Soo should we strap in for weekly maintenance at this point or...?

[Vidu]

What gets me shows NA has a bigger player base than Japan player base does. So why they pick prime time for NA player to have there maintenance.

While its true that the NA playerbase is bigger than the Japan one (...even though not by a lot, accoding to the census of active players in july 2018: 267,629 vs. 231,677) you need to keep in mind that the maintenance time falls into japanese work hours, so its convient for them.

...and before anyone argues how they dont care about their western playerbase: Please remember that we europeans exist aswell! Our playerbase might be a lot smaller than either NA or japan (120,959 active characters, accoding to the census), BUT that makes those maintenances actually convient for both Japan and Europe (the maintenance started at 3 am for me and while I'm normally playing at that time, its also a perfectly fine moment to go to bed).

Even though the main reason is probably japanese buisness hours, not picking a time thats convient for europe - they'll always inconvience someone anyways.

[van_arn]

They seem to intend to keep rolling out hotfixes for Pagos, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had weekly maintenance for a bit, then more weekly maintenance following 4.4.

Yet another reason why they should just delete Pagos and pretend it never happened.

[MicahZerrshia]

Weekly maintenance is nothing new to mmos. Hotfixes, patches, server maintenance, etc. And its only a few hours a week so its not like its long, abnormal or extended by any means. I really don't understand how the loss of 3 hours means someone cannot get anything done in the remaining 165 hours in that week. Esp given the fact we get at least 2 to 3 days warning ahead of time.

And it may be peak time for NA but its a JP game so you need to expect it to be more on their schedule anyway. When you are dealing with something global and timezones its what happens. Someone, somewhere is always gonna get the short end.

[JohnJacobAstor]

That maintenance is conducted as conveniences Japan seems quite besides the point. The US East Coast is a sizable portion of the game's subscribers repeatedly inconvenienced not only by the baffling decision to not rotate maintenance timings in a sane, responsible manner that, if not equalizing the impact across the board, at least offers an occasional reprieve to the one group of players saddled with the worst of the maintenance burden, but also by frustratingly poor routing that too often causes East Coast players to have worse ping to US servers than do players connecting from Southeast Asia. It is not as if the revelation that Square Enix is a Japanese company - quelle surprise! - somehow eases these concerns. Nor does it satisfactorily explain them.

I also understand that programs like Slack, Skype, Discord exist to help large teams communicate that may not be located in the same region or time zone, and co-ordinate efforts like server maintenance. For that matter, if real-time communication is an issue across time zones, a still older technology known as Email may be used to schedule the operations of a multinational company such as is convenient for ALL of their customers, without requiring they co-ordinate in real time maintenance of servers that, despite not sharing players, content, or physical server space, must go offline simultaneously.

[Seig345]

I don’t think anyone in NA or EU handles maintenance... pretty sure the servers go down and they send the patched files from Japan to all 3 databases. Thus, doing this during normal company hours in Japan seems pertinent.

I’m just assuming here though.

[Hestzhyen]

That maintenance is conducted as conveniences Japan seems quite besides the point. The US East Coast is a sizable portion of the game's subscribers repeatedly inconvenienced not only by the baffling decision to not rotate maintenance timings in a sane, responsible manner that, if not equalizing the impact across the board, at least offers an occasional reprieve to the one group of players saddled with the worst of the maintenance burden, but also by frustratingly poor routing that too often causes East Coast players to have worse ping to US servers than do players connecting from Southeast Asia. It is not as if the revelation that Square Enix is a Japanese company - quelle surprise! - somehow eases these concerns. Nor does it satisfactorily explain them.

I also understand that programs like Slack, Skype, Discord exist to help large teams communicate that may not be located in the same region or time zone, and co-ordinate efforts like server maintenance. For that matter, if real-time communication is an issue across time zones, a still older technology known as Email may be used to schedule the operations of a multinational company such as is convenient for ALL of their customers, without requiring they co-ordinate in real time maintenance of servers that, despite not sharing players, content, or physical server space, must go offline simultaneously.

You've clearly never done maintenance/ops work for a large company. I agree that in an ideal world no one would be inconvenienced and all maintenance would happen at the lowest-population times for each region. But reality dictates that you do what you can when you can, and that's often constrained by your resources (whether time, people, capacity, or some combination thereof). Not to mention the sheer number of people you need to coordinate with. The individual components of MMOs and the infra that serve them don't operate in vacuums- what you do to one section affects the whole ecosystem, and taking that all down so it comes back up nicely is hella complicated. An earlier poster's recollection of how long it used to take Blizzard to perform maintenance compared to the four hour outage we have tonight shows how much better things have gotten IMO. (I know they don't shut it all down for quick maintenance like this, but the point is, even taking some of the services offline is more complicated than most realize.)

Trust me, if e-mails and Skype were sufficient, my job would be a heck of a lot easier! :P If you can find a way to 1) coordinate effectively across timezones, organizational units, and knowledge gaps and 2) get people to read my friggin' emails, you will be a very wealthy person.

[Marxam]

This is the 3rd time servers have gone down for maintenance in 3 weeks, just wondering if this is going to be the new normal going forward. Feels like every other time I've sat down to play I've had to cut it short due to maintenance. It doesn't help that the time chosen for maintenance is peak hours for east coast, when everybody is back from school/work.

however, maintenance doesn't concern me much since I have other things to do and games to play. As long as they fix that thing they call Pagos I'm okay with it.

[Alistaire]

They seem to intend to keep rolling out hotfixes for Pagos, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had weekly maintenance for a bit, then more weekly maintenance following 4.4.

Let's be clear here, SE rarely does hotfixes in this game. The word hotfix specifically refers to fixes performed while the system is still live.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Let's be clear here, SE rarely does hotfixes in this game. The word hotfix specifically refers to fixes performed while the system is still live.

Not necessarily. From google:

A hotfix or quick-fix engineering update is a single, cumulative package that includes information that is used to address a problem in a software product. Typically, hotfixes are made to address a specific customer situation.

[Hestzhyen]

Not necessarily. From google:

A hotfix or quick-fix engineering update is a single, cumulative package that includes information that is used to address a problem in a software product. Typically, hotfixes are made to address a specific customer situation.

Minor quibble: hotfixes imply that the systems are live, available, and in use while the change is being deployed. If you take it down, it's not a hotfix- it's maintenance.