50 staff members on, it's a small team -- that should be able to come in during the night to turn it.

Prime Time is the time between people arriving home from work or school and time most people log off for bed for the night.
This is usually somewhere between 5pm until 10, sometimes 11pm during the weekday. Longer on the weekend.


It's the easiest to tell when prime time is on the most populated servers, as evidence by a queue, no matter how small.

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Originally Posted by Starrywisdom

Primetime News is 6PM.

SE has already said, multiple times, the grand majority of players are NA -- not JP. Scheduling an NA/EU mait during NA primetiem is assinine. These downtime/maits don't have 50 staff members on, it's a small team -- that should be able to come in during the night to turn it.

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I'll tell you what.. just because the majority of players lives in a specific country doesn't mean that the majority will also be affected by this. usually online gaming companies know damn well how to read their logs and figure out when the best time for maintenance was (for the longest time pretty much every MMO out there did their maintenance on Tuesday, for example. then pretty much every game switched to Wednesday because WoW did their maintenance on Tuesday... this has shifted in the last couple of years, but it's still apparent that companies 'do their research')

they have the actual numbers. they know what they are doing.

Well, typically NA has its own servers not groups with EU. Anything after 5pm would be prime time, with maintenance expected to be outside the hours of 5pm-3am EST to account for both coasts. Since we have EU included the situation is different here oin FFXIV. People may not like the complaints but it was not a smart logistical choice to group servers this way.

Legitimate answer to a sarcastic post :)

you do realize a server labeled (north american) going down during north american prime time is ridiculous i would hope instead of just trying to be a snide ass about it.
Euro servers this is still a bad time frame
japanese servers this is about right.

each server region should have it's own maintenance schedule based on the region it is supposed to be catered towards and people playing on servers outside their own region should be accepting of the fact that they aren't playing in their own timezone

Prime time in a MMORPG means when you play.

Lets say all of the world plays at noon and not midnight, and SE see's that so they schedule it at midnight when they think no one is playing, and it turns out there is one person in the whole world that is playing. SE has just schedule'd there maintenance during prime time. So SE deserves to be destroyed for it.

Please stop creating strawmen. There's a legitimate definition for prime time.

Because its 7 to 9 eastern time, prime time for me, I play around 7pm to midnight every day. I'm not complaining though, I welcome patches, they improve things. If it's once a week I have no problem with it. But more than that is annoying.

Prime Time - The time a singular player is awake and active, and anything that happens during this time is obviously a negative impact on his gameplay and thus, must be vocalized aloud in a very unappealing manner.

J/King. It is amusing no one actually does server maintence at different times depending on what cluster the server is currently hosting to ( area region. ) Then again, you'd have one region literally ahead of other regions in terms of server versions and updates and you'd have collissions if a player not from that region tries to play on a server that is not their region.

VERY tricky since EU and NA servers are both in Canada, unless they moved them and I didn't get the memo.

Prime time on US server east coast is 5 PM EST to like 11 PM EST and Prime time on a US server West Coast is 5 PM PST to like 11 PM PST dont care about the rest of the worlds prime time im in America on an American Server

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Originally Posted by Ivy_Blackrose

Prime time on US server east coast is 5 PM EST to like 11 PM EST and Prime time on a US server West Coast is 5 PM PST to like 11 PM PST dont care about the rest of the worlds prime time im in America on an American Server

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Noez. You're in america on a canadian server. :P

JP company = maintenance during their working hrs. Think of it this way, Blizzard (an American company) do their maintenance during their working hrs. When I played WoW a few yrs back, they had maintenance once a week on Tuesdays I think. Maybe they still do. Their maintenance hrs were 11am - 1pm EST if I remember correctly (during their working hrs). Guess what, it was prime time somewhere in the world and people couldnt play either. I live on the east coast (US), maintenance for this game happens at prime time hrs all the time. But I am not bitching and moaning. Kids these days = waaaaaaaaaaaaah can't play for 2hrs once a week for maintenance, waaaaaaah. grow up

You can't use "waaaaaah" then tell people to grow up.


That said, It would be different for SE if it was a "All server" maintenance, but Japan servers are still up and NA down during their prime time playing house is crazy....


But then again, this is the same company that has customer service in place that takes 3+ weeks to reply to tickets, 3+ hours to answer phone calls on non-toll free numbers, and closes tickets without even fixing or answering them.

