Scheduled Maintenance too early for PST.

[TTiscancer]

Asian MMOs have non-US friendly Downtimes because that's when the engineers are at work in case something goes wrong. It's literally the same deal with eastern europeans and US based MMOs.

Deal with it.

[Dragonblanco]

I'm not sure why Maintenance is scheduled for 6pm PST. 9pm or 11 pm would be preferable. I feel like a group is being catered to or being shown favoritism while those who live in the west don't have time to play after work on the days scheduled maintenance is set for 6pm. Any thought?

Short answer: Because 6pm PDT = 10AM in Japan. So it would be the start of their workday.

Longer explanation: For it to be an estimated 9 hours until completion time, it tells us that the patch size is actually pretty big. Just uploading from one location to the other can be fairly time consuming, but then to actually "install" everything afterward and make sure that nothing is corrupted, it takes time. After all that is said and done, it takes time to get the servers up and running before they make them available to players. If they open prematurely, the rush to hop on can make them crash.

If you're unaware, they are generally sending petabytes of information out to various servers. We're not talking just petty amounts of data.

You'll remember last patch was Jun. 21, 2021 11:00 p.m. to Jun. 22, 2021 3:00 a.m. (PDT)

So they usually try to respect our time while also fitting it into the timeframe for when they are supposed to work. When they say 3 am PDT that would be 7pm in Japan. So they are working fairly late in the day to get it to us.

[Dragonblanco]

For how long this maitenance is they better be fixing alot of thing and adding alot of new content. Isn't normal maitenance at 9pm pst and not 6pm pst.

It's been said that this patch is going to be Season 20 of The Feast and there's been a lot of speculation that there will be the implementation of World Center Travel. Let me quote from a website on that:

"The main reason people believe Data Center Travel is coming in Patch 5.58 is because of the preliminary patch notes released for Patch 5.5 on Steam. Originally, the page said Data Center Travel is scheduled to be implemented in Patch 5.58, but any mention of the functionality has since been removed from the list. World Visit came shortly after the final MSQ patches dropped for Stormblood, so the timing seems right for Data Center Travel."

Quote is from https://attackofthefanboy.com/guides...8-patch-notes/

[ForteNightshade]

I'm not sure why Maintenance is scheduled for 6pm PST. 9pm or 11 pm would be preferable. I feel like a group is being catered to or being shown favoritism while those who live in the west don't have time to play after work on the days scheduled maintenance is set for 6pm. Any thought?

They probably are. Almost all media caters to EST time zones because the majority live there. For reference sake, nearly 50% of the United States' population lives in EST while 63% of Canada's does. Furthermore, being a JP company, they are likely choosing their schedule around standard working hours. Both those factors means some regions will likely be more impacted than others.

[technole]

It's been said that this patch is going to be Season 20 of The Feast and there's been a lot of speculation that there will be the implementation of World Center Travel. Let me quote from a website on that:



Quote is from https://attackofthefanboy.com/guides...8-patch-notes/

DC travel is not in this patch, but they are likely putting the work in to get it tested and ready for the 6.0 window. Hence the server infrastructure upgrades being mentioned on the JP side.

[Dragonblanco]

Thanks for the information. It's not the end of the world but it is kind of strange.

I work for a software company and we have licensing servers that our product has to check in with to verify it's activation in real time with every use. Our customers are world wide so we choose to do server maintenance during times with the least traffic and it is not convenient for us at all. But it's company policy to reduce downtime as much as possible for as many customers as possible. /shrug

Correct, but now you have to look at all over the world. Let's pretend the numbers on https://ffxivcensus.com/ is correct.

That would mean FFXIV has 4.8 million players. Of that, 2.37m are from America. Then you have 1.39m from Japan and 1.1m in Europe.

Though percentages might be off, that means 49% of the player base are from America.

In that case, Americans are slightly in the minority of player base and thus the ones inconvenienced. However, they did it on a Monday night so as to have some of the least issue for players. Let's face it, it's a work and school night. If they did it on a weekend, everyone would be upset. They did a fairly decent job of balancing it out, especially considering their employees are primarily all out of Japan

[Dragonblanco]

Even more interesting if they are correct in the numbers shown at https://www.gamepur.com/guides/final...er-populations

It says:

Total American realm population = 2,378,009
Active American realm population = 279,480
Percentage Active = 11.7%


Total Japanese realm population = 1,395,530
Active Japanese realm population = 242,229
Percentage Active = 17.3%

Total European realm population = 1,112,159
Active European realm population = 125,681
Percentage Active = 11.3%

Total Population All Realms = 4,885,698
Total Active Population = 647,390
Percentage Active = 13.3%


Americans = 48.7% of TOTAL population OR 43.2% of ACTIVE population
Japanese = 28.6% of TOTAL population OR 37.4% of ACTIVE population
Europeans = 22.8% of TOTAL population OR 19.4% of ACTIVE population.

------------------------

For those who looked at all those numbers, do you think it sounds right? Did you think Americans were a larger percentage of MMO? I know in the past I've always heard Americans and English is the minority when it comes to subscribers and players of MMORPG. But it is quite interesting to see how it plays out IF these are indeed correct.

[Soulebreaker]

I don't see the issue in it. They are doing maintenance at the beginning of their day. It's gonna always be inconvenient for someone. Just make sure to pay attention to when maintenance is, and plan around it accordingly.

[Darkstride]

So the fact that they cater to someone else bothers you and you would like them to fix the issue by... catering to you? Gotcha.

That's basically how the world works now.

[FALCSMASH]

I work for a multi billion-dollar International software company that does just that. We cater our server maintenances to non peak times based on region. It is part of a service. Doing maintenance during peak times is unacceptable in this day. Why you have flexible employees.