Maintenance.

First off: wow...quite a thread necro there.

Secondly, you are not treated worse. You are treated the same, it just affects you more.

Secondly, the game needs maintenance just as every other online game needs maintenance. Things don't always work out perfectly, and sometimes the servers can get bogged down. It happens in every business I've been a part of, and I'd imagine it's worse with an online game. So, they need to take the servers down and clean them out. This takes time. Time that the servers need to be down unless you want the game to be largely unplayable. If you can't understand that, then I suggest you not play MMOs, because it happens in all of them.

Secondly, the maintenance can't be done live. I'm sorry, but it just can't. The servers can't be up and being maintained at the same time. Not on a game this big where it would significantly slow down the game for a larger timeframe, and therefore impact more people.

Secondly, the time period chosen was datamined to have the fewest people on during the period where people could be reasonably asked to be in the office. The servers are in California and Virginia. If the company doesn't want to pay overtime (and that is definitely a business decision), then you want to schedule it during the time when people would already be there. So, you take that, and find out when the servers have the lowest population, and go with that time for maintenance. I'm sorry that this affects you, but to change it would only INCREASE the population affected by maintance.

Secondly, if you think that you cna program an MMO that doesn't require server downtime, go right ahead. I'd love to see it.

^ just owned you

That's up there with, "some are more equal than others". If an action with known undesirable consequences affects A more than B, then A is being treated worse. That's just a consequence of what the word 'worse' means.

A server is not a piece of machinery which needs oiling. What exactly is being 'cleaned out'? I would not be satisfied - nor should I be - if I wrote an application that demands weeks of CPU time over multiple servers, but needs to be regularly restarted because it accumulates cruft, or leaks resources, or fragments memory. Indeed, I have been in this situation, and indeed, anything of this order was regarded as a bug, and was fixed (to the point of submitting bugfixes to third-party libraries.)

It affects us unduly. People are not averse to 'taking one for the team', or experiencing some loss for the greater good. But it requires a sense of community and fairness. I'm happy that many other players get to enjoy a lot more playtime; but I am frustrated that the same population - the population that includes myself and probably most other Australian players - pays the price, over and over. I don't want to state that you, yourself, find it easy to take this position if you are not gaming in these hours, but I do observe that generally, those who are not affected by a problem are more likely not to consider it to be important.

I reckon that as a part of a development team with appropriate experience and similar ideals, I probably could. Of course creating such a service by oneself is another matter entirely.

You have the same downtime as everyone else. You have had the same downtime as everyone else for years now. I get that this is peak playtime for you guys, and do feel bad, but know that any change in it makes it worse for more people. As such, it is probably unlikely to change anytime soon. If you cannot adapt to something that has been happening for 5 years now (and has gotten better over that time period), then I don't know what to say.


Okay, leave your computer running for days on end, making heavy use out of it. Don't shut it down for days. Make sure that you're opening different applications on it. Does it get slower after a few days of use? Do things start working a little oddly on it? I bet it does. Keep running your computer without ever defragging it. Does it get slower? How about if you never run a virus scan on it? Do things start breaking or working oddly? I bet it does.

That is exactly what goes on with the servers, too. It doesn't need to necessarily be a bug that causes it. Heavy use of the software can cause things to appear that wouldn't be there if it was restarted again. Why is it that whenever you call tech support for an issue on your computer, the first thing they usually have you do is restart the computer? It 'cleans' out a lot of the junk that has been going on by you using the computer.

Those applications that you've created; have they been intended to run indefinitely with the computer never shutting down? Have any of the computers with it kept performing wonderfully even after running for a week without shutting down?

The server gets heavy use. Take Freedom, for instance. Let's give it 20,000 of the game's 100,000+ players. That's 20,000 people using it on a frequent basis, doing a lot of packet transfers and making the server do a lot of calculations. Add that up over time, and things cna get misplaced, which makes the server act a little slower. If you don't take it down every now and again, it gets worse.

If you think that the Devs can track down every little memory leak or bug in this game's code, especially before new ones pop up, then I think you're deluding yourself. I've never seen an MMO where they didn't need to have server maintenance, and I'm betting that I never will.

I do consider it important. The Devs consider it important. However, as I've said, to change it now would only affect MORE people. Why would the Devs change it if they know that? They continuously work to make the game better. If they stopped everything to try to make it so that they never had to do server maintenance, I doubt they'd ever get to that point, and we'd have no new content updates while they did that. How would the game survive that? That's not even considering that I doubt the art department is great at debugging. They might be, but I doubt it.

Knowing that it affects people who wish they weren't affected by it is a far cry from being able to change it in a way that would make everyone happy.


Then go and get yourself a job on a team like this. I'm betting that business decisions would force you to not get the product you want out on time. Especially on an MMO.

If it were really the same, then it would not matter if it were moved to, say, North American peak times. It obviously does matter, and we can conclude that in any meaningful sense, it is not the same.

The servers running the application I described above had their last reboot about a year ago. The Windows desktop experience, dire as it is, does not correspond to how servers operate. Or at least, it need not and should not.

Yes, and yes!

Well, it would be fun. But it's not very practical for me. I already have a fun job! And if my past experience with the game development industry is any guide, moving back into the fold is sadly just asking for long hours and job insecurity. Industry woes are another issue though!

I did not say that the effects were the same, only that the downtime is the same, i.e., it's at the same time. Now, the time zones affect what time that is FOR YOU, but it is run at the same time. Your connection would be down at the same time as mine, if I was trying to play then. It would just be earlier in the morning for me, and at night for you.

I did NOT say that the effects from that were the same, only that the servers go down from 9-11 Eastern Standard Time for everyone. That is the same.

If you mean that when the servers are down, they are down for everybody, then of course I have to agree with you. They sure are!

But if you mean that they go down at the same time every day, then I disagree on two points: firstly, due to vagaries of changes in daylight savings both in the US and in Australia, and the fact that the downtime is tied to the US timezones, the actual time of day does change - twice a year with regards to the closest thing we have to a standard time, UTC, and four times with regards to Australian timezones with DST; secondly, even if it were the same time UTC, it is of course not the same time locally given differing timezones.

Don't want to make a mountain out of this point, but I wasn't really sure what your clarification meant.

This is indeed what I meant. Just that they are either down or up, not that they go down for you at a bad playtime just because it's a bad playtime for you guys and gals, but that they're down for everyone at what happens to be peak time for you.

Oh darn, Here I thought it was a global game.

I've always found it pretty damn easy to find a team around Aus prime time. And I play those times regularily.

I'd like a more recent datamine about times, and see the dev post again stating this is the empty time still. But realistically after 5 years it isnt going to change. It defiantly wont change unless there is some voiced criticism about the schedule.

And got the usage datamined again. That would be the hard bit. The other hard bit would be getting more Aussies to play with maintenance as is

Quoted for Truth.