Excessive maintenance is starting to piss off the casual, non-raiding players.

[-Magnai-]

Hello, OP! I am a fellow casual player and while I cannot speak for anyone else here,
I personally like to view maintenance day as a little break from ffxiv to focus on other games while waiting.
It's a good idea to preoccupy yourself with other things during those times. ^-^

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I agree, we deserve compensation for our time wasted!

So if you pay for a 180 day sub, that's $13 USD for every 30 days.

Which is 43¢ a day.

Which is 2¢ an hour. (rounded up)

So for an 8 hour maintenance we deserve our 16¢ back!

Joking aside, I feel like the title is misleading as are many on these forums, it should have been changed to "1 friend of mine (i.e. myself) finds it annoying that there's multiple maintenances after a big major patch introducing new content within a game". To which I say, First Time?

Its like, 27cents a day for me. so barely more than 1 cent an hour...

a whopping 8 cents back for maint!

[Kes13a]

Its like, 27cents a day for me. so barely more than 1 cent an hour...

a whopping 8 cents back for maint!

now as a casual .. I AM PISSED!!!! once a week, if they do 8 hours (which they dont)IN A YEAR I COULD GET $4.16 back!!!!!!!!!! we are being ripped off! for that kind of money I could buy.. uh.. well.. nothing. BUT if I save that for a few years, I might be able to buy a starbucks coffee!!!

thats why I always laugh at the "I aint getting my moneys worth" thinkers. what else can you do daily for so little?

[hynaku]

Lets see i'm paying for 2 subs and 16 retainers pretty sure I would get pretty good credit back. Anytime online goes down for maitenance they should give everyone a credit for not being able to play. Just like if your internet goes down and they give you a credit.

[Silverbane]

I agree, we deserve compensation for our time wasted!

So if you pay for a 180 day sub, that's $13 USD for every 30 days.
Which is 43¢ a day.
Which is 2¢ an hour. (rounded up)
So for an 8 hour maintenance we deserve our 16¢ back!

While I know you are dead serious about the above (not),
the analysis is predicated on a faulty assumption regarding what a subscription is buying.
It is not buying a certain number of minutes of game time,
or even the opportunity to play the game for a certain number of minutes.
It's not even buying access to the servers, since Free Trial players get that.

As pertinent to this thread's complaint, a FFXIV subscription buys an opportunity to use more than just the limited features available under the Free Trial, whenever the servers are up, *
along with an implied (at least) promise to keep the servers up to the extent commercially feasible.

So, there's no monetary value to 8 hours of lost access to the game, at all.
Even with the servers down, subscribers are still getting what they paid for.

Don't believe me? Hire a lawyer and ask them.

*subject to your compliance with the TOS, of course, which is why suspensions don't get come with a refund.

[PharisHanasaki]

There was a time where we had maintenance (for emergency reasons) every monday without fail, from 7pm to 3am. This very same topic emerged. And since they've been a bit more concious of our timezone.

Maintenance rarely happens before 11pm now. Remember these sometimes have to happen while they're working in Japan. It is unfortunate, but no, they won't refund us because it's in the ToS. It's not every month, we've gone long periods without a single maintenance, while other MMOs usually have one weekly.

[IkaraGreydancer]

Shout out to those thinking you were gonna finish capping after work this evening

[Knot_D]

snips.

[rainichan]

I can understand emergency maintenance. However, this all Worlds complete servers shutdown, mind you, is to implement 6.21. And they will do this again for 6.25. I can't speak for everyone, but I would rather wait and get the whole patch instead of staggering it across multiple maintenance and server shutdowns.

I wouldn't really fault a player for getting frustrated with this. Time is extremely valuable.

It's still the same thing. It's adding content for this particular patch, yes, but it is also likely fixing some backend issues, usually categorized in the patch notes in Resolved Issues, restarting servers also means smoother gameplay once they're back up. Emergency maint that affects everything brings down all servers as well, just like content patches which... have always been on this schedule! When content patches were every 3-3.5 months, we got the .x1 patches about two weeks after the .x patches, and the .x5 patches a month after, with a final minor of minor patches in .x8 about a month after that! Now with the added two weeks for a 4 month patch schedule, .x1 patches are a month out and .x5 patches are two, and the .x8 after 3-ish. This has been constant since the game came out in 2.0, starting in 2.1. I'm fine with additional content across multiple patches to be accompanied with downtime, it means things work with better regularity if equipment is taken offline, restarted, tested, and in working order before being put back online.

Screaming and crying and throwing a tantrum over SE making sure their always online game is running smoothly is ridiculous. Some mild disappointment of "ew maint is early this time" is expected (I certainly made a face at the time before going 'eh guess I'm playing lotro on tuesday'), but what amounts to a first world problem of "I didn't get my island bike because of maint" toddler meltdown? Nah fam that ain't it. Use your time doing something else. I have a shiny new PS5 I can play on, I can read, I can no-life some of my mobile games, I can play a f2p mmo or Vampire Sim Survival. If someone can't find something else to do after being told in advance the game is going down for a handful of hours and is having anger issues over it, they should probably seek help for addiction, and I'm not saying that sarcastically.

[PharisHanasaki]

Shout out to those thinking you were gonna finish capping after work this evening

Been playing casually these past weeks because of work. I capped by Thursday. Normal Raid clears on Tuesday, plus re-runs for a couple where I didn't get loot. That plus Expert, Trial Roulette, and Normal Raid Roulette. I don't ever go into Alliance, 50-80, or MSQ roulettes anymore.

At least run Expert roulette to get the majority of your weekly tomes with less than 30 mins a day. Even if you miss it one day, you still get about 80-90 tomes per roulette if it's the newest dungeon.