Another Downtime tonight 13 April ***

It was six, I believe. Scheduled for 8 and was back early. My understanding is that something was wrong and they needed to get it fixed, otherwise I'd bet (truly) they would NOT have done it today because right now they are on a lot of peoples' uh...list. I don't think they could wait either that or they are completely nuts and if THAT is the case, it'll show sooner rather than later.

As for maint. times...it's how it goes with a global client. There's benefits to global clients and there are downsides. Maint. times are downsides for those not in the same region as the business.

Be nice if they could do something about it but don't hold yer breath...it's a tall order.

I agree but its not hard to change, they just implemented it completely wrong, if they did it the way you are saying which is very hard to change (as in integrated into EVERYTHING) then when cross server Groups / WZ's etc come in then it should be all across all of them (including all america, all EU etc, but I very much doubt they did this) so it SHOULD be an easy fix, its just like the bug / performance issues in this game, they just ignore them and pretend they are not a problem hoping the people complaining will just either shut up and keep paying or leave (I'm guessing they are hoping for the first, specially EA)

ive seen a few posts about doing it on a Tuesday
I aggree!!
Its 9:15pm on a friday, my partner is watching a movie, im relaxing to a few games of star wa... wait... a maintenance period yet again...
I understand most people from other countries dont give a hoot about anyone but themselves, but night time during the week is when most blokes jump on..
Do it during the day??? Not at 9pm on a Friday night.. Seriously.. Its not that difficult to see.
We may be a small minority, but we are a loud few

But why on a Friday night, 5PM to 9 PM local time is not a good way to maintain a happy customer base?

Please change your major patch night from Thursday so the Oceanic timezone don't also lose Friday night primetime as well with Emergency patches. Patching content on a Tuesday so we lose the occassional Wednesday I can live with.

I can't help but wonder if by simplifying maintenance schedules for their teams they opened a can of worms customer service wise.

Blizzards method of keeping USA, European and Asia-pacific servers separate with their own times for maintenance kept many a player happy.
However many people I know would have loved to be able to play with friends in the states without first paying blizzard for another account >.>;

Most of all, I was able to raid last night..... smoothly, without errors or disconnects on a MAJOR patch day... this a HUGE success, one that blizzard never pulled off at any point during vanilla.

However, for those who are "relatively" new to MMO's downtime like this is super common.
There were days when we would have days of playtime refunded because on patch day we couldn't get into molten core due to the servers crashing every 5 minutes.

This is pretty smooth sailing, and having obtained an extra 30 days for free i'm in no position to complain even if this does eat into my time. I will simply head over to the SC2 ladders during this downtime.

Be happy! be positive.... Bioware are FIXING the game for us.

But thats just the thing, it really isn't a tall order. Its pretty standard amongst all international services and countries these days, in any other industry, to cater towards the timezones they service. Be this by one department catering towards multiple timezones, or several smaller regional departments being set up.

It is if it's an...hmmm...afterthought. Had they set it up regionally from the get go, be different but, for whatever reason, they did not. I agree that it's standard and I'm not defending that it wasn't a great idea to go with one global client. I think it was a mistake.

Its really not that hard to keep the three server instances running SW:TOR up with a later or earlier version then the US ones, and then updating at a convenient time. The belief that it's the way it is and thus we just have to let it be isn't right. People should be annoyed at this, and make themselves heard. There really is not excuse for Bioware/EA to treat everyone different based on locale.