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Originally Posted by Leonas

Noez. You're in america on a canadian server. :P

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An American on a Chinese server in Canada.

Japan time is 11am right now so this started at 8am for them. While Japanese servers started at 6am. And I am sure they got into work before 6am to get things started.
So yes this is during U.S. primetime (5pm anytime zone is when primetime would start as a lot of people are starting to get off work) but at least its being done.

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Originally Posted by EvokerKeii

An American on a Chinese server in Canada.

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Mind. Blown.

From Wikipedia:

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Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The hours traditionally taken as constituting prime time in North America are 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific and 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Central and Mountain Time Monday–Saturday. On Sundays, prime time begins an hour earlier, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific and 6:00 p.m. Central and Mountain, ending at the same time as on the other six days of the week.

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By this definition maintenance ended an hour before prime time after prime time started (eastern time).

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Originally Posted by EvokerKeii

An American on a Chinese server in Canada.

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An American on a Chinese server hosting a Japanese game in Canada.:rolleyes:

Aside from that, I agree with Dreamer. "Prime time" has a very strict definition used by most media companies; it isn't a loose synonym for "peak hours", though of course it caters to that notion.

Prime time is going to be anywhere from 5PM to 10PM, give or take. Children come home between 2PM and 5PM, many adults get off between 5PM and 6PM. A lot of people with (potentially) nothing to do for a few (or more) hours.

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Originally Posted by Starrywisdom

Primetime News is 6PM.

SE has already said, multiple times, the grand majority of players are NA -- not JP. Scheduling an NA/EU mait during NA primetiem is assinine. These downtime/maits don't have 50 staff members on, it's a small team -- that should be able to come in during the night to turn it.

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It's a NA/EU data center and the maintenance is not during EU prime time. Where is the problem?

NA get the better latency, EU get the better maintenance time. Everyone is happy.

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Originally Posted by Dreamer

From Wikipedia:



By this definition maintenance ended an hour before prime time.

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I think you need to redo that math. Maintenance went from 7:00pm to 9:00 pm eastern which is an hour into the prime time as stated by your quote from wikipedia.

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Originally Posted by Hippo

The latest maintenance...

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Hmm, only ONE data sample qualifies your research being conclusive?!?!

How about going back a few more?

Sep. 3, 5:00 p.m. to Sep. 4, 2013 3:00 a.m. (PDT) (8pm-6am EDT)
Sep. 11, 5:00 p.m. to Sep. 12, 2013 3:00 a.m. (PDT) (8pm-6am EDT)
Sep. 19, 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (PDT) (7pm-9pm EDT)

Considering 3 out of 4 the "scheduled" ones were during the hours where it does fall in between the hours where people are home during late afternoon, early and late evening, yeah, so far most of the "scheduled" maintenance is during prime time when the NA population is most likely to log on.

BTW, where do you live? Maybe we can ask SE to schedule it during the hours you are most available to play instead of NA's.

EDIT:

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Originally Posted by DeadlySwordz

JP company = maintenance during their working hrs.

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While this excuse was acceptable during beta, this is no longer an acceptable excuse for a product that is live 24x7 serving the globe. Major data centers are operational and manned 24x7, hence the service provider also needs to be sensitive to the locale of their service area.

jc

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Originally Posted by Tubbins

I think you need to redo that math. Maintenance went from 7:00pm to 9:00 pm eastern which is an hour into the prime time as stated by your quote from wikipedia.

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Yep, you're right. For some reason my brain was thinking that maintenance was 5p-7p (even though I'm in eastern time myself).

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Originally Posted by Leonas

Noez. You're in america on a canadian server. :P

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Canada is a part of the Americas... Nobody said United States of America servers, just American servers.

Prime time is defined by two things:

Largest population density, hardware location.

For NA/EU, that more than likely means prime time is related to EST.

take it easy people. let them fix the servers when ever they want.

and for all who bitch about American Prime time just tink about this:
the servers say NA/EU so when you have Prime time EU people are going to bed.
yes ofc it can be more American people who play but this is a JP game and not a American/EU game and do this different.

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Originally Posted by lyse20

yes ofc it can be more American people who play but this is a JP game and not a American/EU game and do this different.

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Please stop using this as an excuse, this game is a global game hence it needs to service the global community.

Just because Toyota HQ is located in Japan doesn't mean their operation can only operate during JP hours. When was the last time you spoken to an Indian accent customer service/tech support center during India's hours?

jc