Aussie Server Maintenance

The original patch time was later (I forget if it was 2am PST or 3am PST), but the European players didn't like it because they wanted to start playing earlier in the afternoon. So, BioWare moved the patch time back a few hours.

Look, it's a world-wide game. No one time is going to work for everyone. The US gets priority because we have more players and because BioWare Austin is located here.

If you would prefer locked regions like WoW has, then you can have staggered maintenance times. If that's the case, then certainly you should make BioWare aware of it. However, I don't think that they're likely to change the system any time soon. After all, players in all regions already have characters on servers that are located in other regions.

While I respect my brothers from down under, I have to say as a
West Coast US player that I absolutely loathe the midnight shutoff for maintenance. Some of us work 2nd shift, and we know that nearly no one plays weekday mornings.

Exactly, it's a worldwide game. No one region should be favoured over the others. That's an outdated way of looking at things, it's easy excuse to use. Doesn't make it right though.
I manage a store, all my customers are treated the same, the regulars, the once now and then shoppers, the ones that's spend alot, the ones spend less. They are ALL my customers, and I value each and everyone if them.
All that's being asked is that they rotate the night downtime so each region gets the same treatment.

Because its so hard to have a version check on servers, aka "your version of the client is not patched to the same version of this server, if you want to play on this server please update your client by clicking on [insert link]. Please note, once patched you will not be able to play on servers with an older version of the game"

Hahahahahahaha

Maybe when there are more than 3 Oceanic servers there will be devoted aussie maintenance windows.

exactly - i've posted this same thing many times only to have my thread closed and directed here.

but not hard to do at all no, need for separate regional clients and those update tourists that visit our servers while theirs are down will have to negotiate the queue - thats what the queue is for after all...

but even id be happy if they just did regional maintenance times to suit - that would be an improvement on now.

I guess there's not too many brain surgeons or rocket scientists in Austin

every MMO company does this. It's easier for them to do all maintenance at once. There are many reasons for this.

oh and EVERY mmo has people on the forums that complain about the time the servers are down claiming bio "hates" them.

you're seriously clueless if you think that is the case.

It's one day. You'll all live.

This is WHY companies HAVE staggered maintenance in the middle of the night... so YOUR servers are ALWAYS available during your normal play times. Another way around this would be to have a round-robin global maintenance, ie. middle of night in Europe this week, next week middle of night in US, then middle of night Asia. This would show you ACTUALLY CARE abotu your customers in Europe and Asia, one thing is to SAY you care, quite another is to SHOW it!

Have a nice day, hope you learned something now.

I absolutely understand why Bioware need to bring down all servers at the same time globally to roll out new content/fixes and perform maintenance - to have different downtimes for different zones, they would be doing the same job many times over just to patch all the servers instead of bringing them down once and patch all of them at the same time (not to mention the fact there would be a lot of people that would hop to whatever server is up just to continue playing in some form).

What I'm VERY annoyed about is the fact that the chosen downtime for maintenance is OBVIOUSLY aimed at providing the least possible impact for their US subscribers and let all other territories fall where they may. I thought the EU servers were getting a bad run but now it seems like the AU/NZ territories are getting shafted the most.

All I'm asking is for them to adjust that downtime to impact all territories EQUALLY - I understand it would be impossible to get the exact same peak/off-peak ratio for every single server/country but at the moment it's COMPLETELY biased towards keeping their US subscribers happy.

Their downtime is totally during off-peak times so most US subscribers wouldn't even notice the downtime is there - AU/NZ subscribers have their downtime totally during peak times. I'm not sure about the various timezones across Europe but I get the impression they experience various amounts of both peak and off-peak times.

Please adjust the maintenance downtime so everyone gets *some* peak time loss and *some* off-peak loss - this bias towards US subsribers HAS TO STOP!

Please understand, this post is not complaining about downtime in general - I understand Bioware need global downtime on all servers and I certainly don't care about missing a couple of hours of playtime each week (as many have said, it's good to have some time off to get things done), I just don't like seeing one group of people catered for while another group is given the scraps - in any form.

Thanks all

EDIT: I just read the post above mine and found this suggestion
I think this would be a GREAT idea - have downtime for all servers be during off-peak time for the US one week, off-peak times for Europe the following week, off-peak times for Asia Pacific the week after etc. Everyone would get an equal turn at having downtime during their peak times...

1. I don't think that it would be more afford to update the servers. Either they install an update by clicking on a button (doubt it) or they do it for every server individually. Personally I think the update process is minimal comparing to database maintenance jobs (and updates), which have a big impact on the server, but shouldn't require a person to do anything. So no big problem with that.
2. I don't think that many players would switch during maintenance. For Example: When the US-Servers go down, it's 2 am on a work day. How many people could possibly log into an other server. And why would they choose one of the three AUS-servers, there are many in Europe...

Warouth