[ QUOTE ]
I feel your pain. Really I do. I mean it. I work till 6 am so my play hours land in the same area as yours do. But I remember seeing this exact same conversation on the Warhammer Online forums when I played that a few months back. Fact is people with our play hours just get shafted in this regard... by EVERYONE.
[/ QUOTE ]
If they were doing it to keep you from playing you would be getting shafted. The simple fact is, that is the time when the least number of people are playing. therefore they annoy the smallest number of people.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I feel your pain. Really I do. I mean it. I work till 6 am so my play hours land in the same area as yours do. But I remember seeing this exact same conversation on the Warhammer Online forums when I played that a few months back. Fact is people with our play hours just get shafted in this regard... by EVERYONE.
[/ QUOTE ]
If they were doing it to keep you from playing you would be getting shafted. The simple fact is, that is the time when the least number of people are playing. therefore they annoy the smallest number of people.
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Just for the record I wasn't complaining. If I get hit with Maintenance I just play a console game.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I feel your pain. Really I do. I mean it. I work till 6 am so my play hours land in the same area as yours do. But I remember seeing this exact same conversation on the Warhammer Online forums when I played that a few months back. Fact is people with our play hours just get shafted in this regard... by EVERYONE.
[/ QUOTE ]
If they were doing it to keep you from playing you would be getting shafted. The simple fact is, that is the time when the least number of people are playing. therefore they annoy the smallest number of people.
[/ QUOTE ]
Just for the record I wasn't complaining. If I get hit with Maintenance I just play a console game.
[/ QUOTE ]
Same here... or come here and chat on the forums...
Really though, I have a wife and infant and job.... this means I play at odd hours. Now, when I play, mostly I have found myself teaming with those of you from other countries as everyone here in the states is asleep. So I do understand, but come on, people... this is just a game. it's an online game maintained on a regular basis that the devs who try very hard not to change. I say just deal with it or go... it's really not that bad.
Ozzie - thanks for taking time to say that. Its nice to hear a positive response 
Adam Alpha - yeah it's just a game. Doesn't that apply to every post on this forum? Thats why I'm posting here rather than talking to my local MP (senator) about it :P
Deal with, or go, or suggest and alternative and then get on with something else. I'll take option C thanks.
Gosh, planets are hard to explain to the terminally thick.
"oh, don't you -get- Daylight Saving's, Excession, teehee"
It makes my blood boil that you patently refuse to understand the underlying issue, that you try to cloud the issue with this nonsense about 'It's a US game', that you stand behind some farcical End User License Agreement and shout me down, when you clearly do not understand the relevance or importance of what is being stated. You misunderstand, and you obviously LIKE misunderstanding, it suits your purpose to be obdurately inconsiderate, to be supercilious about the 'downtime we had to have', to be completely and utterly uncaring about how NCSOFT's decisions affect others.
I love proving people wrong. Even idiotic Neanderthals who cannot possibly understand the depth of their incorrectness (like some of the respondents in this very thread). It's cathartic. It's nice to see the light of reason dawn in the eyes of the few, and yet have the baleful stare of disbelieving unrepentant ignorance shine forth from the non-comprehending masses.
So here's an explanation, I'd use ASCII Art, but that's too much effort, I have literally 5 minutes to go before I need to dash out and get a lovely Indian curry, so here goes.
2004 : maintenance was haphazard, it would sometimes happen on weekdays, sometimes on weekends, it was from the normal start time and went for '2 hours', but you could pretty well guarantee that the 2 hour window would only be about an hour or so.
2005 : maintenance was still haphazard, but the time-frame was fixed. it hit when it was 11pm in Australia, or when the world flip-flopped from Daylight savings, it gets pushed back to 1am local. It NEVER started before 11pm local unless there was something really special, like a new release.
2006: They started the Monday/Friday schedule. Again, starting at 11pm local, or during our summer, 1am local.
2007, 2008 and 2009 the schedule has been very much the same. Special events aside, the maintenance window's -earliest- start time was 11pm local.
Then in March 2009 they started to have 'early' maintenance, which we saw starting at midnight -- Australia still in Summer time, and the US not yet into DST. Then in the week I "ranted" (such as it was), Australia dropped out of summer, the US went into daylight savings, and suddenly we're getting maintenance at 11pm, OR 10pm, or even as early as 9pm.
Years of playing, years of having the same maintenance schedule, and then they unilaterally, arbitrarily, decide to have it start earlier. (That's the bit where some of you peabrains are hopelessly wrong, where you fail to grasp the meaning of 'earlier').
