maintenance, why so much

My tuppence or 2 cents,

I think the majority of us understand the need for regular maintenance and agree that sh*t happens and some urgent maintenance needs to take place occasionally.

The issue as I see it are.

1. No segregation of time zone maintenance. Why cant US, Europe and Asia Pacific servers have maintenance windows during off peak periods. I guess this is cost and/or server design. But as mentioned elsewhere in this post 'At what cost to customer retention'.

Your main competitor manages to do this why not you ?

2. Communication. How much notice was there of today's downtime ? Looks like less than 12 hours (I'm in UK). I cant seem to find and details as to what this is fixing either.

3. Have a single recognized patch day per week. All small/major changes get applied during this window. OK I accept that Tuesdays are the 'usual' maintenance day but lately it could be any. This allows the player to plan their game time with confidence. Any changes outside of this should be communicated with enough notice for all timezones to have a chance to see. I would suggest 3 days as not everybody checks these forums every day.

In this day and age an online service provider should be aiming for 99% availability. Given today's technology all we should be asked to do on patch days is to sign off / sign on again or logout whilst server is rebooting. I would like a system whereby the maintenance schedule is set in stone i.e 8 hours once per week preferably out of peak times. Anything over this should be automatically added to subscriber accounts.

Bioware definitely need to up their game in this area. Things as of late seem rushed, disjointed and not customer focused.

Also , how does this impact the 'under-valued' player base who were given until 22nd April to reach Legacy level 6 for their free 30 days. Will the additional unplanned downtime be added to the 22nd April deadline ? If not it just an example on how things are disjointed.

I'm sorry, but this isn't a job where there are quotas to be filled. I'm missing out on a great deal of my gametime today and I have things planned later in the day that prevent me from "making up" the time I PAYED FOR that was unexpectedly taken away from me.

It's right therre in the dev tracker, **** off if you think I'm expected to spoon it to you. You obviously can read since you wanna argue the facts. I don't have to copy/paste something you can find easily by looking for yourself. Man this world has become lazy. I'll tell you what, how bout I just give you a quik start point. Google muthu ufka

That's hardly a flattering comparison. EVE downtime is usually less than an hour.

ohyeah neat

Nice its 30 dollars a month. point well taken. we can shorten each month by using other calendars.

So far all you have done is insult most of the other posters and disprove our discussions. Contribute something, don't just try to prove us all wrong.

And you have that in writing? No you do not.

You paid for access to play the game when the servers are up and running, which they are around 95% of the time.

lol you actually are ok with 28 hours of downtime in three weeks ?

ok i give up

For me anyway it's not the downtime (maintenance is needed i know) it is the fact that almost everytime they add any patch (not just an update, but a small patch) they screw the job up and close down 2 or 3 days later to fix it.

That is my complaint, rank amateurs they are making themselves look imo.

Hey popular, your book filled next week? didn't think so, see ya then. Oh wait, you got a month free?!? I'm sure the $30 dollars saved will compensate for your sad sad loss friend.