Define prime time!

[Leonas]

An American on a Chinese server in Canada.

Mind. Blown.

[Dreamer]

From Wikipedia:

The hours traditionally taken as constituting prime time in North America are 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific and 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Central and Mountain Time Monday–Saturday. On Sundays, prime time begins an hour earlier, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific and 6:00 p.m. Central and Mountain, ending at the same time as on the other six days of the week.

By this definition maintenance ended an hour before prime time after prime time started (eastern time).

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

An American on a Chinese server in Canada.

An American on a Chinese server hosting a Japanese game in Canada.

Aside from that, I agree with Dreamer. "Prime time" has a very strict definition used by most media companies; it isn't a loose synonym for "peak hours", though of course it caters to that notion.

[Haoma]

Prime time is going to be anywhere from 5PM to 10PM, give or take. Children come home between 2PM and 5PM, many adults get off between 5PM and 6PM. A lot of people with (potentially) nothing to do for a few (or more) hours.

[Felis]

Primetime News is 6PM.

SE has already said, multiple times, the grand majority of players are NA -- not JP. Scheduling an NA/EU mait during NA primetiem is assinine. These downtime/maits don't have 50 staff members on, it's a small team -- that should be able to come in during the night to turn it.

It's a NA/EU data center and the maintenance is not during EU prime time. Where is the problem?

NA get the better latency, EU get the better maintenance time. Everyone is happy.

[Tubbins]

From Wikipedia:



By this definition maintenance ended an hour before prime time.

I think you need to redo that math. Maintenance went from 7:00pm to 9:00 pm eastern which is an hour into the prime time as stated by your quote from wikipedia.

[AttacKat]

The latest maintenance...

Hmm, only ONE data sample qualifies your research being conclusive?!?!

How about going back a few more?

Sep. 3, 5:00 p.m. to Sep. 4, 2013 3:00 a.m. (PDT) (8pm-6am EDT)
Sep. 11, 5:00 p.m. to Sep. 12, 2013 3:00 a.m. (PDT) (8pm-6am EDT)
Sep. 19, 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (PDT) (7pm-9pm EDT)

Considering 3 out of 4 the "scheduled" ones were during the hours where it does fall in between the hours where people are home during late afternoon, early and late evening, yeah, so far most of the "scheduled" maintenance is during prime time when the NA population is most likely to log on.

BTW, where do you live? Maybe we can ask SE to schedule it during the hours you are most available to play instead of NA's.

EDIT:

JP company = maintenance during their working hrs.

While this excuse was acceptable during beta, this is no longer an acceptable excuse for a product that is live 24x7 serving the globe. Major data centers are operational and manned 24x7, hence the service provider also needs to be sensitive to the locale of their service area.

jc

[Dreamer]

I think you need to redo that math. Maintenance went from 7:00pm to 9:00 pm eastern which is an hour into the prime time as stated by your quote from wikipedia.

Yep, you're right. For some reason my brain was thinking that maintenance was 5p-7p (even though I'm in eastern time myself).

[Leet]

Noez. You're in america on a canadian server. :P

Canada is a part of the Americas... Nobody said United States of America servers, just American servers.

[Ahlen]

Prime time is defined by two things:

Largest population density, hardware location.

For NA/EU, that more than likely means prime time is related to EST.