Aussie Server Maintenance

I think people pretty much understand at this stage that regular maintenance is required and sometimes emergency downtime for patching critical problems are called for as well - the problem I have is that EVERY time maintenance like that needs to happen (whether regular scheduled maintenance or emergency maintenance) ALWAYS happens at a time chosen to impact the US subscribers as little as possible and all other regions need to just accept the scraps we're given.

If you need to bring down the servers each week for maintenance, that's fine - but PLEASE don't tailor EVERY downtime to the convenience of your US players only. This problem isn't going away and every maintenance that follows the current schedule (by happening while US players are sleeping and at peak times for other regions) will just be pouring fuel on a fire.

We need some sort of rotating schedule of maintenance times so everyone is missing the same amount of peak time - there simply isn't any way to please the whole world all the time but you can, at least, treat all regions equally without showing obvious preference to one over the rest. I just hate feeling like a second class citizen...

I DO believe that Bioware have made a brilliant game here and have set some ground breaking precedents (like having actual Oceanic servers) - please set an example for other MMO developers again and offer rotating maintenance schedules so ALL players are treated equally.

As has been stated numerous times by the Devs, it has nothing to do with the Us customers. Maintenance was chosen based on when the overall server population was at it's lowest. They also stated, again on multiple occasions, that their system does not allow for taking down servers by region for updates.

Time to get over the US bashing already.

Please believe me when I say I'm not bashing the US population in any way - if I gave you that impression I sincerly apologise.

It's basically a fact that EVERY time they needed to take the server down for scheduled maintenance, it's in off-peak times in the US (starting at 2:00am and going to 6:00am-8:00am). I don't doubt they're right when they say the average population across servers are the lowest but it doesn't make it seem any fairer for the people that are scheduled to be disconnected during their peak time week after week knowing that the same region each and every time experience no downtime at all (because the vast majority are asleep).

I understand that taking down certain servers at a time would be near impossible to do - I would never expect them to do that. Even if their system did support doing this, it would be a PITA for maintenance staff to co-ordinate multiple downtimes over a 24-hour period for each region and I genuinely wouldn't want them to go through all that hassle.

What I'm asking for is a rotating schedule for maintenance so all servers are still taken offline at the same time but the time various to suit a different region each week.

For example (please forgive me, I don't know the exact timezones in each region):

* Week 1 - ALL servers are brought down for maintenance at 2am US time
* Week 2 - ALL servers are brought down for maintenance at 2am Eastern EU time
* Week 3 - ALL servers are brought down for maintenance at 2am Western EU time
* Week 4 - ALL servers are brought down for maintenance at 2am AU/NZ time
* Week 5 - The sequence restarts with ALL servers brought down at 2am US time

The above regions are just an example - in all likelyhood, there would need to be more regions included to keep peak downtimes EQUAL AND FAIR.

I don't think this would be too much to ask for - it's something they can apply to the same patch-rollout schedule they're already using, it just varies the start time each week.

I understand where you are coming from, Dsan, I live in Perth.. and I even admit that I probably get it easier than people on the east coast since often the servers are up in time to play after dinner.

But with any downtime, routine is key, along with simplicity.

I hate to bring up.. that other game.. but lets use it as an example. Maintenance has been Tuesday for how long? Seven Years now, pretty much every week.

And yet, every week.. there are people posting "OMG why are the servers down!?!?". Not new people either, people who have max level characters and have obviously been playing awhile.

It's pretty obvious, then, that there are plenty of people who struggle with a weekly routine that's been going on for years. It's only going to get worse if they have to get their head around a routine that changes weekly, and cycles once ever four weeks.

There are other considerations to be taken into account as well. There could be hard coded features of the game that cycle around those maintenance times that would need to be changed.. think weekly roll-over of caps in other games. Their employees would have to be willing to come in at obscure times of the night.. and probably need to be compensated for that.

Much as I would like to not have maintenance during a prime time for my server... I simply don't think it's likely we will see this unless they completely isolate the Asia/Pacific servers and give them their own staff.

I have to agree that the forums shouldn't be down for maintenance as well.

To put it as kindly as possible, some people are.... "enthusiastic" about the game and even with servers down, they want to chat with other people in order to handle their withdrawals... ah I mean to share their passion of the game with others.

The way I see it, their maintenance staff already come in at obscure times of the night (the maintenance starts at 2:00am their time) so, if anything, I would think the staff would be happy they'd only have to come in at 2:00am once a month.

If they can't do some kind of rotating schedule, there must be some other way to reduce the peak-time disruption on some servers - maybe they can bring the maintenance time forward a couple of hours and start it at 11:00pm-12:00am their time? Players in their time zone would lose an hour or 2 of playtime but would reduce the disruption over here by an hour or 2 (but it will also create a ripple affect that will most likely put some other poor region into our situation of full peak-time maintenance).

But obviously, no matter how you arrange a global downtime at the same time each and every week, some region is always going to be losing more effective gametime than other regions. The only way around it is to rotate the maintenance times so everyone gets (at least) a taste of pure off-peak downtime.

I would LOVE to get a bit more open discussion about this going with Bioware/Devs instead of seeing pages of people saying they don't like it and a post from a Dev saying (effectively) "Sorry about that but that's just the way it is"...

http://www.swtor.com/blog/no-downtim...nce-march-27th

It would be nice to have Aussie friendly Maintenance but after playing WoW for 6 years, I am used to it

As you can play on either Aus or US Servers, imagine how many US people will be on the couple of Aus servers during their off time

Wow never gave us Aussies this much shafting.

Ever since I remember playing Wow maintenance on Tuesday has started from 10 pm or 12 a.m. AEST (dependant on DST). That's at around 5 a.m. PDT. Enough time after work to do the dailies and whatever else needed doing.

Prime time maintenance is inexcusable - I wouldn't mind having it once a month but every single week?

Glad I cancelled my subscription when I did. I don't care how good the game is; when a company treats it's customers like this it's time to take my money elsewhere.

While the Friday night downtime sucked, Bioware still give us a local servers so we don't have to play with pings of 200+. Can't say that about most other MMO's.