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

[Jojoya]

Server typically goes down for a little while every week here recently. I can't think of a time it hasn't.

*extended* maintenance is reserved for patches. Hell, I didn't even know there was a patch til this morning and I'm just like "meh"(I'm in EU, downtime goes til noon).

It's a new patch release. Additional maintenance down time for hotfixes is normal.


Doesn't take much to work your way back through the Maintenance Notices on Lodestone to see when servers were down.

Sept 12/13 (right now) - patch

August 31/Sept 1 - emergency hotfixes

August 28/29 - normal post-patch hotfixes

August 22/23 - patch

July 24/25 - emergency maint NA worlds only (Data Center Travel and cross world difficulties)

July 12/13 - normal post-patch hotfixes

July 4/5 - patch to add Data Center Travel, addition of new EU worlds

June 6 - patch

May 23/24 - patch

May 16/17 - housing lottery fix

April 24/25 - patch

April 13/14 - emergency hotfixes

April 11/12 - patch

So about half the maintenance down time in the past 5 months has been to add new content/system updates to the game and half of the rest to apply the normal hotfixes that end up needed. (Yo, SE! Stop adding new content and system improvements to my game, you're interrupting my game play. /s-heavy)

Out of about 3700 hours in this time period, servers are down for about 120 hours. Most players aren't inconvenienced for more than 20 of those hours because the maintenance is occurring outside of when they would normally be playing the game.

You genuinely find that worth complaining about?

[rainichan]

This is a game as a service. It is to be expected that we get maintenances. We do not deserve any compensation. What we do deserve is shorter bugfix maintenance times. We used to see 2-3 hour hotfix maintenance timings. Now we are starting to get closer to FFXI 5+ hour maintenances.

Tonight's changes to HP and damage values should not have had to be 5 hours.

The laundry list of Resolved Issues was longer than the rest of the patch notes, which is what the patch was likely for overall, they just added some balance changes into it to make it a worthwhile .x1 patch - this wasn't a hotfix. The biggest fixes I saw in there was the fixed achievements for Island Sanctuaries and the fact that if you had a full or close-to-full glam dresser, trying to /isearch could crash your game. People had workarounds in place before it was patched, but the patch means that it's actually fixed.

While I'm not a dev, some googling because I was curious how rollouts like this work (did you know it's called a "patch" because you used to cover holes in the tape the computer used to fix problems? I didn't, and now we all know!) it seems like the process is, fairly simplified:

- pull servers offline. Since all the servers are in different places, I imagine coordinating this is lots of fun. Not pulling them offline runs the risk of the patch not deploying properly.

- upload and deploy a script to modify files. Depending on how big the file is - it's compressed prior - decompressing and deploying can take maybe a handful of seconds to hours.

- running checks to make sure everything was deployed correctly, everything that needed to be deleted was deleted, and that nothing needed to be rolled back. At least for one game, they have a scoreboard to make sure that the script is running bug-free for what they were trying to fix. I don't know if they do dev debug live while servers are down if something minor happens where a bug that should have been fixed isn't or it is but not without creating a different problem created by the same issues, however - again, not a dev just someone curious about it all.

If there was infrastructure work (which it sounds like there was,) everything is going to take longer, especially if it's swapping parts around. I know enough about that to know that you want to make sure nothing is lost after swapping parts out, and those checks will add more time into the time taken to deploy patches. Checking each individual server I would imagine takes some time, plus communication between each site - NA has 24 servers, EU has 16, JP has 32(!), and OCE has 5. I don't imagine they have that amount of people for each individual server checking its status for an all clear, either, and fewer people means it goes slower, despite all of the server clusters for each region being in one place. Restarting everything to clear caches, putting everything back online to test everything for a clear of everything being patched would also take time. Maint even ended early by about 70 minutes, but I'd rather they give themselves enough time to patch and check than patch, check, and then have to extend out because they lowballed how long it would take (looking at you, Elex, and patching a mobile game.)

Generally, hotfix times are a few hours. Bigger patches take more time, as this one was an actual "named" patch and not just "hotfix 6.208642756354732" or whatever. "Named" patches are always bigger, and it's why xpac releases are always a 24 hour maint period, content patches .x1-5 are usually 8, and the content patches' patches are anywhere from 4-8 depending on what is being done. That's all from my looking at patch times over the course of 9 years and noticing a constant in the way they deploy and time out their patch times. They also have to make sure everything is kosher on Sony's side for the PS4/PS5 clients, and Steam's own clients. The servers don't generally come up before server rollovers for the week, and they will never come up early when housing is released.



If any software devs want to chime in on how the process could work (it seems every company is different too, so SE may have their own methods that are kept under wraps) if I missed anything, I'd love to learn, especially if something goes wrong in patching for what I looked up, this article is what I read to see how a few different companies do their thing. A few years old now, but I don't doubt the process is more or less the same, but with better tech.

tl;dr: patching takes longer than you think depending on everything, not just a couple of hours.

[KaitoAsaha]

The maintenance really isn't that bad. I came from DCUO about 7 or more years ago and over there they have a morning maintenance, at the same hour, all year long, for about 1 hour.

[Atelier-Bagur]

It's topics like these that really make me despise the self entitled forum community. You guys are the literal worst

[BluexBird]

This thread is so funny. Especially when you consider THE ONLY PEOPLE who are actually affected by these maintenances, are the raiders. They're the ones eager to wake/stay up for the reset, just so they can raid again. But the maintenance often lasts until 2 hours after the reset.

The main reason why people like doing re-clears just after the reset, is because these are the real hardcore players who often know VERY WELL what they're doing, and are usually able to 1-shot the fights. People can argue with me on this, but I've been doing it for years now. The longer in the week I wait to clear, the harder it becomes.

As for non-raiders, they literally have A WEEK, A WHOLE FREAKIN' WEEK to do their weekly content. If you waited until Monday night just before maintenance to do your stuff, you really have no right to complain.

Anyway, that's the reply I would have given if this were actually a legit post, but the fact that you said the raiding playerbase means nothing to the game makes it obvious you're just a troll. :')

[Illmaeran]

I get why they do it, mind you; it's a lot easier to make a compelling/exciting trailer and patch summary when you have the MSQ chapter and raid tier or alliance raid to include in it. A patch that only includes, say, PvP balance fixes and a new Deep Dungeon is harder to make an exciting trailer for. So it makes sense that they like to make a trailer for 'the next MSQ chapter, and all that content that's coming up from now until the chapter after that'.

There's also the benefit of giving the players a roadmap of what to expect that cycle, ie all of 6.2X up to 6.3, etc.

[SerephinaBlossom]

Pull the server down for like longer get all the stuff done, instead of this 4 hrs stuff weekly,
We will wait for a polished thing and SQ i think forgets that.
Also the server lag after patches just isn't worth it.

No master piece is ever rushed.

[DPZ2]

NA has 24 servers, EU has 16, JP has 32(!), and OCE has 5.

I just wanted to add to this. There are multiple physical servers for each World.

This is what one section of the new North American data center looked like when it was moved back in 2017:



(Source: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ter-Relocation)

[IkaraGreydancer]

I just wish this maint didn't cut into people's time to finish their weekly stuff. That was a long maint for just some fixes

[Snorky]

I'm not mad about weekly maintenance and I'm pretty casual ������