Maintenance length

[Kranel_San]

I always wondered why the maintenance here takes a long time to complete while it's much shorter in other games.
Can an expert explain why?

[SailorCeti]

Maybe, unlike other games, they want to get it right.

[weebtext]

dont tell anybody i told you this but... not every game has the same maintenance time. crazy, i know.

[Krotoan]

Without knowing exactly what their maintenance entails VS the "other games" it's impossible to say.

Maintenance for one system I manage at work is just rebooting the servers and clearing caches and giving the racks a once over to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. For another it's checking every single jumper one by one and passing test lights through them to make sure there is no degradation. The difference between the two is one takes 10 minutes the other takes 3 hours and if the first one fails it's usually easily fixable but if the other one fails someone could die (quite literally). So it's highly dependent on how thorough they're being, how complex the systems are, what their standards are for "passing" and what they're actually calling "maintenance".

[Kranel_San]

Without knowing exactly what their maintenance entails VS the "other games" it's impossible to say.

Maintenance for one system I manage at work is just rebooting the servers and clearing caches and giving the racks a once over to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. For another it's checking every single jumper one by one and passing test lights through them to make sure there is no degradation. The difference between the two is one takes 10 minutes the other takes 3 hours and if the first one fails it's usually easily fixable but if the other one fails someone could die (quite literally). So it's highly dependent on how thorough they're being, how complex the systems are, what their standards are for "passing" and what they're actually calling "maintenance".

Thanks! This is the kind of answer I was looking to.

[Shibi]

As well as reboots and cleanup;

Maintenance time is also used to install the little ladies day event, the moogle tomestone event, sometimes small bug fixes (how Materia displays "next cactpot is in 2.") and so on.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I play ESO and when they actually have real updates their maintenance takes many hours also. Same issues with many games I’ve played like Aion and other mmos. Heck I even play mobile games whose maintenances got extended for similar amounts of time.

[TaleraRistain]

They're not usually 10 hours. This one was stated as 6.08 hotfixes and some infrastructure maintenance and infrastructure maintenance is always more involved.

[TalithaSolarien]

Don't forget that there is a whole new data center will all it's shiny new servers (Materia) that has to be done as well. This will surely increase maintenance time in the future.

[Curisu]

They also do the maintenance worldwide at the same time.
And they probably implement parts of the DC travel system which is probably extremely complicated.

Every game has also different kind of server.
Like, lost ark has a easy and cheap, not to complicated server were you can easily add now DCs and Server. But because of it you can't transfer your character to other server and if you want to login on another server you have to restart the whole game.