4h. downtime... a SATURDAY???

I assume my post will get lost in the ocean of other replies but it appears this is the place Bioware would like us to give our feedback, so here goes. If you take the time to read this post then feel free to comment.

First, its worth noting that in general I avoid forums as I like to consider myself a well balanced person who can understand multiple points of view. A trip to the forums always shows people with insanely polar opposite views so whatever you post will always get shot down and abused. However, this issue I felt was worth commenting on.

I should also note that I think this a great game and that I will definitely continue playing. During the down time today I took the time to head out to the food market earlier than usual so I am no social reject who compains insanely just because I am missing 4-6 hours of gameplay.

However, I do think you have handled this situation very poorly bioware/EA and would highly reccomend you take some time to do a lessons learnt about this week and gather feedback (Regardless of how negative it is) from this forum about your actions.

My key thoughts are:

1) You cannot continue to annoy the EU playerbase with matinanance times that are extremely inconvenient and now starting to eat into good ol prime time. For example, I know a lot of people that consider the morning / early afternoon slot on a saturday as a great time to play as we try and wind down from a long week at work.

2) Improve your communication with the playerbase. Details as to why servers are going down on a saturday is very limited and gets people guessing. This just causing mass arguments on the forum. If you had said up front that there was a major exploit in the game that needed fixing immediately then people would be much less upset at your actions.

3) I still see no real reason why you cannot split the maintanance times for EU and US. The Eu servers and all their staff are based over in Ireland so there are no logistical issues. If you are concerned it will cause population issues on servers during the cross over period (i.e. US logging into EU during their downtime) then simply put some control mechanisms in place to mitigate that issue (which I feel will not be significant anyway).

As a rational person, I will not scream "quitting" over this issue but I have to admit it has got me annoyed. if you have managed to annoy me then I am pretty sure that the vast majority of irrational people who play MMORPG will take much more drastic action. This is why I have seen quite a lot of quit posts and whereas I dont agree with them, for me that is a negative for the game I love playing at the moment as I want to see it be as prosperous as possible.

I hope you have found some usefull feedbacak in this post. I will never know if it has been read or included in any future learning but at least I feel I have done my bit =)

Regards

Actually it is important to my finical wellbeing. I can only afford one games sub. I can only play 8 hours a week the majority on a Saturday morning. Ergo is the only game I have ever known to have non-essential maintenance on a weekend really the one I should be paying for?

That is the problem here.

Best thing to do is quit this game. It isn't worth the monthly sub or the time you invest in it compared to the other fun games out there you could be playing. This pile of junk code should have never been released.

That makes no sense. There is no need to region lock servers. If you schedule maintenance differently in EU and US, the EU downtime will be in the middle of the night. There will be no "flooding" of the US servers during EU downtime or vice versa.

And even if there were, I don't see how that would be a problem at all. Worst case scenario, some hardcore people abusing the game like crack would have a few cross-Atlantic alts.

Your girlfriend is trolling you.

Great plan there bub.


Lots of people unsub, game looses money, gets less support and therefore you get less updates, the game becomes less popular etc etc...


How about hoping they fix this so there is a different way of roling out patches (Eg split times) and then you can roll on an EU server and wont be affected?

You're 100% true, this and Customer Support (which I believe doesn't exist, it's only a spam robot) are the reason for me to cancel my subscription plan. I can't believed that a 200M$ multinational product has been so badly managed in it's first weeks after launch.

It is my understanding that the NA and EU servers are in separate locations.
Isn't having maintenance at the same time doing it the hard way?

Right. There is no need for region lock, but the easiest way to do it is to seperate US and EU clients and force them to only connect to their own respective servers.

They are, but they are intentionally keeping them on the same schedule. There was feedback from the devs/customer support as to why its being kept like this. Everyone thats complaining just doesn't agree with the reasoning.