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

No, not really. I'm a casual gamer and I do not game during the week. It's at saturday and sunday that I do game and when I see that a quarter of my potential game time get's eaten away in a weekend, it disappoints me. Especially considering that I'm not the only European customer that get's hit this way and that BioWare obviously does not care about us. Perhaps you have the time to game at various different times, but to me the Saturday is one of the few times when I can game.

Of course the game doesn't revolve around the time when I can game, but I can not imagine that I'm the only one that games during the weekend. BioWare isn't very considerate towards the EU player base, but is towards the American playerbase and putting them central. A problem that could be simply avoided by splitting server times. I do not see how that has to be a problem in 2012. I see a lot of 'But WoW didn't have X at launch either!', yes that's too bad, but that's exactly the same in any market or specific sports - entrants have to adapt to the standards of that day, not to those of 7 years ago.

Yea, it COULD go down, doesn't mean it SHOULD go down. Don't take phrases of what I said out of context. The idea is that they lack the means to make me accept downtimes. What you are saying is that I could very well end up paying for 30 days, and the servers are down for 30 days too? It's like paying and ISP or cable provider and not receiving internet/cable tv. If that's the case, I at least expect a:

"Sorry"

or

A discount

or

1 extra play day

That my friend, is called customer service, and BW, as much as I love their work and respect them, terribly fail to deliver. You'd imagine that the game with the highest budget in history could afford to hire 10 people to answer the community on the forums.

Me (and Bioware too) lolling from the fools that protect the lazy dilettants, and all it is absolutely free!

Well Done! Continue! Bioware afraid answer for their fails, so let it be the free volanteurs

A lot of the gold that their currency is based off comes from Africa.

I like this game!

Pretty much. WoW has had tuesday maintenence for years and yet people still to this day pitch a fit when it happens. I want compensation, you favor xy and x...Im gonna unsub! See ya all tuesday.

Wow... just wow... Americans...

You do know that requires manpower...which probably didn't come in until later in the morning right?

Frankly, as a US player who only plays in the evening, I would have preferred the patch to occur during working hours so I'd be at work during the downtime But I understand if midnight might statistically be their lowest population time. Like many other posters I was completely unaware that the patch notes dated the 31st would ninja in a maintenance at the only time I can run Ilum without being massively swarmed by imps.

I really expected the bug to be a critical bug ripe for abuse that couldn't wait for the 31st but... nope. When I logged in last night, I had no idea there was a patch, the only announcements I saw were 15 minutes prior to shutdown while we were running a mission. Even the forums listed "31st" instead of 28th until you read the letter.
I'm really wondering how many game hours were lost to a few people "losing connection to the connection screen" compared to 4+ hours of everyone unable to login. The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few.

From the perspective of global patches and fairness, I'm sure the engineers in Ireland would prefer to patch during their normal work hours too. BW should learn from Apple, when they time their release schedule on iTunes, it starts at midnight in each timezone (meaning when a title is released to their appstore, it starts at midnight in New Zealand, and becomes available at midnight in each local timezone, in a rolling fashion). Yes, New Zealanders get their releases first every time, but hey it's takes into account global users everywhere, and they can say "XYZ will be available at midnight." Not GMT, CST, but midnight in YOUR COUNTRY. At least Bioware could patch at a certain time in each geographical zone.

How do you know they could have done it at a different time, please link evidence.

sad to see another Oct 08 go. seriously