Two maintenances

[ajx]

Im paying for a 30 DAY subscription every month I atleast want to be able to play it.
So far since 3.0 dropped we've had maintenance on the following days (All of which are during my normal play time):

June 18-19th (24hr Maintenance)
Jun 24th (4hr maintenance)
Jun 29th (4hr maintenance)
July 8th (4hr maintenance)
July 13th (4hr Maintenance - ended up being 5hrs Aether was still down)
July 14th (Emergency Maintenance for all worlds)
July 20th (4hr maintenance today to drop partial 3.05)
July 22nd (likely 4hr mainstenance to drop the remainder of 3.05)


That being said, I'm all for maintenances to implement patches, but lately its been getting out of hand. A lot of times it was for very very minor bug fixes (or atleast as far as we're told) that likely could have waited for 3.05 .
So as far as I can see this is 8 days (out of my 30 day sub) that I'll have lost the ability to play during my available time slot. And the month is not yet over, who knows how many more will follow, as there will likely be bug fixes for 3.05 in the coming days.

I'm not sure how your month is not over yet . There are 30 days in a calendar month (example: 18 June -17 July or 24 June -23 July). In the 2nd mentioned time frame that does not include expansion patch there were 7 maintenance (6 scheduled , 1 emergency) within a 30 day period.

While i understand the frustration some may get. From a business perspective when you pay a month subscription it is to play it up to a max of 30x24 hr = 720 hours per month. Now 7 maintenances net around 30 hours which is around 4% downtime during an expansion month. This is quite a good feat.


Another business perspective from a game developer point of view, SE does not wish to give preference to one player Base over the other like say Blizzard does when they release their content patches 1 day in advance to their American playerbase before releasing it to Europe and the rest of the world. SE wants the JP / NA / EU playerbase to get content /hotfixes at the same time ( for the time being anyway ). This makes it impractical for them to have longer maintenances as they're bound to affect during peak times at which a bigger majority of their player Base will get impacted .

Todays maintenance was :

11 pm - 03 am PDT
2 am- 06 am EST
6 am - 10 am GMT
3 pm - 7 pm JP time

So it makes more sense to select shorter but more frequent maintenances that could annoy some but will affect a much smaller number of their customers than extending the above maintenance times by starting 4 hours earlier or ending 4 hours later.