ANOTHER MAINTENANCE TODAY!

[PandaPause]

What's broken? Maintenance notes make no mention of 'fixing' anything.
Maintenance 4 of 7 days in a week is a bit excessive and a 'new' trend that is occurring here. This has been getting worse since the introduction to 2.0.5 and server transfers.

[NA] All Worlds Maintenance (Nov. 4)
At the following time, in order to address high server stress, we will be performing maintenance on all Worlds. During this period, FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn will be unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your understanding.

* The World transfer service will be suspended 15 minutes before maintenance begins, and will be unavailable until maintenance has ended.

[Date & Time]
From Nov. 4, 2013 9:00 p.m. to Nov. 5, 2013 1:00 a.m. (PST)
* The completion time may be subject to change.

[Affected Service]
- FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn


Yeah you're right its working as intended. Nothing is broke.

[DSN]

So you're upset because you chose to interpret it your own way? That's honestly not SE's problem at that point.

No I work in this industry and am very aware of a 'hail mary' when I see one.

Also when you give no information you are only open to interpretation, if they do not like it they could give a little more information than 'to reduce stress'. A computer does not need a reboot for the sake of a reboot unless you have a leak in your code consuming resources and not releasing them. I have many machines that have been online for many years are extremely busy and have never seen downtime.

If you are restarting machines to fix a problems then the thing is you are only buying time and don't understand the root cause of the problem which results in a 'temp fix' meaning it will come back again.

[DeceptionsWrath]

Typical that they'd delete any posts about maintenance. Kinda shocked they don't deleted the .3 second delay thread as well. Out of sight out of mind right? Anyways, i really don't care anymore if they do maintenance, now i don't have to feel guilty about not getting on a game i wasted 45$ on to sub for 3 months. So no FFXIV today and i'm guilt free YAY!

[Molly_Millions]

clustering and redundancy is cool, it lets you reboot machines without impacting end users. The fact they keep needing to take the game offline for what in essence I am reading the maintenance notes as a reboot to fix a memory leak is getting old.
Lie to me tell me its to combat RMT that would make the community happier than 'um servers feel kind slow, were are going to try poking it with a stick to see if that fixes it' which is what a 'to alleviate stress' means to me.

Let me borrow your IT crystal ball! It would have really been handy for me last night when I had to work.

But seriously, where did they say they needed to reboot for a memory leak?

[Lurkios]

No reboot takes 3 hours. Even the largest blade centers reboot in 20 minutes (unless the'ye Hyper-V based, then you're just lucky if it reboots at all). The time delay speaks of database updates to me - but that's just conjecture.

[Reinheart]

It's right when my play time starts/ends again, but it's alright, fix is needed so it's a good thing.

I just hope it fixes some lag issues instead of making it worse like it has been in every last recent maintenances... ><

[Battlewrench]

It seems like SE is deleting all posts related to maintenance complaints.

Take the hint, stop making these threads complaining about maintanence.

[Rivienne]

Let me borrow your IT crystal ball! It would have really been handy for me last night when I had to work.

But seriously, where did they say they needed to reboot for a memory leak?

They previously mentioned issues with memory fragmentation on the instance servers, and having to reboot(I don't recall if they said reboot though) to fix. Memory fragmentation isn't actually a memory leak however, and it is a very hard problem to solve depending on cause and environment.

I don't actually know what the servers look like, but as an example in a similar issue I have had this issue with in memory indexes in a database that involves millions of inserts and deletes (as opposed to updates) in a short period of time, and the only solution is to drop the index and rebuild, which involves kicking out all clients bringing everything down, rebuilding, and then bringing everything back up. Depending on how they are managing memory, it may be a similar type of issue. The long term solution has to be pretty sophisticated to prevent synchronization issues or cpu spikes, and is unique to each case.

That said, the description on this one isn't remotely specific enough to judge what or where the issue is, though I see in many of their problems since launch, strong parallels with issues I have seen in the past in real time enterprise scale databases.

It's not emergency maintenance if it's announced and planed a day or two in advance. What is the emergency that has to be fixed...tomorrow? Since it's not a real emergency, why are they not just doing what almost every other AAA mmo does and have one weekly maintenance. They've now done 5 maintenance's in the past 6 days.

Not necessarily. In the database index example, when the problem was discovered we scheduled the fix based on current state of the database until a long term better solution could be found, and would know a certain amount of time in advance each time, but it wasn't precise enough to predict a fixed day on a rolling basis. You can know in advance when something will become an emergency if you don't repair it, without being able to schedule it on a fixed date.

[whilke]

It's right when my play time starts/ends again, but it's alright, fix is needed so it's a good thing.

I just hope it fixes some lag issues instead of making it worse like it has been in every last recent maintenances... ><

It's not emergency maintenance if it's announced and planed a day or two in advance. What is the emergency that has to be fixed...tomorrow? Since it's not a real emergency, why are they not just doing what almost every other AAA mmo does and have one weekly maintenance. They've now done 5 maintenance's in the past 6 days.

Sure, if there is a real emergency take the servers down now and do what needs to be done. But the fact that they are okay with whatever it is until 24-48 hours from now means they could just wait a couple of more days until the standard weekly maintenance day and fix it then.

No one is arguing that issues should not be fixed, or that maintenance should not be done. What people are complaining about is the fact that they are doing a maintenance almost every other night. None of these are real emergencies since every one is a *scheduled* emergency maintenance. They could have just waited until tomorrow and done them all at the same time.

[Shadex]

I am going to have to agree that this maintenance thing is getting out of hand. Is their game THAT broken that they have to bring the servers down two to three times a week? And no, complaining about it is not pointless or the issue of the user. This is a paid service and as paying customers there is a right to be upset and convey that dissatisfaction to the provider. If they don't have the skin to take it when their customers are upset perhaps Square should get into another business.