Fed Up With Weekly Downtimes

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.

EVE Online goes down every single day at 0400 AM. Every single day. So what? They're back up in an hour or so. It's not that big of a deal...really. Get some sleep. It'll be up tomorrow.

I really enjoy SWTOR. I've been playing since release, and I've been very patient with these weekly maintenance downtimes. Hey, it's a new game that was probably released a bit early, but it's been out a solid 4 months now with no sign that they are going to start scaling these back.

I'm a West coast dad with 3 kids and a wife. I don't start playing until 10 - 10:30 pm on the 3 nights a week that I let myself play. Unfortunately, one of those nights is Monday night which falls on their schedule every damn week. And with my luck, another night is Thursday which also had maintenance last week. Very frustrating indeed.

Anyone know why they require weekly maintenance times? This is my 5th MMO (DAOC, WOW, WHO, Rift), and none of the others were down like this. And why can't they start it in the wee hours of the night at say 2 - 4 am? Midnight is still relatively early.

Anyway, as much fun as I'm having with SWTOR, this maintenance is close to chasing me away. Has BW given any indication that this is a temporary deal, or is this maybe not the game for my schedule?

Maintenance is done at that time because most people are asleep at that time.

Heh, tomorrow I'll be up at 6:30 am PST, work till 6, coach a baseball game until 7:30, help my two boys with homework until 8:30, put my baby girl to bed around 9, watch some tv with the Mrs until 11 with hopes that we'll watch something that puts her "in the mood" and be in bed by 11:30 only to get up at 6:30 again the next day and start it all over again. Ya, I need to get a life.