Excessive maintenance is starting to piss off the casual, non-raiding players.

[Silverbane]

I see that like me, you didnt get the memo advising we had our own offended spokesperson.

These days, one can make good money being a professional offended spokesperson.
Others just do it for lulz.
Either way, it's sad.

[MellowMink]

Believe it or not, Final Fantasy XIV isn’t the only game that you’re ever able to play throughout the entirety of your free time; try something else for a short bit if maintenance lasts while you’re awake.

[NanaWiloh]

Three words...GET OVER IT!!! *drops mic*

[xenahawk]

I don't ever find it more than mildly inconvenient. If you life is so one-dimensional that the downtime is a BFD, you should consider broadening your interests a little.

However, I don't agree that it is a typical maintenance schedule. FFXIV has more frequent and longer maintenance periods than any MMO that I have played in the last 10 years, including GW2, WoW, Lotro, and ESO. I take it as a sign that their back end infrastructure is a bit of a mess, making applying patches or doing database maintenance a lengthy process. It is what it is.

Really? Cant seak to gw2 or eso but though wow has gotten better over time i remember 8+ hour maintenance every tuesday and even when it was back up it was very laggy and hard to play, so i would plan to make tuesday my run around errand day Just saying. Personally i would rather take the couple hour maintenance to keep the game running smoothly then not. Like i said though nothing in this game is time sensitive that people should get mad over a bit of down time.

[Reclusegamer]

From USA Central Time

maint always goes down at either 11:00 pm or 1:00 am in the morning. By that time, i've finished all daily activities and I'm ready to go to bed.

Maint has never effected me at all and no I don't do endgame raids.

I wanted to suggest OP's in an inconvenient time zone but we have an EU player that just claimed that Maint is during legit work hours for our friends in Europe.

There is no war in Ba Seng Se.

[Packetdancer]

Does FFXIV have more planned maintenance windows than many MMOs? Maybe. Does FFXIV have far fewer unplanned maintenance windows than many MMOs? Absolutely.

And personally, as a player, I'm more than willing to accept the minor inconvenience of the former to be spared the major inconvenience of the latter.

It's like doing maintenance on your car. One person takes the car in to get the oil changed regularly, brings it to the mechanic for periodic check-ups, and deals with minor problems right away. The other person doesn't deal with all those scheduled maintenances -- they have their car available more often, because they aren't sending it in for tune-ups -- but when something goes wrong, now there's a good chance it's more serious and the car's got to be taken to the shop and stay there for a while.

What FFXIV does -- planned, short maintenance windows on a reasonably consistent schedule -- is good dev-ops procedure; they're taking good care of the car, even if it means sometimes it's at the mechanic for a checkup. The alternative -- never dealing with anything until an actual problem arises -- means when a problem does crop up, it's often a lot bigger and more critical... and frequently means you have an unplanned outage, which is way less convenient for anyone (and also way worse in terms of your service's reputation).

[Illmaeran]

I'm a casual non-raider and am not pissed off by maintenance. My wife works very early mornings and I'm usually up around 3 am NA Eastern and in bed early so mornings before I have to go to work are the best time for me to play. Any time maintenance goes past midnight, I'm "inconvenienced" and have reduced play time. It's a disruption to my routine, but it's not a big deal.

I'd rather have the planned and well-communicated maintenance than the alternative.

[Gemina]

No it's not.

I'd be more irritated at the game going down for longer than 24 hours because they have to fix an issue that they went "hmmm we can just let this game breaking bug go for a while right?" to instead of just taking the game down for a few hours to hotfix and test before bringing the servers back up. A minor inconvenience is expected,

I can understand emergency maintenance. However, this all Worlds complete servers shutdown, mind you, is to implement 6.21. And they will do this again for 6.25. I can't speak for everyone, but I would rather wait and get the whole patch instead of staggering it across multiple maintenance and server shutdowns.

I wouldn't really fault a player for getting frustrated with this. Time is extremely valuable.

[Jojoya]

Time is extremely valuable.

Then why spend it playing a game instead of doing something valuable with your valuable time?

[Rayne6665]

People still bitching about maintenance? Boohoo. Lol im a casual non midcore or hardcore raider and i dont have a problem. When the game is down tonight, i have other games to play and sleep after.