Too Many Server Maintenances!!!!

[Kahnha]

Yeah Yoshi P should do a live stream crying and saying sorry and then give us two months free would be nice. xD

[ForteNightshade]

Just for reference sake. This latest four hour maintenance would equate to roughly two cents. Even a full 24 hour maintenance is 53 cents. We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel to complain about this of all things.

Nah, I'm not hoping for any compensation out of this, it's just annoying that these things always land in the most inconvenient spot for me because I can typically only play late at night, lol.

It's because Tokyo is roughly 13 hours ahead of EST. In other words, 2am EST is 3pm the following day for the dev team. So it sucks that your availability falls in that window, but it's standard working hours for Japan.

[jomas_45]

- OCE peak hours would be in an hour or two.

So this time cleverly avoids those peak hours and the timing itself makes sense.

I said in my post before, this lands smack bang in the middle of OCE peak.

[Jeeqbit]

I said in my post before, this lands smack bang in the middle of OCE peak.

Define peak then. I define it as 7-10pm or 8-10pm. Maint was scheduled to end at worse by 8pm in AU time and an hour earlier JP time. In practice they end it earlier than that usually.

[Catwho]

If we didn't have fixed home worlds, they could do a rolling maintenance and take the servers offline one at a time for the hotfix. It's what we do for the duplicate servers of the software that I work on IRL, and it's what some MMOs that utilize AWS or temporary instanced worlds for their server space can do.

However, because the in game worlds for XIV are fixed and persistent on a single server cluster, they don't get that option. It's pull the servers down, apply the patch, run the post patch checks, then put them back online.

[ChrysOCE]

Define peak then. I define it as 7-10pm or 8-10pm. Maint was scheduled to end at worse by 8pm in AU time and an hour earlier JP time. In practice they end it earlier than that usually.

Add 2 hours for NZ. It's not just AU that plays in OCE

[Shialan]

If you were serious, I apologize. Your post read like parody regarding something that is extremely common in the MMO world.
EchoingPulse and Jeeqbit answered things sufficiently though. Maintenance for MMOs is normal, and Emergency Maintenance is especially normal after content updates.

Stop.engaging.with.trolls.

[Shinku_Tachi]

Stop.engaging.with.trolls.

You're right, 100% right. I gave the benefit of the doubt for a moment, which proved to be a mistake.

[Haru304]

It's a true fact of the matter but your comment made me wonder, how much harder would it be for them to segement off data center updates based on the average player prime time?

I almost feel like that should be pretty doable, with exceptions to major patch updates. Like idk im just riffing here, but I feel like this would be especially fair for them to have to figure out considering some of the bugs in these emergency patch updates are things that they should have been able to catch through quality testing. I think the unreal tomb drop rate not working properly comes to mind in the previous patch.

I could be completely off in my assumptions here so feel free to correct any dumb opinion I just had lol.

It would be fairier and imo, entirely doable. But I just can't see Square Enix, particularly, doing it. On their end, I imagine it would require a lot more scheduling than the usual Japanese working hours allow, which in turn leads to a lot of additional costs on the company's end to facilitate. I imagine based on what I've read on here before, as well, that there'd be some technical hang ups because of the limitations of the engine. Can't remember exactly how it goes, but even a small dialogue change seems to require a full on server shut down. On the quality control front, which I'm not impressed with in Dawntrail, I think it's likely that a staggered approach to updates would just lead to more clumsiness across the board.

All in all, cost wise, I really wouldn't imagine it 'should' cost that much to facilitate, but every game company across the board seems to be in constant financial straits to the point opting for a staff vending machine is probably too much of an expense. I'd like to get back to a point, some day, where player goodwill trumps such things but eeeeeh. Eeeeeeh.

[Ephremjlm]

It would be fairier and imo, entirely doable. But I just can't see Square Enix, particularly, doing it. On their end, I imagine it would require a lot more scheduling than the usual Japanese working hours allow, which in turn leads to a lot of additional costs on the company's end to facilitate. I imagine based on what I've read on here before, as well, that there'd be some technical hang ups because of the limitations of the engine. Can't remember exactly how it goes, but even a small dialogue change seems to require a full on server shut down. On the quality control front, which I'm not impressed with in Dawntrail, I think it's likely that a staggered approach to updates would just lead to more clumsiness across the board.

All in all, cost wise, I really wouldn't imagine it 'should' cost that much to facilitate, but every game company across the board seems to be in constant financial straits to the point opting for a staff vending machine is probably too much of an expense. I'd like to get back to a point, some day, where player goodwill trumps such things but eeeeeh. Eeeeeeh.

Yeah fair enough, I see your point.