the rerturn of the daily maintenance?

What corporation doesn't make decisions that way? NCsoft is not a Mom and pop shop mate. Thats the reality of it.

Do you think CoH would be the great game it is, if they cared only about making a profit?

Well then you need to reread the thread mate. Staggering any shutdown over the normal 8 hour days seems the most reasonable option and I have yet to see a reasonable issue with it. There may indeed be a good reason why they all need to be within the same timezone but we have yet to hear one.


There isn't a person involved in this discussion that isn't aware of this. Obviously it's only during these change periods that theres a problem at all. And if the busy periods were only a week or two we could easily just grin and bear it but they tend to last for a couple of months at a time. As it is it has already been about three weeks worth of patches and we haven't even got a release date yet for the issue. Not to mention there will be at least a couple of weeks of patches after the release to address bugs etc. And as you said this is a much larger release than normal so god knows how long it will go for.

I love it when people erroneously use the discrimination card.
It shows just how dense they really are.

I'm thinking specifically of whomever the person that popped their head into the 'Ustream Marathon" on their way into Paragon Studios to "Work the nightshift" was.

Now being as that was at least 6 hours into me watching the Usteam event that day since the severs were down for what seemed like Aeons I am sure I blurred QA into GM or something of that nature.

I wanted to go back and dig thru the Ustream cast to find the right moment but they are not exactly user friendly to fastforward or scan through for one person popping in their head for all of idk 20 seconds.

Man nothing makes you feel more like an idiot than checking twitter on your lunch and seeing the com manager point your being wrong in a post. Made me feel special though

I love it when people deliberately take something out of context in order to make snide remarks. It makes my morning. Mmm, blowhards and coffee — perfect start to the day.

Because you don't pay for the game to be up when you want it, you pay for it to be up when it's up. Relative convenience is not part of the equation, numbers affected is. That's all.

This entire line of reasoning is fruitless. They *DO* have to piss someone off. This is a GIVEN. There MUST be maintenance on a regular basis.

The decision is not made on dollars "alone", but dollars are the FIRST consideration. This is correct and proper for a for-profit business.

Yeah okay that makes zero sense. Of course I'm only going to pay for a game that's up when I want to play. Would anyone do otherwise? And the fact that it isn't for such long stetches is exactly why so many of us are questioning continuing our subs. And rather than just quit we are letting NCSoft know first in case they are willing to do something to encourage us to stay.

Oh and I was scheduled to play tonight with friends and have just noticed that there is indeed yet another patch. This makes it the fourth time in a row that we have all tried to play together only to find it will be cut very short. Can you even begin to see why we might be feeling the way we are yet?

So you can give us a specific example that handles the amount of data CoH does across multiple shards with thousands of users that does not have to go offline for regular maintenance and costs no more than what NCNC pays now for their service? If you can, I am sure you can go far in the MMO server world and make a fortune.

Because, to use your phrase, anything else is arguing with a strawman.

While the individuals within Paragon treat CoH as a labor of love (and for what most game makers get paid they have to love what they do) it would not still be floating if every single one did not want to make money from it in some way.

Altruism does not pay the bills.

You already have your answer.

There are not enough of you for it to make financial sense for the maintenance windows to be anything other than what they are, take it or leave it.

Does it suck when you cannot have something you want? Yes.

Are you even reading what I'm saying? You keep coming back with obvious points that have already been addressed countless times. Yes there must be regular maintenance but no it does not have to be at the exact same time each day.

This argument is going in circles with the initial countering arguments just being constantly respouted. That's not how you win a debate.

NCSoft is no doubt aware of how we feel now anyway and that's who the information was directed towards anyway.

I do want to thank all of you though for keeping the debate civil. Quite frequently in issues such as this where the majority have no interest in it you get the fanboy trolls coming in trying to start arguments so that the mods have to lock the thread which then stifles discussion and stops us being heard.

That may very well be how things turn out we realise that. In which case the devs shouldn't be surprised if their unwillingness to change costs them some ongoing subscriptions. Something most companies would have wanted to avoid I would have thought.

The balls in their court. Frankly I suspect they wont even comment on the issue. So many of us will just have to decide how we want to go on.

Can you prove that you can't do it for a relatively small increase in costs compared with revenue? See, we can play this game all day. It could pass the time while the servers are down.

Perhaps you yourself also have considerable industry experience, in which case I apologize for judging your comments as shallow and mostly baseless. But if so, it would help your case if you argued coherently, as opposed to lurching between rhetorical devices, unsupported by anything approaching facts.

I've read everything you've said. You keep coming back with comments about how it doesn't have to be done the way it has been done, despite multiple people stating the reasons for it. Well, the 'apparent' reasons. We don't know what the devs are thinking - we have to draw conclusions based on our knowledge of computers and businesses.

And, by the way, this isn't a debate. I'm not espousing any particular position - I'm explaining what I think the devs' reasoning is. The only people it would make sense to debate with is those who have made the decisions regarding maintenance schedules.

For my own purposes, they could schedule it any time during the day since I'm at work. It would have no effect on me at all. I have no personal bias or preference here. *BUT*, because of how businesses operate, I really don't think it's going to be changed.

Ricktu's most obvious option if they want answers is to start emailing NCsoft and/or PMing the Devs and the community Mods and anyone else who might *reasonably* have direct knowledge and/or a say in the scheduling. Bear in mind that i doubt that the Dev team or community Mods themselves have any direct say in this. In my opinion the odds favor NCsoft as being the most directly involved in the server setup. That's not to say that they're likely to feel the need to respond and explain, but NCsoft management is most directly in charge of the servers AFAIK and also very unlikely to read the boards here.

The same advice applies to halfflat as well as Ricktu. This is assuming that either one is actually interested in answers rather than posting arguments and complaints to the forums.

Edit: i'm not suggesting they constantly send messages demanding an answer. Just that if you actually care about the hows and whys that you try contacting those most likely to know. Be prepared to accept no or possibly no response at all as an answer. If no one will reply then resume [complaining]* with a clear conscience.




*Using a far more polite synonym for what i was initially going to write here. You can thank me later. Or not at all. Whatever.

What on Earth makes you think the software developers even know, much less control, the people in charge of server maintenance? That's like expecting the engineers at General Motors to have authority over the Secretary of Transportation.

That is just bad business.
Regardless of where the majority of players are from, do you think it would cost more subscriptions by locking a minority out for a week or the minority out for 5 days and the majority for 2?
The answer is obvious.

Pedantic much? If you want to be even more so the reality is it's not even the dev's or the server maintenance crew that would make this decision but the management of NCSoft itself. You are quite correct that I mispoke when I typed dev's however I was just typing quickly and trying to not spend any more time on this than I had to.

Sigh..you cannot have a delicious, mouthwatering cake without some crumbs...the cake being Freedom, and the crumbs being the downtime.

Us American players are affected by this downtime too....I have Tuesdays and Thursdays off and do my most efficient playing in the early morning....and so maintenance happens in my prime playing time.

Lots of times, especially recently, I feel like you do...instead of packing up my things and leaving though, I head into the kitchen and whomp up some heavenly breakfast.

I know this sounds trite, but have a bit of patience. Freedom will roar in, the bugs will get fixed, and things will settle back down....that is my hope at least...one of my hopes...I would LOVE it if Freedom goes live on a Tuesday

Lisa.