late night working American here...can I play meow?
And miss out on the chance to mess with EU players? Inconceivable!
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but I want to play meow 
Sigh, is this really what the community - both sides of the Atlantic - has come to?
There's nothing wrong with politely asking for a slightly more useful heads up on downtime, scheduled downtime at that. The kind of work which isn't decided on within 12 hours etc.
Everyone hates the community of a certain other virtual world so much, yet sometimes I wonder if they've looked in the mirror.
Guess not
Sorry, it's a good idea, I'm just a little jaded; I appreciate *why* we always get screwed over on the downtime, but the apparent lack of effort to make it a little easier for us hasn't gone unnoticed.
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Ignore Mr DJ, he's just annoyed by us in the EU expressing any kind of opinion. He does it in a lot of these threads.
In fairness not all maintenance is pre-planned that far ahead and I know that Avatea doesn't always get the time to notify the community far in advance and that's true for other members of the community. Sometimes it's because it's critical, sometimes it's cuz it's a fix just delivered in time , and sometimes it's just what we might call "unforseen circumstances."
Also because the Devs have a stated daily "maintenance window" that can technically run every day they kind of do give us some pretty good advanced warning.
could they do better? Almost certainly but given the issues that have arisen with the release of Freedom, actually they ain't doing so bad I guess. The biggest issue IMO is that it all falls on the peak EU times but there's not much they can actually do about that. Whenever they do maintenance, it'll always give somebody arseache.
Yes it's a PITA, but Avatea and the other CCs do try their damndest to let us know. The simple fact is they don't often know til it's too late.
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Please would it be possible to have downtime notification threads posted at a slightly friendlier time than the midnight/early hours postings we currently get.
I realise there's the issue of Pacific coast working hours, but putting something up at 18:00 BST the day before would fit perfectly and allow most people, NA/EU/Oceanic to read about it in advance.
Currently it seems that most announcements go up in the middle of the night and it ends up feeling like there's extremely short notice of downtime, because most of Europe is asleep when it's posted and for a good 6 hours or so afterwards.
Obviously this request doesn't apply to unscheduled emergency maintenance, but things like Live server publishes or scheduled maintenance (that which is over and above the usual weekly slot) could go up with a bit more warning.
**Please note: this is not about excessive downtime, this is about the timing of announcement posts**