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

[Petite]

The game is japanese, they have to do maintenance during japan office hours.

Yes, we can wish none of us were affected by maintenance, but you'll have the dude that comes complain saying they can only play from 2am to 6am each day. Truth is, no time would satisfy everyone. We've had this conversation every odd year where maintenances stack up.

Yes I know there's nothing to be done here. I was just expressing how it sucks to be pretty much barred from playing once a week in my case. I've been playing since 2014 and I'm pretty sure 4hr maintenances used to be far less frequent in the past though.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Yes I know there's nothing to be done here. I was just expressing how it sucks to be pretty much barred from playing once a week in my case. I've been playing since 2014 and I'm pretty sure 4hr maintenances used to be far less frequent in the past though.

More frequent actually. We've gotten progressively less maintenance as the game has aged

[Avidria]

Regardless of actual opinions on maintenance, anyone else think the original post is just bizarre? Especially that last paragraph lmao
Your friend missed out on a day of gathering so you make a post on behalf of a group you say you aren't a part of, discount your own opinion and experience twice, and somewhere in all of this... We're apparently having excessive maintenance and someone, somewhere is pissed off I guess? Super weird

Anyway I also don't care about the maintenance lmao

[Packetdancer]

And then you have a game like GW2 where it stays online during just about all patches and what not. It's quite nice.

FFXIV actually has had a fair number of minor hotfix/patch instances in the past where they do keep the service live. I excluded them from the list of maintenance windows I compiled because they weren't downtime (and if there's no service interruption they don't even seem to post it on Lodestone).

We do know they used to have a 'safety net', as it were, for testing purely server-side fixes; they had basically test servers in each datacenter where they could deploy the new version of any purely server-side software, try bringing it live by adding those to the server pool and watching to see if things worked, and if it did then they could do a rolling deployment (take some servers out of the instance pool, update them, add them back in)... and if it didn't, they could remove the test hardware from the server pool again without having to roll anything back on the 'real' servers.

However, we also know that when we had that unforeseen influx of new players last summer, it ate all the hardware that had been earmarked for expanding capacity for Endwalker. So when the login servers were dying at Endwalker launch, one of the things they mentioned they did was repurpose all that 'safety net' into actual live servers... which meant they were able to increase capacity a bit despite not being able to get server hardware, but no longer having that safety net does mean a full shutdown to deploy things -- even for changes that don't require it -- becomes a lot more advisable.

Which may also be a factor in why it feels to some folks like maintenance windows are more frequent than they used to be.

(Obviously, any change that requires a new version of the client requires the service to go offline for the update; old clients wouldn't talk to the new server software, and vice versa. So you need to update all of the server-side software and get all the users to update the client so that everyone's on the same page, as it were.)

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

And then you have a game like GW2 where it stays online during just about all patches and what not. It's quite nice.

The problem with Gw2 was, at least back when I played it, there were no hot fixes. If a game breaking bug was found (back then it was an issue with the ice dragon world boss), and a fix found and tested, it would not be applied until the next planned update. Which was like 2 months away.

For a fight that was made impossible to complete by the bug if it happened.

[MrPresident]

Yes I know there's nothing to be done here. I was just expressing how it sucks to be pretty much barred from playing once a week in my case. I've been playing since 2014 and I'm pretty sure 4hr maintenances used to be far less frequent in the past though.

Don’t think you’ve played very consistently since 2014 if you think we get more maintenance now than we did then. They’d break something constantly back then.

[Jojoya]

Yes I know there's nothing to be done here. I was just expressing how it sucks to be pretty much barred from playing once a week in my case. I've been playing since 2014 and I'm pretty sure 4hr maintenances used to be far less frequent in the past though.

If you're mentally comparing to Shadowbringers, it might leave that impression. COVID emerging toward the tail end of 5.1 and disrupting the development schedule for 5.3 left us with a lot more time where no maintenance was needed. It happened at the end of Shadowbringers as well when they pushed the release date back a little longer than normal compared to the release of the X.5 patch.

But if you go back prior to 5.2, you'll see that maintenance was the same frequency then as now if not more often. Not only that, the down time was usually longer in the past. It used to be almost every patch maintenance was 24 hours. Now some of them are only 8 hours.

I agree if you're stuck to a set schedule and that means it conflicts with one of the few days a week you're able to play but it's unavoidable. It's always going to conflict with someone's schedule. They've picked what they feel is the best schedule to avoid disrupting the fewest number of players. If they were to do it 11p-7a Pacific, it would be occurring during JP prime time (which they're not about to do).

[Deveryn]

I remembered some recommended reading for next maintenance: "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff... and It's All Small Stuff"

[NekoMataMata]

At the following time, in order to address issues, emergency maintenance will take place on several areas of all Worlds. During this period, the areas listed below will be unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause for our customers and thank you for your understanding.

[Date & Time]
Sep. 14, 2022 10:00 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. (PDT)
* Completion time is subject to change.

[Affected Areas]
- Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks
- Ul'dah - Steps of Nald
- New Gridania

15 minute maintenance coming up.

[nighttimebunny]

Annoying, but necessary I guess