NCSOFT did advertise that they were doing early maintenance, it wasn't a surprise, what it WAS is disappointing, because 10pm is prime-time for Australia. 10pm is prime game-playing time whereever you are in the world.
They did a few 10pm (local) starts, and it looked like it was a permanent change.
Then they reverted back to the 'original' 11pm start.
This week it's been maintenance every weekday.
Monday 11pm, Tuesday 10pm, Wednesday 11pm, Thursday 10pm, and tonight 11pm.
Yes, I know they're doing stuff, yes, I know it's needed, NO, I DO NOT AGREE THAT THEY SHOULD KICK IT OFF EARLY, and hey (here's the good bit) I RECKON THEY SHOULD PUSH IT BACK an hour.
You guys claim that it's only Australia, and maybe Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, and a bit of Russia -- and that those geographical areas will always 'suck' for time-zone stuff.
Yet the biggest MMO of them all, "WoW" has maintenance just once a week. Just one day (Tuesdays). And sometimes they even skip that.
It's all well and good for those of you who don't ever see the maintenance window kick into YOUR game-playing times. We see it all too damn often, and it's very -very- frustrating when you're trying to organise a task force or a team event, and Maintenance comes crashing down -early-, so preventing the event from finishing on time.
Oh yes, I'm sure you're all going to get hurt and miffed that I've collectively lumped you all into the dimwit basket -- get over yourselves, enough people were so hopelessly wrong, I think it's reasonable to state you're a bunch of uncomprehending orangutans ... just to get the message to sink in.
As ever, it doesn't matter. You'll continue to be dim, and I'll continue to be peeved when Maintenance kicks in 'early'.
--
Ex.
Part-Troll, who used to be Excession777, now playing pantomime with people's mindlets.
--
[ QUOTE ]
because 10pm is prime-time for Australia. 10pm is prime game-playing time whereever you are in the world.
[/ QUOTE ]I don't know what you do, but 10pm isn't prime time in my or most of my friends' worlds...we're getting ready to kick off for the night, work or school or other obligations going in the morning and all. Prime time is 5pm-9 or 10pm, not much later than that.
(PS; prime time means "heaviest load time" not "what time I would like to play".)
[ QUOTE ]
Yet the biggest MMO of them all, "WoW" has maintenance just once a week. Just one day (Tuesdays). And sometimes they even skip that.
[/ QUOTE ]Please note that since the latest couple patches, WoW has gone down repeatedly and often for bugfixing, so that comment falls on its face.
Paragon Wiki: http://www.paragonwiki.com
City Info Terminal: http://cit.cohtitan.com
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Originally Posted by Dispari
I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.
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WoW also does about an 8 hour maintenance. So, even though it is down only once a week, it is down pretty much the entire days from 5am my time until shenever they star it back up. Also during my time playing WoW I noticed the servers were no where near as stable as in coh. On many occasions I would log in to see half of the servers down or there would be night that the servers would have to have rolling restarts multiple times.
To be fair, 10pm on Friday night is probably busier than most weekday nights.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
The rude responses to the OP earlier in this thread need to check themselves.
Saying "I don't mean to be rude but..." does not make it alright to actually BE RUDE!
The OP brings up a valid issue...one that should be addressed by the game.
There is no reason the maintenance times cannot be handled by their respective time zones and coastal regions.
East Coast servers can go down at different times than West Coast servers.
European servers SHOULD go down at different times than the US servers certainly.
To say the devs don't care about the Autrailian players is crap...and so close to racism you could spit on it.
If they did not care, they would not have added european servers at all, chump.
I frankly think maintenance should happen from 4am to 6am in their time zone. That would seem to make hte most sense.
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I don't know what you do, but 10pm isn't prime time in my or most of my friends' worlds...we're getting ready to kick off for the night, work or school or other obligations going in the morning and all. Prime time is 5pm-9 or 10pm, not much later than that.
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You live in a limited world then. The real Prime Time is 8 pm to 11 pm. That's why they call it Prime Time TV, friend.
So 10 pm IS prime time everywhere in the world.
That said, if you are a student, I can see why you and your friends are winding down around that time.
For somebody so focused on being rude, you certainly don't pay any attention to the facts that have been presented, which, in its own way, is also rude.
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The OP brings up a valid issue...one that should be addressed by the game.
