Are the people defending this practice as clueless as SE themselves? You need proof NA is the biggest MMORPG market? Just go to any MMORPG and start counting the number of NA servers versus EU servers. It won't take very long for you to realize there's always more NA servers than EU servers. Korea and China are potentially the wild cards but I'm pretty sure FF14 is not trying to cater to either. The reason why EU tends to be neglected at the expense of NA is not because everyone hates Euros. The reason why almost every other MMORPG has a NA-friendly schedule over EU-friendly schedule is not because they're all based in NA. It's because NA is a bigger market than EU. If anythign, NA-based companies have a harder time doing a NA-friendly schedule than EU-friendly schedule, and yet that's never stopped them from putting patch at 1am PST or so.