Really love the game, but your service forced me to quit.

[Welsper59]

I'm just surprised more people are not worried over the sheer amount of downtime this game has three months after release. That is not normal. I've been through almost every AAA MMO launch since UO, and four hours of maintenance every three days is not normal after the first couple of weeks from launch.

That's kind of what happens when you prep for (probably) 50% of the actual player base to play your game. You create a game that was intended for a small crowd, but became bombarded and thus runs on the bare minimum. Even with the increased servers they did for NA/EU, it still probably was a minimal boost. Had it been expected that over a million players would potentially be on the game, they may have prepped more locations to house servers than just two for the entire world.

Something that I've actually come to accept was that they're okay with the idea of losing subscriptions. "All MMOs gain/lose subs as time goes on", right? Right. But this is more along the lines that they predicted a lower turn out, and thus allocated funds for that prediction (thus, our server problems). The income is significantly more than expected, but because of the fact that people will come and go, it's probably not a major problem (in their eyes).

If people leave because of maintenance times/frequency, then they were pretty fickle to begin with. Companies know that consumers are like this. They know they'll act like the sky is falling for the most ridiculous reasons. Think along the lines of someone from the outside looking at these complaints (neutral party). Heck, people should look at their own history of seeing people complain and applying their own comments to themselves. "So you're complaining about maintenance going on for several hours weekly, occasionally a couple times a week, and threatening to end something you enjoy because of it..." or for those who view themselves as not having a lot of time to play "You're paying $15 a month for a game that you apparently only have a couple hours a week to play..."

Our decisions and perspectives seem a bit ridiculous when you actually think about it.

[whilke]

If people leave because of maintenance times/frequency, then they were pretty fickle to begin with.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they are fickle. Maybe you assume the people complaining about this are able to play 15 hours a day, and are just whining that they are sometimes losing 4 of those hours. On the other hand, it could be people who only have a couple of hours to play a couple of times a week. When those couple of times a week get squashed because of the constant game downtime, that person is basically not able to play the game at all. Where is the fickle there? Just sounds like a frustrated customer who wants to play the game he's paying for.

[Welsper59]

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they are fickle. Maybe you assume the people complaining about this are able to play 15 hours a day, and are just whining that they are sometimes losing 4 of those hours. On the other hand, it could be people who only have a couple of hours to play a couple of times a week. When those couple of times a week get squashed because of the constant game downtime, that person is basically not able to play the game at all. Where is the fickle there? Just sounds like a frustrated customer who wants to play the game he's paying for.

That argument doesn't really help support the notion that they are not fickle. If you choose to look at something being one way for someone else, don't close your perception off to just that one case. If maintenance (which is 100% necessary for server upkeep) change would be ideal for one person, it does not mean it'd be ideal to others when the change would leave them in that same position.

You can't avoid maintenance, thus someone could potentially get the short end of the stick on that. Even if this were, by legendary coincidence, exclusively every single occasion that we've had maintenance. People have to be responsible about their own circumstance and understand that others do NOT have to cater to them. They chose to play an MMORPG... a game that takes time and requires maintenance.

How do you propose SE change their maintenance schedule to get around that? Cater to the western world (which to many people is only the US)? Leave behind the lesser people (folks who are not in the US). It's fine that people complain that the maintenance coincidentally occurs ONLY when they play, as they have a legit reason to quit or be unhappy. But it's one of those things, as I said, where someones going to get the short end of the stick with something inconvenient that is 100% necessary. That's why I say they're fickle... either there's too much going on IRL for them that they likely wouldn't have even stayed, or they're just blind to the fact that the world does not revolve around their own convenience.