Quote Originally Posted by aesteval View Post
Usually it's better to schedule too much time for maintenance instead of too little just in case a disaster happens and they have to recover / fix and repatch. There's also likely some testing once the patch is applied on the live environment.
Well, these long maintenances usually do go for the entire time. I've played many MMOs and FFXIV by far takes the cake for long maintenances.

Patches are usually bug free for the most part, but other games accomplish the same thing in a much shorter time, mostly due to having a testlive system. Hopefully SE will look at speeding up the process sometime in the near future.