maintenance, why so much

For those of us in the Asia Pacific regions that downtime is scheduled to start just as we get home from work and the servers come back up just as we go to bed. So whilst it might actually only be 10 hours to me and many of my Asia Pacific brethren it may as well be 48hrs downtime per week as it has much the same outcome.

I have roughly 58 hours a week that I could realistically play SWTOR and those 10hrs down time are within those 58 so to me 10/58 is pretty poor when compared to 10/168. Due to real life commitments and the fact that I play the game with friends we are only able to get online together once or twice a week, so when that happens to coincide with maintenance it can be some what frustrating.

I understand the need to do regular weekly maintenance at this early stage of the games release, I also understand the need to place that maintenance at a time that impacts the least amount of players. I understand both these things even if they are extremely inconvenient.

But at this point in time for me to be able to play SWTOR with so much downtime I almost have to plan my real life stuff to occur on days that SWTOR will be down just in an effort to ensure when the game is up I might actually be free and able to play. Once a game starts to factor in to your real life planning that much well its time to start to think why bother is it even worth it.

Yah like the post above me and the last couple on the previous page have said this is an annoyance to have the downtime catered to the EST time zone in the USA..

It would be nice if you could do the USA servers at 6am EST and the other servers according to their off hours.

So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE with a cherry on top change the times of maintenance around to cater to the players a little better.

Now this type of post I agree with.

The game has about a 96-97% server uptime, that's far from the worst uptime compared to all other MMO's in this early stage of post release development, it's actually quite high up on the "good" list.
While the timing of the downtime is atleast "unpleasent" to a big part of Europe (me included, but I'm not whining about it) it still is situated in a time where it still affects the MAJORITY of players the least.

Well, the rest of us have (atleast most of us with eyes, basic memory and awareness skills).

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one, while a decent "endgame" is nice to have (which I for the record think SWTOR has), the fun in this MMORPG (in contrast to most other MMO's) starts at level 1 (atleast 8 times actually).

No, they aren't, they are improving areas that they see needs improving.

Yes, well maybe not love, but I like it very much, it's a good start.

They don't have a magic "code" wand that they can just wave and *poof* everything is in, programming/developing/expanding a game doesn't work like that (especially when it comes to a complex MMORPG), these things take time, the game has come a long way in the few months it's been "alive", I'm sorry that you can't see that.

If you think the ability delay is gone, youre delusional.

In that case let's ask the devs to patch every day and change the down time so that it's right in the middle of your prime gaming time.

It's going to happen. From a business perspective it makes more sense to make downtime happen when you have the least amount of players on according to your metrics. Anything else is pretty dumb.

Want it to happen during US Prime Time? Get more people to play during those off-peak hours.

Well unlike you, as by those times you are able to play 24 hours a day 7 days a week, I only have a small window of access. A more realistic time frame would be 8 hours a day and the servers have been down 11hours this week in that time frame so by the end of this evening, assuming that they don't come down again that'll be ~80% ( or 71% of my actual access time as 16 hours is lost.) up time for the week. Heck I'd be happy if I was locked into a 5pm to 10pm window of access if it meant that I was guaranteed access between those times.

Well I suppose if we all want to pay more for the game so they can hire multiple teams to handle 1 entire division of the game process then you can have what you want as far as downing servers according to region. Bioware is located in North America, even if the servers are abroad they are still being handled by North America. Server Maintance and patching is handled by 1 team. That team is likely maybe 10 people, those 10 people can't work over 24 / 48 hours to down the servers in small incriments according to various people's time schedules. I can't even imagine the ridiculous amounts of complaints that would be caused when something goes wrong and a particular region has to wait longer because a window was missed or better yet...like the olden days when all regions except north america had to wait an extra day for everything because NA the company's home region is always going to get the patch first.

Its not feesable to have multiple teams and multiple launch windows unless you want to be Region Locked like several MMOs are because they spend money to hire other companies to run, maintain and update their servers abroad. Its a format people have cried and moaned over for years because they can't play with friend X on Server B because Server B is not in their region and to buy the appropriate copy of the game its to expensive.

Bioware is damed if they do and damned if they don't. If they waste money to pay a third party or higher ridiculous amounts of employees to handle 1 division of the company customers will still cry. Its the first year of the game get used to there just be an unusual amount of down time thats just par for course. Its even more par for course when a game is adding in new content. Every MMO does this even that other game that shall not be named.

The servers go down maybe twice a week, three times if its a bad week like a content addition week thats the nature of the game. If your life completely revolves around playing the game everyday or only playing the game on only 1 day a week and that day is patch day then maybe you need to re-evaluate your schedules and your priorities. Or change your play day to a day that almost never has downtime like a Saturday.

Last week was unfortante and they gave everyone a free day. Just about everyone who's played since launch or the first month or so since launch is about to get a free month so is it really hurting your bottomline so much that an extra maintance day or two after a content addition is so bad? I mean really.....is it killing small children in 3rd world countries? No.

PS. They're not catering to the US. They're IN NORTH AMERICA so they're schedule is on North American work hours which just happen to suck for Euro / Asia etc.

You could easily change the title to this thread to "Whining, why so much???"

Seriously, go play the game or do something else instead of posting nonsense.

Their is no purpose to this thread and it should be locked away and/or deleted.