Worst. News. Ever

New Maintenance Times

I'm just feeling screwed over right about now.

Second week in a row that maintenance has prevented my RP group from finishing the treespec.

Perhaps now would be the time to re-suggest something that I mentioned a while ago - staggered maintenance times for Mondays and Fridays. Why not schedule the two windows at separate times so that our timezones aren't catching the brunt of every single maintenance window?

We all know that maintenance is a necessary evil, but hitting the same group of players twice a week is excessive, and completely avoidable in my opinion. In my case this is about 40% of my weekly play time gone for the foreseeable future, which is no small matter. I know that we're not the largest group by any means, but that doesn't mean that we should suffer as second-class citizens.

I'm on US Eastern timezone and this hits me as well. I like to get a little game time in before going to work. I liked the previous maintenance time better.

Oh well.

Well at least the European early afternoons and American mid-mornings are now free. heh

I was so looking forward to US Daylight Savings Time when maintenance switches to a more reasonable time for me.

Now this?

I'm kinda stunned. I don't normally get on until 9:30 or 10:00 pm most nights, and I don't normally play much later than 11:30 to midnight. This change means I lose two days of play from each week.

OTOH, the maintenance usually only takes around 45 minutes, so what I'm really losing is the opportunity to play SFs or other organised play on Mondays and Fridays ... and I can't remember the last time I did either on a Monday or a Friday due to the already annoying maintenance periods.

I need to think about this. Right now, it just feels like a kick in the teeth.

Mildly annoyed with it.
But after checking how many people were playing villains last night all of 17. Even Heroes only had 30 unhidden people online.

I thought great I can get to bed just that little bit earlier.

Eve Online: scheduled maintenance 9pm - 10pm AEST

Everyday.

365 days a year.

Sure does suck.

NCSOFT, Shafting Australians, 100% of the time.

It's not really relevant what other MMOs do with their downtimes - Age of Conan had lots of outages during the Australian evenings in the first month, and their general attitude to the issue was a big factor in the cancellation of my subscription.

The Australian community in this game provide some of the best free marketing that NCSoft could ask for, because the generally low populations mean that we need every new player that we can get. I can only imagine how guys like Lili and Min Min must feel, knowing that this move has the potential to undo all of their hard work towards keeping the game vibrant in our timezone.

If I could put my finger on the thing that bugs me the most, it's that there's no real acknowledgement on NCSoft's part that they appreciate the extent of the impact that this will have on the typical Australasian player. The impression that I have is that they don't care enough about our subscriptions to find a way to keep us happy, especially now that I see another outage tomorrow night which is again scheduled smack bang in the middle of our primetime. I would have thought it was better business sense to mildly annoy a slightly larger number of customers, rather than totally shafting a smaller number to the point where five year veterans are actually considering leaving the game. I've said this before when we've had multiple patch outages in primetime in the same week, and I've yet to hear a good reason why the Monday outage has to be at the same time as the Friday outage. I'm sure it's more difficult to do it this way from a management perspective, but frankly I'm not paying NCSoft to do what's convenient for them.

As it is I'm going to be cancelling my second account - not out of bitterness, but because I simply can't justify paying two subscriptions for a game that I can't access during a fair proportion of my playtime. Like Min, the next little while is going to be make or break on whether I stick with the game at all.

As I understand it they've just chosen the time with the least people on.

It's not much fun for the people who *are* on at that time, but there doesn't seem to be anything but maths driving this. And I don't imagine whether it's Monday or Friday makes any difference. Least people on is least people on.

I'll either adapt or move on. It'll be a shame if I have to move on, but I doubt there's anything NCSoft can do about it. A change in maintenance time was bound to hit someone after all ...

Sure, someone has to be affected - but why the same people on both nights. For instance, starting maintenance an hour earlier on Mondays and an hour later on Fridays wouldn't drastically affect the number of players online, but it would help to reduce the impact on any individual player.

Gah. Down again. It's like they actually want us to stop our subscriptions.

For patching, I can understand the need to take the servers down. But regular maintenance? What exactly do they do? If the code is leaking resources, it's a bug that should be fixed.

I bet there would be much more motivation to fix it if the downtime was say, 8.30pm to 10.30pm Pacific time.

I really don't see why they can't take some servers down at one time and the rest at another so that there is always some servers running. Those of us with alts would always be able to play.

Maybe they are all tied together by the login server, so they kind of have to? Well, all of the US servers tied to each other and maybe all the Euro servers tied to each other at least.
I don't know. Just a theory.

I'd recommend at least staggering the times of the Monday ones vs. the Friday ones though.

Well the global chat server and the markets servers are global. I suspect the login server is too.

Well last night was fun. We got in just over an hours worth of play before the servers went down at nine. Of course this time maintenance took well over two hours so by the time it came back there were only one other friend who was still up.

On the plus side though I was really getting into Aion.

I had typed a much bigger post but I ended up deleting most of it. They don't give a toss and I'm wasting my breath.

It is very sucky.

I understand why they have an Oceanic Lounge - it keeps these gripes out of general public attention.

I'll probably hang on until GoRo, but to be honest my main point of logging into CoH/V is to move characters to places they can get Day Job badges and then leaving them there for 21 days.