server maintenence ruins the "predict the fall of garuda" event?

[Azurymber]

Count the two hours before maintenance, dont count the 5 hour maintenance, continue counting after maintenance. It ruins nothing.

of course it does. Lets say my friends and I prepared prior to the patch to try to get first kill. With a 5 hour maintenance some would have to go to work, school, etc. It essentially interrupts ppl in the process of trying to win. When the server reopens it will be 5am est and 2am pst. There will be a lot less ppl on trying and ppl who sacrificed their sleep schedule or took time out of their life to try to kill it (yes some ppl do that) will have given up on rushing for it.

[Lux_Rayna]

of course it does. Lets say my friends and I prepared prior to the patch to try to get first kill. With a 5 hour maintenance some would have to go to work, school, etc. It essentially interrupts ppl in the process of trying to win. When the server reopens it will be 5am est and 2am pst. There will be a lot less ppl on trying and ppl who sacrificed their sleep schedule or took time out of their life to try to kill it (yes some ppl do that) will have given up on rushing for it.

The problem with this thinking is that we did not know *when* the patch was going to be released prior to the contest. Therefore, any plans made could only be tentative at best because you had no timetable. The fact that you could meet up at all after patch was random chance, SE could have just as easily said "sorry maintenance is extended til 1am, and servers woudl have opened at inconvenient times anyway.

Long story short, its perfectly fair. Nowhere in the contest did it say patch had to conform to tentatively scheduled plans.

[Azurymber]

The problem with this thinking is that we did not know *when* the patch was going to be released prior to the contest. Therefore, any plans made could only be tentative at best because you had no timetable. The fact that you could meet up at all after patch was random chance, SE could have just as easily said "sorry maintenance is extended til 1am, and servers woudl have opened at inconvenient times anyway.

Long story short, its perfectly fair. Nowhere in the contest did it say patch had to conform to tentatively scheduled plans.

it has nothing to do with when the patch is released, it has to do with the servers being up for 2 hours and then going down.
If they don't count the 2 hours than a party who has completed the pre-reqs prior maintenence coming back up might defeat it in an hour. The fight will be tallied as an hour but in reality it took them 3 hours.

If they do count the 2 hours then instead of 40 parties being ready to try the fight, due to the 5 hours only 10 parties might still have the 8 ppl with pre-reqs done. Thus the average time to complete garuda would increase.

[Raymeo]

it has nothing to do with when the patch is released, it has to do with the servers being up for 2 hours and then going down.
If they don't count the 2 hours than a party who has completed the pre-reqs prior maintenence coming back up might defeat it in an hour. The fight will be tallied as an hour but in reality it took them 3 hours.

Unless a brand new group logs in and somehow does it all from scratch in less time than the servers initially were up for. Then it would still be fair.

If they do count the 2 hours then instead of 40 parties being ready to try the fight, due to the 5 hours only 10 parties might still have the 8 ppl with pre-reqs done. Thus the average time to complete garuda would increase.

Unless one of those ten remaining parties was going to be the winning party out of the original 40 parties anyway. Then having a bunch of parties disband while the servers are down would actually make no difference. OR Unless none of those original 40 parties had the chops to take Garuda down before eventually calling it a night anyway, because it's not required that the world first occurs in the first 24 hours of attempts.

There's no right or wrong decision that SE can make here. Both potential options have unpredictable variables that allow them to be spun as both fair and unfair. In the end, it all boils down to one of two things:

(1) Does the coin they flip in the office land on heads or tails?

(2) More likely, does SE think we should have accounted for the (practically guaranteed) possibility of maintenance? It would make sense to assume that they do. If we read between the lines, it could be argued that they subtly told us to factor in potential maintenance. After all, there was surely maintenance before Ifrit and/or Moogles, yet this was not subtracted from the times that they gave us for those kills in the contest description.

My bet's on them saying, "You shoulda seen some downtime coming and factored it in to your guess."