Maintenance window

[HaelseMikiro]

Even if maintenance is completed early, I expect they'll keep it closed until the weekly reset, only because they're adding a new 24 man with a weekly reward. Yes, it's new content and it might be unlikely that many people could clear it between maintenance and reset time, but if there's a chance of it happening, they'll keep it shut down.

[Dement]

Even if maintenance is completed early, I expect they'll keep it closed until the weekly reset, only because they're adding a new 24 man with a weekly reward. Yes, it's new content and it might be unlikely that many people could clear it between maintenance and reset time, but if there's a chance of it happening, they'll keep it shut down.

Bingo.

Non-patch maintenance can and frequently does end early.

Patch maintenance will never end early. They learned their lesson in the early 2.x series when they released new tomestones and finished maintenance early. Some people got on and were able to complete various trials to get a large chunk of the new tomestones before reset giving them an advantage moving forward. Since then patch maintenance hasn't ended early.

In regards to the why 24 hours question, I always guessed it likely doesn't take them 24 hours to implement most patches but I'm guessing they give themselves 24 hours in case something goes amiss they have time to fix it before the scheduled finishing time. Then once everything is up and running, they still can't release it until the scheduled time for the aforementioned reasoning regarding weekly resets. I assume the reasoning to be it's better to take away the final day of a dying patch than to end up with game breaking problems and have to take away the opening day of a new patch (the rioting mob would rapidly get out their pitchforks and torches). Even with fairly significant hot fixes needed, they typically don't shut the game down to implement them on patch day but usually the next day (Wednesday night expect a short patch).

[HaelseMikiro]

Even if maintenance is completed early, I expect they'll keep it closed until the weekly reset, only because they're adding a new 24 man with a weekly reward. Yes, it's new content and it might be unlikely that many people could clear it between maintenance and reset time, but if there's a chance of it happening, they'll keep it shut down.

And so SE outsmarts me, maintenance is over 90 minutes early, and they forced weekly reset to occur early to compensate for it. Outstanding work devs, I'm truly surprised and proud this time around