Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
It's not necessarily specific to NA. There are different datacenters, so the question is really, "Why can't each datacenter have its own maintenance schedule that is convenient for that datacenter?" Maybe there's a perfectly valid reason for all the datacenters to have to undergo maintenance at one time, but a well-designed system would have allowed for staggered maintenance schedules so that no datacenter would be stuck in maintenance mode in the middle of its most active period.
Because your client can connect to all data centres and make characters on any of them, thus they all need to receive the patch at the same time. There are players who live in one region and play in another due to their schedule, friends, etc. Having some data centres suddenly be incompatible with some players clients would not work.