Quote Originally Posted by Lux_Rayna View Post
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.