Quote Originally Posted by Adire View Post
Well, these long maintenances usually do go for the entire time. I've played many MMOs and FFXIV by far takes the cake for long maintenances.

Patches are usually bug free for the most part, but other games accomplish the same thing in a much shorter time, mostly due to having a testlive system. Hopefully SE will look at speeding up the process sometime in the near future.
These long maintenances usually go the entire time because the servers won't be available for play before the weekly reset of new content happens and where there will be a rush to acquire certain things (ie: new housing, mats for new recipes - there's a rush on the MB for old mats madely newly relevant the moment the patch comes up.) If they did trim time off of the maint schedule it would be the servers going down later rather than coming up early - but better to be safe on case something goes really wrong and have too much time than too little.