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The OP does bring up a valid issue, but that DOES NOT MEAN that it should be addressed by the Devs. The Devs did datamining, and found the time slot when they do maintenance was the time period when the LEAST amount of people are playing the game. To change the maintenance time would therefore, on average, affect more people, no matter which direction you moved it. So, are you saying that the game should affect more people with maintenance down time?
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There is no reason the maintenance times cannot be handled by their respective time zones and coastal regions.
East Coast servers can go down at different times than West Coast servers.
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Maybe at one time they could, but not any more. It is also MUCH easier to bring down all of the servers at once, patch them at the same time, and bring them back up together than it would be to bring them down in two groups.
The Market servers are cross-serve, though. So to bring down the servers in two groups could cause large problems with the markets. It's an issue that DOES NOT NEED to be caused, so why cause it?
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To say the devs don't care about the Autrailian players is crap...and so close to racism you could spit on it.
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Not even close to racism. Australians are mostly of European decent, much like here in American. Now, it is a bit nationalistic, but that's not racist either.
The only way that it might come close to racism is if you use the UN definition of racial descrimination:
"the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."
But even then, I think you'll be hard pressed to say that a game is a fundamental freedom or human right.
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If they did not care, they would not have added european servers at all, chump.
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Well, the name-calling is rude, so you might want to stop that if you want to be the champion of the anti-rudeness cause. However, that aside, they added European (and Asian) servers to better serve those markets, not because they care about the time zone issues. It also was dealing with language and social barriers that don't translate well in an MMO. I'm willing to bet that the decision to have European and Asian servers had almost no discussion about time zone issues.
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I frankly think maintenance should happen from 4am to 6am in their time zone. That would seem to make hte most sense.
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Really? would it. Because if you take 4 am in Sydney, that would make it 2 PM here on the East Coast. I'm betting that you'll disrupt a whole lot more people playing at 2 PM here.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
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To say the devs don't care about the Autrailian players is crap...and so close to racism you could spit on it.
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DAMNED HONKIES! 
I HATE DEM ENGLISH SPEAKING WHITE MOTHER [censored]!
/e Kanye west voice
POSI HATES WHITE PEOPLE!
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European servers SHOULD go down at different times than the US servers certainly.
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Europe has their own servers. Australia and the east doesn't IIRC. Thats why
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I frankly think maintenance should happen from 4am to 6am in their time zone. That would seem to make hte most sense.
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WAAAAAAH! BUT THAT WOULD BE 7pm to 9pm EASTERN TIME! ZOMG! AA HATES EAST COAST PLAYERS THIS IS LIKE.... RACISM OR SOMETHIN!
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I don't know what you do, but 10pm isn't prime time in my or most of my friends' worlds...we're getting ready to kick off for the night, work or school or other obligations going in the morning and all. Prime time is 5pm-9 or 10pm, not much later than that.
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You live in a limited world then. The real Prime Time is 8 pm to 11 pm. That's why they call it Prime Time TV, friend.
So 10 pm IS prime time everywhere in the world.
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Please check your facts before you post. 10 pm is the very end of prime time in many places. Including the Central and Mountain time zones here in America. This is based off of the TV schedules, as seems to be your definition. Certainly, 8-11 EST is considered prime-time, but because of the time changes, this equates to a 7-10 CST prime-time schedule. So, 10 PM would be the end of their prime time.
In Japan, Golden Time is 7-10 PM. In Spain, it's later (but then, they also wake up later and their work day ends later).
Yes, "Prime Time" generally includes the 10 pm block. But that is also basing this off of the TV schedule definition, not the "most players playing the game" definition, which is usually the case when talking about the game. The game's Prime Time could be significantly different than TV's. And I'm betting that it is, especially on Fridays and Saturdays.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
And just for completeness' sake: 4 AM Perth time would make it 4 pm on the East Coast.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
<QR>
Let's see . . .
Ranting . . . Check
Raving . . . Check
Foaming at the mouth . . . Check
Wild accusations . . . Check
Opinions based on incorrect facts . . . Check
Utter lack of consideration for the majority of the playerbase . . . Check
Sounds like A_A is channeling the spirit of B_I today.
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There is no reason the maintenance times cannot be handled by their respective time zones and coastal regions.
East Coast servers can go down at different times than West Coast servers.
[/ QUOTE ]With AE, the Market, and Global channels all being cross server? I don't think so.
[ QUOTE ]
European servers SHOULD go down at different times than the US servers certainly.
