Excessive Maintenance

[Bishop81]

It ain't that bad.

It's roughly once a week - occasionally they skip a week or 2 - and they are fairly short with the occasional emergency maintenance when something unexpected breaks.

You want maintenance hell? Go play WoW. 8 hour maintenances are routine. Patch days can go up to 12 hours with the occasional "extended maintenance" dragging it to 16 hours.

[Avenger]

You want maintenance hell? Go play WoW.

Fixed that for you.

Though 16 hour "extended" maintenance... <No, thanks!>.....

[Miste]

I think the key is to not have maintenance during prime time. Maintenance did seem a lot more frequent for the period after FFXIV's launch, to the point that basically gave up on FFXIV for a while since maintenance seemed to be magically synchronized with the times I was available to play...

I think you maybe did not read my whole post and only selected the first part so....

Maybe OP is getting unlucky and nights he is able to play is usually maint, but that means you really do not get to play much, and you are getting unlucky or stuck on days they usually do maint if they need to. This is not really the games fault, since it is up and running 95% of the time, just you are not available to access it.

They cannot change maint schedules around a few people who only login once every few weeks and I say once every few weeks cause maint is like once a week at most and sometimes only once in 2-3 weeks, unless there is a major content patch (every 3 months) then there may be a couple extra maints that week to fix issues. So I do not know how you happen to be logging in every time to play and there is maint.

Sorry, I was thinking of the patch 2.51 maintenance, which was 9pm - posted before finishing editing. Tonight mog station was down at 9pm but game maintenance was 11pm pacific. But lots of people who have work or school play in the evening rather than during the day.

Patch 2.51 was a major content patch, they usually start maint for major content patches earlier in the evening like 9PM PST, but this only happens once every 3 months...all other maints are usually 11PM PST or later. So...what you are saying is you'd rather them not have new content because of the maint required :/

I like the idea of rotating the maintenance times to spread the impact over multiple time zones, if that's possible.

Yeah they could rotate timezones but they still gonna end up in some groups prime time, maint really does not happen that often. The game is up like 95% of the time. If you are somehow landing in that 5% every single time you login...I don't think anything can be done about that.

[Faelandaea]

Uh . . . . just be glad this game HAS maintenance. Do you realize how many games out there, subscription or otherwise - don;t fix anything? The fact that this game constantly fixes stuff is one of the reasons that I DO play FFXIV.

EDIT: I forgot to add: You are right about one thing - real life commitments are priority and I respect that. You should always consider that if your real life schedule does not allow you to play a game, you should either find a different game or find another activity which you can actively share with your family or something.

[Avenger]

Patch 2.51 was a major content patch, they usually start maint for major content patches earlier in the evening like 9PM PST, but this only happens once every 3 months...all other maints are usually 11PM PST or later. So...what you are saying is you'd rather them not have new content because of the maint required :/

1. They have been scheduled starting at 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2... but as you note it's often around 11, which is bad for a lot of people in pacific-ish time zones who like to play at the end of the day. In my own experience, our server seems pretty busy at the above times.

2. No, it's a mistake to conflate timing with the existence of maintenance - they're not the same thing. I am trying to explain why OP has a legitimate point, which is simply that the same people will tend to get hit by maintenance repeatedly since it's scheduled at similar times. This seems unfortunate and unfair, which leads us to...

Yeah they could rotate timezones but they still gonna end up in some groups prime time, maint really does not happen that often. The game is up like 95% of the time. If you are somehow landing in that 5% every single time you login...I don't think anything can be done about that.

3. Rotating could spread the pain over multiple time zones. Most people play at similar times during the day, so this reduces the likelihood of inconveniencing the same players over and over. I think we are actually agreeing that it's certainly annoying when maintenance repeatedly hits your preferred game time, and that rotating could possibly mitigate the problem.

[314159265358979323846264338327]

I'd be willing to bet that an entire total of 0 resumes have been submitted to SE by people who complain about maintenance. I mean if it's so easy to run the game without it, someone who clearly knows how to do it better would be an invaluable person to have on the team right?

[Avenger]

I'd be willing to bet that an entire total of 0 resumes have been submitted to SE by people who complain about maintenance. I mean if it's so easy to run the game without it, someone who clearly knows how to do it better would be an invaluable person to have on the team right?

OP has a legitimate point, which is that scheduling maintenance around the same time of day is likely to affect the same people/time zone repeatedly. This can be frustrating if you're one of those people.

[Taika]

The fact is, that they have been tending to schedule these maintenances during primetime for EU players

Since when is 7-10am prime time? The maintenances are during when most Europeans are at work or studying, definitely not our prime game time (and I thank SE for it).

[Avenger]

Uh . . . . just be glad this game HAS maintenance. Do you realize how many games out there, subscription or otherwise - don;t fix anything? The fact that this game constantly fixes stuff is one of the reasons that I DO play FFXIV.

EDIT: I forgot to add: You are right about one thing - real life commitments are priority and I respect that. You should always consider that if your real life schedule does not allow you to play a game, you should either find a different game or find another activity which you can actively share with your family or something.

I am pretty sure all of us appreciate maintenance and game upgrades, but if you're in the wrong time zone you might wish that SE would mix it up a bit more as far as picking the time of day for said maintenance and upgrades.

[Hysterior]

stop work and break up with the gf
problem solved