Fed Up With Weekly Downtimes

austin is actually in the central time zone,thats why all maintence times are for central time zone..which is good for me because i live in chicago

Actually this is one area that I think Bioware has done a decent job in considering it's pretty much still a new game.

They should change the times to reflect each server area though (NA, EU, and OC) like some other MMO's do, but overall I give them a "B" in downtime.

Rift had a "D", SWG was a "C-", and I wasn't around for WoW, but most people I knew that were would say "F".

Do a search and Bioware can tell you directly in one of their many posts on the subject why they will be staying with a worldwide maintenance time. They are the authority on the matter and so their words will explain it best.

There are two main reasons for having maintenance for all servers at the same time:
1. Ease/convenience
2. If server maintenance was separated to different timezones you would find those servers that are online would be swamped by those players that can not log into their usual server. This would cause server crashes and huge queues. Then we'd have people complaining they cant login to their servers because of it.

The best way is all offline for maintenance.

fyi - the time for me is through my prime time as I'm from the oceanic region.

North American servers are located in Santa Clara, CA (West Coast) and Ashburn, VA (East Coast).
NOT in Austin.

http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-march-2nd-2012
Rtwozero - Any plans to implement region by region maintenance times?

Blaine Christine (Sr. Producer, Live Services): At this time there are no plans to implement separate maintenance times by region. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a global service with no restrictions on a player’s server choice.

Unfortunately the trade-off is that we have to maintain a single service environment, which leads to global maintenance periods. We are very sensitive to the fact that we are limiting play time once per week with a global scheduled maintenance.

We have carefully examined global peak times and the number of players affected by our planned downtime. Those of you that have been with us since launch may have noticed that the first few patches were scheduled at 4 AM CST; we very quickly adjusted to 2 AM CST. The reason for this adjustment was an analysis of the peak time play patterns by region that resulted in the current start time.

We understand that this is especially concerning to players in the European and newly opened Asia/Pacific server regions. We will always do our best to minimize the downtime, but it is the only way that we can perform critical service updates on the game client and on the game’s network infrastructure, underlying platform systems and so on.

Thank you for bringing your concerns to us – we will always listen and do our best to make adjustments when possible, but at this time, we have to move forward with a single global maintenance period.

I have played mmo's for over 14 years now, all of them have some sort of maintance, some weekly, some bi-weekly and after the game has been out awhile monthly, I have even seen daily downtime, emergency hot fix to go in, all kinds of stuff, thats how mmo's roll, and if you can't roll with it mmo;s are not for you.. /shrug

I would rather see the downtime at least i know some one is working at keeping the game playable for my money/

It was 2 days last week pissed me off too. I came very close to unsubing too . With the event going this week it cost me 2 playing nights for the event content. Take the servers down for the day of maintenance and test it before you bring them back up after patches. If you wait for players to find the glitches and bugs guess all we are paying for is a beta.

Wow.... that's it utterly pathetic. Doing weekly maintenance will cause you to unsub? What generation of kids have we bread people?

BW, please keep taking the servers down and doing maintenance. THe majority of us like a good healthly game server to play on. Thank you.

The QQ in this thread is THICK.

I guess you forgot they extended everyones contract day by 1 too? So you didn't pay for that down time... it was a Day Off for us..