[/ QUOTE ]Well, duh. They're separate, non-interconnected, server farms, and essentially two different games. Euro market is not the same as US market. Same for global channels and AE.
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To say the devs don't care about the Australian players is crap...and so close to racism you could spit on it.
[/ QUOTE ]And no one except you and the OP said it. All the other responses have been along the lines of "Look, the servers have to go down at someone's 10 PM, that's just the simple fact of time zones. And unfortunately, the time that was datamined as least-disruptive ended up in Australia's 10 PM."
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If they did not care, they would not have added European servers at all, chump.
[/ QUOTE ]That still doesn't help Aussies. And honestly, most Europeans I know are playing on the US servers anyway.
[ QUOTE ]
I frankly think maintenance should happen from 4am to 6am in their time zone. That would seem to make the most sense.
[/ QUOTE ]What part of "they datamined the most dead times" did you not understand? 4 AM to 6 AM Perth Time is 4 PM to 6 PM New York time. That's when people are just getting home from work and wanting to hop on.
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Originally Posted by Back Alley Brawler
Did you just use "casual gamer" and "purpled-out warshade" in the same sentence?
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Well, duh. They're separate, non-interconnected, server farms, and essentially two different games. Euro market is not the same as US market. Same for global channels and AE.
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Market and AE are the same. Global channels are different.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Well, duh. They're separate, non-interconnected, server farms, and essentially two different games. Euro market is not the same as US market. Same for global channels and AE.
[/ QUOTE ]
Market and AE are the same. Global channels are different.
[/ QUOTE ]They are? I was pretty sure AE would be separate at the least since you can have two different people with the same globals on Euro and US.
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Originally Posted by Back Alley Brawler
Did you just use "casual gamer" and "purpled-out warshade" in the same sentence?
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If you go into search in the AE you can select Euro missions to do. They are designated by flag. Ours are Identified by Old Glory (US) and the Union Jack (UK)
Adding my bit... Maybe they could switch up maintenance a little then, so its not ALWAYS primetime Australia time. I also live on the east coast of Australia and the week with at least 4 days of server maintenance was heads and tails THE most annoying gaming experience of my life. I understand that the devs dont want to affect their prime audience (US) but maybe instead of only ever doing maintenance in US mornings, could you also sometimes do maintenance in US mid-mornings->midday? Just to give the aussies a break from constant game interruption. I mean, especially in those weeks when maintenance is a constant thing.
Corporations have to consider what is best for the largest percentage of their customer base.
If the OP wants the maintenance schedule to change then he needs to get more people playing the game in his time zone.
Once he has gotten the number of subscribers increased to the point that another area will have the fewest players online then the maintenance schedule can be switched to their zone.
[ QUOTE ]
Corporations have to consider what is best for the largest percentage of their customer base.
If the OP wants the maintenance schedule to change then he needs to get [u]more people playing the game in his time zone.[u]
[u]Once he has gotten the number of subscribers increased to the point that another area will have the fewest players online[u] then the maintenance schedule can be switched to their zone.
[/ QUOTE ]
...ummm... this really needed to be fixed and repeated.
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[ QUOTE ]
Corporations have to consider what is best for the largest percentage of their customer base.
If the OP wants the maintenance schedule to change then he needs to get [u]more people playing the game in his time zone.[u]
[u]Once he has gotten the number of subscribers increased to the point that another area will have the fewest players online[u] then the maintenance schedule can be switched to their zone.
[/ QUOTE ]
...ummm... this really needed to be fixed and repeated.
[/ QUOTE ]
So another period of many maintenance windows, all during peak Australian gaming time.
I'm frankly sick of it. We pay the same price for the game, yet are treated substantially worse.
It's firstly far from clear why the game needs to be taken down at all, short of issue updates. 'Required' downtime surely is a bug - one which should have been fixed by now. What is the actual reason for downtime? Backups? If they can't be done live, then it's poor design. Resource leaks? These are bugs.
But granting that apparently regular downtime will be scheduled, it is completely unfair for one segment of the customer population to shoulder all of the burden. Perhaps if the downtime were scheduled for peak North American times, there would be more impetus to find solutions to the problems that are causing the servers to be taken down in the first place.
Grumpy in Australia.
I feel your pain. Really I do. I mean it. I work till 6 am so my play hours land in the same area as yours do. But I remember seeing this exact same conversation on the Warhammer Online forums when I played that a few months back. Fact is people with our play hours just get shafted in this regard... by EVERYONE.