Please "rotate" the Emergency Maintenances (unable to play)

[Sixmp]

They're consistently hitting me at 11pm, and that's very annoying. On nights when I do play I'll go till midnight. Rotate it around - for fairness for everyone. A global player base means no matter what time is picked someone suffers - so just share the burden on a rotation.

SE isn't a 24/7 company. They might have skeleton crews keeping things running here and there. You honestly expect them to wake up in the middle of their sleep time and do maintenance just so it is fair in your eyes?

[Crafter]

SE isn't a 24/7 company. They might have skeleton crews keeping things running here and there. You honestly expect them to wake up in the middle of their sleep time and do maintenance just so it is fair in your eyes?

Just FYI, S-E used to do maintenance starting at 1 am, 2 am, and etc. JP time for FFXI.

[Xayoc]

Hi,

Square-Enix please consider "rotating" the Emergency Maintenance as most of your Oceanic players are getting hit with 3-4 hour maintenance straight after usual work times.

I come home and every 2-3 days there's a maintenance at 7PM NZ Time all the way to 10pm or 11pm, meaning I get no play time whatsoever. This basically means I am paying £14.95 (24-25 NZ dollars) to play 20 days a month.. there has been a total of 13+ maintenance this month alone, meaning for 13 days I have missed out completely.

I understand you try your best to do these things when less people are playing, but it's not fair the same people are getting hit day after day with maintenance and having no game-time whatsoever.

Things happen, deal with it right? I understand, I really do.

All I'm asking is that people put themselves in my shoes and many other Oceanic players struggling with this problem.

I once proposed they shift the hours a little, but as we all know if they try to help one region, another will get screwed in the process. A suggestion came up in a different thread that if they rotate the "emergency maintenance" so the same region isn't screwed every. time. this would be beneficial.

As of right now, Oceanic players (excluding Perth, Australia) are hit with maintenance soon as they come home from a long day at work, I just don't see myself continuing to pay for a service if I'm only getting 20 days a month out of it.

I don't want to quit, I really enjoy this game and the communities that have formed, but at this rate I'm feeling ripped off and quite unhappy about this whole thing.

TLDR: Please switch the hours around whenever an emergency maintenance is due, it's not fair the same region can't play whenever you need to shut the servers down... have it so one day Oceanic gets hit with prime time, then another day Americans, then the next day Europeans, etc etc.

Thanks.

This one plays from Hawaii and often gets the shaft from MX times. /signed.

[SaintAjora]

I'll just repeat myself too.

You do realize these are mostly emergency maintenances? I'm pretty sure no one was sitting around, making up the normal maintenance schedule, and said "3 times a week is good".

They find out there's a problem, find out the time period the least amount of people are playing, and schedule it then so they can fix it as soon as possible. They're not going to find a problem, then wait until regular maintenance to fix it.
This is a brand new game, so it has a lot of things that may go wrong until it smooths out enough that the only maintenance we have to look forward to is the scheduled weekly/monthly/whatever they go with. When they go wrong, sometimes it's best to fix them as soon as possible.



By the way, although I'm in North America, my sleep/work times means that when maintenance happens, it's almost always an hour or less after I wake up and eat and would like to play, so it's not like I don't understand. And my main is a dps, so I'm going to spend almost that full hour just in the queue, with no time to actually do the dungeons if they pop. I just see outside my own personal bubble.

So much for this train of thought that somehow everyone defending it is doing so because they're unaffected. Some of us just care more about the big picture than ourselves.

And yes, it sucks that the time when the least amount of people is your special time, but it's probably always going to be your special time. Moving it around isn't going to do anything but inconvenience more people than it does now. It's called a necessary evil. Someone's going to be put out, and if you have to choose between 100 people and 35 people, you go with the 35.

And again, this isn't even a long term thing. It is a brand new game with lots of things popping up that couldn't have been anticipated until massive amounts of people ran at them. Eventually that becomes rarer and rarer. So there's no need in complaining about it now, like it's a permanent or long term thing.

[Tercino]

And yes, it sucks that the time when the least amount of people is your special time, but it's probably always going to be your special time. Moving it around isn't going to do anything but inconvenience more people than it does now. It's called a necessary evil. Someone's going to be put out, and if you have to choose between 100 people and 35 people, you go with the 35.

