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

[Meshico]

Don't take it personal man, Yoshi and his team are doing everything they can! Its not about you and your friends, just try not to take it/make it personal.

[whilke]

So I get that this is a heated discussion, and I couldn't read all 15 pages (sorry!), but I have a question for the more technically minded. Sorry if this has been addressed or if this is a stupid question!

Guild Wars 2 had a system where you'd be able to play the game while they were performing maintenance, only bringing the servers down for ~5-15 minutes. The way this was explained to me is that they would work on the updates and maintenance on a different server, and then apply the update to the game in that 5-15 minute period. This was just wonderful, it obviously cut down on the times the game was inaccessible to the players. Is there some reason that Square can't do the same thing that ArenaNet does (or did, haven't played it in a while)? I'm not saying it's necessary for the game to be successful, but it sure would cause less downtime and irritate less people. That's usually a good thing.

GW2 was able to pull in all of their online game experience from GW1, and ArenaNet to make their system work properly. They had the proper architects and infrastructure people designing the back end to GW2 with that update system in mind.

For some reason, even though SE has already produced 1.5 MMO's, FFXIV feels like it's a companies first stab into the market from a technical perspective. How they implemented their netcode, to how often they are having to bring servers down three months after release. I'm still not sure why more people are not worried about this pattern. It does not bode well for the future of the game.

[Tupsi]

GW2 was able to pull in all of their online game experience from GW1, and ArenaNet to make their system work properly. They had the proper architects and infrastructure people designing the back end to GW2 with that update system in mind.

Let's be honest - Even though we get told not to compare ARR to other MMOs, since people keep bringing up GW2 and GW1, GW1 wasn't a true MMORPG much like PSO/PSO2 aren't true MMORPGs.

For some reason, even though SE has already produced 1.5 MMO's, FFXIV feels like it's a companies first stab into the market from a technical perspective.

You can say this about any company since you're posting in a topic regarding maintenance, every company does maintenance especially at a high frequency during launch and for a while after. SE's FFXI had a ton of maint. in early 2002, then it slowed way down to the point of only happening when they needed to fix a game breaking bug or post major update/expansion live date (CoP's 15-16 hour maintenance...)

These days, XI is hardly ever down, so you can't really determine much even though this is SE's 3rd major MMO since XIV ARR was a redesign, a newly launched redesign of barely 4 months old and not even had one major update yet.

[whilke]

Let's be honest - Even though we get told not to compare ARR to other MMOs, since people keep bringing up GW2 and GW1, GW1 wasn't a true MMORPG much like PSO/PSO2 aren't true MMORPGs.

You can say this about any company since you're posting in a topic regarding maintenance, every company does maintenance especially at a high frequency during launch and for a while after. SE's FFXI had a ton of maint. in early 2002, then it slowed way down to the point of only happening when they needed to fix a game breaking bug or post major update/expansion live date (CoP's 15-16 hour maintenance...)

These days, XI is hardly ever down, so you can't really determine much even though this is SE's 3rd major MMO since XIV ARR was a redesign, a newly launched redesign of barely 4 months old and not even had one major update yet.

While GW1 wasn't a *true* MMORPG, it was a massively online game, with a backend system just like any other MMO. It's 100% accurate to compare the backend of FFXIV, or any MMO, to GW1/2.

Actually, I can not say that about any AAA MMO that has come out in the past several years. AAA MMO's do not do a maintenance/downtime every 2-3 days, not even a month after release. SE is the unique butterfly of MMO services that seems to need four times as much downtime per week as other games.

If you're telling me that FFXIV is following the same pattern as a game they released a decade ago, well again, how can you not be concerned? Did they not learn any lessons in the past 10 years?

[Urielparadox]

I'm tired of the maintenance and I have had several friends who work in the same industry, Chefs, quite this game bc of it. I expect fairly frequent maintenance at least once a month but this already what time 4 for this month? i'm glad you get to sleep through maintenance however for our GC it always fall during the middle of an event I don't understand why they don't rotate it so it's not always effecting the same people especially when you look at on a global scale more then on just a local scale they are effectively locking entire areas out of the game repeatedly. 11 had this same problem all updates were done at roughly 1pm and it doesn't make since you need to rotate otherwise they are showing the favoritism and effectively telling a portion of your community FU we wont ever change our times ever so that you can play during your prime time.

[PessimiStick]

I'm tired of the maintenance and I have had several friends who work in the same industry, Chefs, quite this game bc of it. I expect fairly frequent maintenance at least once a month but this already what time 4 for this month? i'm glad you get to sleep through maintenance however for our GC it always fall during the middle of an event I don't understand why they don't rotate it so it's not always effecting the same people especially when you look at on a global scale more then on just a local scale they are effectively locking entire areas out of the game repeatedly. 11 had this same problem all updates were done at roughly 1pm and it doesn't make since you need to rotate otherwise they are showing the favoritism and effectively telling a portion of your community FU we wont ever change our times ever so that you can play during your prime time.

That's a side effect of living in a place with few people, and/or playing at a time when most people don't. Rotating screws way more people overall, so you just get screwed all the time because there's so few of you. That's just the way it is. WoW is the same way, for mostly the same reason. Maintenance windows are almost always designed to occur when the fewest amount of people are using the system (for everything, not just MMOs). My company does releases in the evening (EST), because there's almost no users on then.