Server maintenance

[Waeksyn]

All maintenance is planned to finish in a 5 hour time window (0:00 to 05:00 PST). Start times are backed up from there depending on the time required.

That finishing time makes the update complete in the middle of the Japanese afternoon (likely for key resources to complete the patching). This makes the game available after patch for the Japanese prime time late afternoon. Given that most maintenance is less than 4 hours, this puts the entire maintenance activity within a normal Japan business day.

Most major patches have been planned for 24 hours. Patch 2.3 was planned for 8. This is planned for 10.

You can read into the above whatever you want. Based on the stats, I would guess the times are planned for operations resource availability and has nothing to do with customer impact. This is contrary to most IT maintenance activity I've seen in NA, where the work is always planned for the least customer disruption.