Really love the game, but your service forced me to quit.

[whilke]

1. Let's rotate maintenance times.
Sure, that would work out great for the players. But how does that work out for the employees? How would you feel if your job asked you to work bizarre shifts once a wee.

That is flawed logic. If you truly believe their operations staff is not already running around the clock then you are not informed enough try and make a point on this topic. Ops is the group that will be deploying new builds, running server/hardware maintenance, etc. They are already running 3-4 shifts to have coverage at all times. Who do you think reacts if the server goes down at some random off-hour?

Also, to the people wondering why so many fixes are needed, have you ever coded anything? Have you ever had to go through thousands/millions of lines of code to find whatever is not working as intended, then determine how to fix it while ensuring that your fix is compatible with the remaining thousands of lines of code? You think that is easy or simple when even Starbucks doesn't always manage to get your coffee order correct?

What does the amount of fixes required have anything to do with the number of days a week they have downtime? Or, are you trying to say SE has a terrible development staff that can't properly regression test changes in their code base?

By the logic of others in this thread, more maintenance equals more fixes, so let's just do a maintenance every 4 hours of the day. Let's just get this game fixed up now. Right? Why even wait 24 hours for the fix to get deployed? They have the fix, they scheduled the update for tomorrow, but that's too late! That bug is affecting people right now!


Most people are not asking for maintenance to stop completely, and that's the main counter argument defenders like to bring up. They are just asking to roll those 3-4 a week maintenance's into a once a week maintenance like almost every other AAA MMO on the market. Sure, if you have an emergency shut the servers down right now and do what has to be done (like the market hack last week), otherwise if the issue is fine to be live for 24-48 hours (that's how far out they schedule these fixes) then it's probably okay to be live for 3-4 hours and just fix it during your scheduled once a week maintenance window.

[Alhanelem]

The amount of maintenances for FF14 is high for a MMORPG but not unprecedented. What's unprecedented is SE's ability to ensure almost every maintenance falls under prime time for NA.

Midnight and later is not prime time for NA.

Also, maintenance is not anything like a restaurant serving half your food or the power going out at a movie theater. You legally bound yourself to an agreement that states that maintenance is sometimes necessary and may interrupt your service. You did not sign an agreement prior to ordering food at a restaurant stating that there would be no refund if the stock ran out or the power went out at the movie theater.

[re: the graphic and analysis above]
I suppose you're trying to infer something about the number of people inconvenienced by the current maintenance times. However, the fact remains that a considerably larger amount of the nation's population density is on the east coast or at least east half of the US (home to a majority of the 10 largest cities). The ARR maintenances most commonly occur after the highest peak hours of activity according to the chart you cited.

Besides the working time of workers, I theorize that one reason ARR's maintenances are somewhat earlier than other games' is to prevent the clusterbomb of logins the moment the servers come back up, which does work but is probably no longer necessary since the initial buzz of a brand new game has died off. That being said, like i noted before, the current maintenance times are still off the peak hours.

If you don't like the maintenance time, you can always join a JP datacenter server. Many of them have high english populations and you can avoid this issue. I have a friend from new zealand playing on hyperion and she is able to dodge Titan's attacks and such so obviously the increased ping is not a huge concern.

[Sixmp]

I am lucky,this is the first game that i am not effected by any maintenance. I do not remember a huge outcry from any US or Oz players defending the EU for massive amounts of lost game time.
What i do remember is that when ever i or anyone else complained when any of the games that did things during my play time is being told to STFU and deal with it.

I am not stating this to be be smug or a smarty pants, just saying that now the shoe is on the other foot just chill out and wait for things to calm down. SE might make minor changes to their schedule but i wouldn't expect them to start jumping through hoops any time soon.

[whilke]

I'm just surprised more people are not worried over the sheer amount of downtime this game has three months after release. That is not normal. I've been through almost every AAA MMO launch since UO, and four hours of maintenance every three days is not normal after the first couple of weeks from launch.