This isn't exactly true. You're not choosing between just inconveniencing one group of 100 or one group of 35, end of, you're choosing between inconveniencing one group of 35 EVERY TIME or inconveniencing both groups, but not so severely. It wouldn't even have to be a large shift to completely change the group - shift it a few hours forward and everyone's at work, shift it a few hours back and everyone's asleep. Right now it falls slap bang in the middle of NZ primetime EVERY SINGLE TIME. We're not asking that it permanently be shifted to another time so that it never hits us, we understand that you need to do maintenance, but equally the maintenance is what, 3 hours? If your working day is 8-10 hours long you could comfortably shift that to a different time every once in a while.

Yes, NZ (and the rest of Oceania) is probably going to be disproportionately hit because we have a smaller population, but it's possible to run maintenance at other times too. Just for a change.

Oh, and a maintenance that's scheduled more than a day in advance is no longer an "emergency", at least not in the sense that it has to be done at a specific time. If the game can stay live for a day then a few hours forward or back won't hurt the situation much. Turn 5 being taken down because of glitches, THAT was an emergency. Balance changes, not so much.

[SaintAjora]

Oh, and a maintenance that's scheduled more than a day in advance is no longer an "emergency", at least not in the sense that it has to be done at a specific time.

As someone else pointed out, they do have to code the fix. They take the servers down to actually install and test it as best as they can. Sometimes it takes an hour to write code. Sometimes it takes a day or more. It doesn't write itself, and it would be stupid to take down the servers when they're not even ready to put the patch in yet.

And every time they have to do it, they look at their numbers and say "when are the least amount of people on?" and that's when they do it. Sorry, I can't elaborate on that any more than I already did.

[Tercino]

As someone else pointed out, they do have to code the fix. They take the servers down to actually install and test it as best as they can. Sometimes it takes an hour to write code. Sometimes it takes a day or more. It doesn't write itself, and it would be stupid to take down the servers when they're not even ready to put the patch in yet.

And every time they have to do it, they look at their numbers and say "when are the least amount of people on?" and that's when they do it. Sorry, I can't elaborate on that any more than I already did.

The thing is, they don't write the code then go "Blam, servers down now", they write it and then look at when is the best time to put it in (or schedule a time then write the code before that, the exact order isn't important). You're arguing this just as much as me when you say they look at when the least amount of players are on. All we're suggesting is that they use a different metric as well, instead of one that perpetually hits the same people.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong but the current maintenance time is at like 2am or something for the NA server location (Montreal)? This is already inconvenient for anyone working there, so that's no longer an excuse. There's actually even less people on NA servers later (I know, I've tried to make groups at 11pm NZ time - would be about 6am at servers). It could be scheduled then, affecting even less people. I don't know about Japan, but surely there's other times where not many people are on.

[Rekujen]

The thing is, they don't write the code then go "Blam, servers down now", they write it and then look at when is the best time to put it in (or schedule a time then write the code before that, the exact order isn't important). You're arguing this just as much as me when you say they look at when the least amount of players areon. All we're suggesting is that they use a different metric as well, instead of one that perpetually hits the same people.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong but the current maintenance time is at like 2am or something for the NA server location (Montreal)? This is already inconvenient for anyone working there, so that's no longer an excuse. There's actually even less people on NA servers later (I know, I've tried to make groups at 11pm NZ time - would be about 6am at servers). It could be scheduled then, affecting even less people. I don't know about Japan, but surely there's other times where not many people are on.

Careful, you're giving them too much logic... you need to be slow and gentle with these selfish people, otherwise they will spit in your face and say you're wrong.

Like I said, everyone was MORE THAN HAPPY to suit american prime time when Square announced it... but when oceanic players want a simple rotation? OH LAWDY LAWD NO SIR

[Pandastirfry]

I work nights, and tend to keep to that schedule even on my days off... So far both emergency and scheduled maintenance has been on my days off during the time when I'm usually on.

My reaction to this has been... "Well, guess I'm playing GTA tonight."

[KiriA500]

Yeah SE...your emergencies aren't very accommodating to my play time!