[Sublimeprince]

I would think server issues after how many months would not be an issue. SE dose very little to fix problems we begged for years and years to fix stuff in FF11 to the point we had to merge servers.
I don't see this as poor leadership on the Deve staff as much as piss poor equipment and bad Game management from SE's Senior Staff and CEO, you can't re-release a game see it Make money and let it die however people are stupid so go fucking figure its a piss poor version of a FF title anyhow outside Lore and graphics the whole community was better off waiting a few years to see why SE has lost touch with real rpgs

[Noxe]

Can't satisfy everyone :/ but yes I think more convenient maintenance times would be better for everyone xD

[blowfin]

I'm just surprised more people are not worried over the sheer amount of downtime this game has three months after release. That is not normal.

Actually it's quite normal, SWTOR was down at least one day a week, every week after release. Also sometimes not on scheduled maintenance days. It was annoying, I remember it well. Did it make me want to quit, not at all, i'm sensible enough to realise that they need to maintain their product and that maintenance would become less frequent.

WoW had (I don't know if it still does) weekly maintenance, every Wednesday night! Seriously, most Oceanic players lost a day of WoW every week!

The difference with XIV is that they don't do it weekly on a fixed schedule, they do provide adequate notice though. As the product gets more mature the maintenance periods will get less and less. Leaving now due to maintenance is... really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Besides the working time of workers, I theorize that one reason ARR's maintenances are somewhat earlier than other games' is to prevent the clusterbomb of logins the moment the servers come back up, which does work but is probably no longer necessary since the initial buzz of a brand new game has died off. That being said, like i noted before, the current maintenance times are still off the peak hours.

It's so it can be done in JP business hours . They time them during the day and the longer ones always finish right before peak JP time (5 or 6PM).

[Welsper59]

I'm just surprised more people are not worried over the sheer amount of downtime this game has three months after release. That is not normal. I've been through almost every AAA MMO launch since UO, and four hours of maintenance every three days is not normal after the first couple of weeks from launch.

That's kind of what happens when you prep for (probably) 50% of the actual player base to play your game. You create a game that was intended for a small crowd, but became bombarded and thus runs on the bare minimum. Even with the increased servers they did for NA/EU, it still probably was a minimal boost. Had it been expected that over a million players would potentially be on the game, they may have prepped more locations to house servers than just two for the entire world.

Something that I've actually come to accept was that they're okay with the idea of losing subscriptions. "All MMOs gain/lose subs as time goes on", right? Right. But this is more along the lines that they predicted a lower turn out, and thus allocated funds for that prediction (thus, our server problems). The income is significantly more than expected, but because of the fact that people will come and go, it's probably not a major problem (in their eyes).

If people leave because of maintenance times/frequency, then they were pretty fickle to begin with. Companies know that consumers are like this. They know they'll act like the sky is falling for the most ridiculous reasons. Think along the lines of someone from the outside looking at these complaints (neutral party). Heck, people should look at their own history of seeing people complain and applying their own comments to themselves. "So you're complaining about maintenance going on for several hours weekly, occasionally a couple times a week, and threatening to end something you enjoy because of it..." or for those who view themselves as not having a lot of time to play "You're paying $15 a month for a game that you apparently only have a couple hours a week to play..."

Our decisions and perspectives seem a bit ridiculous when you actually think about it.

[Rekujen]

Running a successful business model is not a dictatorship, it is about community and customer relations. I think you need some educating in the matter.

Exactly, and people always fail to understand this.

Square should try their best to make their customers happy, not the other way round. It's not a privilege to play FFXIV, It's a service. The fact that they require monthly payment, they should do their best to make their customers happy.

Oceanic players and NA/EU players with unusual work hours are screwed every. single. time. This is not acceptable, they should rotate the maintenance so everyone shares the burden, not the same people every time.

The only people against this are the ones not affected, which is a simple form of selfishness.

[Sfarzoso]

This is okay. One of less that QQ is fine.