Could be completely incorrect but I strongly suspect there isn't. In my experience that sort of thing is normally done via a scripting/macro system in other MMOs (calling up data via item id).

nevermind.

The point many people are trying to make is it's not. There've been unscheduled downtimes to fix relics, augments & all sorts of other minor non-content critical elements. By "content critical" I mean "something that disables a primary PVE/PVP element of the game" rather than "my boots have the wrong stat". Bioware are the only MMO company I've known to routinely do unscheduled maintenance to fix non-content critical stuff. And I only say "routinely" because someone'll probably think up the one occasion someone else did it if I say "ever". I do not think unscheduled non-content critical maintenances are sensible from any point of view other than a perfectionist's. I point to it as a sign of poor management prioritisation & failure to think like a service provider rather than a developer. While having their augment slot non-functional on saturday, sunday & monday will have annoyed some people, I'm willing to bet that shutting the servers down on friday to make the augment slot functional for those three days was more likely to cost them subscribers. Those who were likely to quit over the augments were already offended when the aug slots were broken for the first half of the week, all they succeeded in doing was angering a new group of people (who they've been repeatedly & routinely angering lately).

Apparently unscheduled maintenance never goes out of fashion, so neither do these threads. There are only three ways these threads will end: 1) All the people bothered by it quit playing 2) Bioware stops doing it 3) SWTOR shuts down (which is a variation on option 2 really) The question is which of those options is preferable. Personally, I want to see the end of my Sith Warrior's class chain & then I'm out of here. It's not worth the ongoing irritation, even if I would very much like to support an MMO with AU/NZ servers.

I'm fed up with it. I'd dearly love to support the one company that provides localised AU/NZ servers, and I enjoy the game, but there's honestly no point if they're constantly being taken offline. Bioware is acting like software developers, not service providers. If your focus is pushing out the internal builds as rapidly as possible, in order to get the final release right, that's fine. But SWTOR is a service. We paid for the software being developed when we bought the game in the first place. What we're paying $15 a month for now is ongoing access to their service. Lets make it even simpler. Which services does any MMO have more in common with post release? Mass Effect & Bioshock multiplayer, or Farmville & Amazon.com? IMO the correct answer is Farmville & Amazon.com. They're about providing consistent, reliable, quality service without constant unexpected breaks. Single & small-multi player games like Mass Effect & Bioshock are much more finished products, without constant ongoing changes as hundreds of thousands of people alter the environment... they can be about one finished product being done right. An MMO is not like this. An MMO has more in common with Amazon.com or Farmville, where an hour's downtime is a broken product and they're constantly fixing the 'engine' while the 'car' is 'driving'. That Bioware can't wrap their collective heads around this is just another symptom of the non-MMO mindset which the management of the company just can't seem to break free of. PS. Signs you have a problem: when your customers don't even try to log in first, they just go straight to checking your dev feed because they anticipate yet more unscheduled downtime.

It's not "a night or two off" though. If you go back and look through the development posts & patch dates, there's about a 50/50 chance of an unscheduled additional maintenance in any given week. It's pin-the-tail-on-the-calendar maintenance scheduling, it's ongoing, and it's not getting better. Bug fixes are meant to improve game stability & performance. A game that's offline for any reason is, by definition, not stable or performing. But next thursday and/or friday there'll be another 50/50 chance of it happening, because the development & maintenance portion of Bioware is still acting like a single/multi player game software developer & pushing to the convenience of their internal schedule. They're not acting like an MMO service provider & recognising that clients need consistency and reliability, even if that means a delayed response to non-critical bugs. There are rarely any bugs so content-destroying that fixing them cannot be delayed 3-4 days till a scheduled maintenance.

8 hours from a regular player removes 1 night's play (e.g. 5 hours they could have realistically been playing). Two maintenances of 4 hours from a regular player remove the majority of 2 nights play (e.g. 8 hours). From most normal players they'll probably remove 10 hours play, unless you're the sort of person who hovers over the login screen waiting for servers to come back up. Hence more maintenances, while equal or potentially better for overall uptime, are actually worse in terms of playable uptime for the community most affected by lost uptime. You could leave the server down for 18 hours on Tuesday and it'd make no difference to the average-worker AEST player I described. Regarding your comparison to WoW, double maintenances are exceptionally rare nowadays & virtually always involve fundamental server stability. Even if we go back many years to a much less stable version of WoW, I have never heard of them running an emergency maintenance purely to fix a non-game destroying item bug. And to those others who are obsessed with the legal bits, under Australian law you cannot sign away basic consumer protections. You could sign away anything in an EULA, and still be protected. It'd be no more binding than a slavery contract would be in the US nowadays. It's one of the reasons that Australia is a more expensive place to do business than the US. Regardless, I should not have bothered pointing that out because - while an interesting side note to a discussion on acceptable service quality - I agree entirely that legal proceedings are typically a waste of time, especially for sums of money in the $15 range. What needs to happen is for Bioware to get their priorities in order, and learn to operate like a service provider rather than a software developer.

Yeah, I suspect you're 100% correct. We can't know what actually happened from the outside, but it certainly presents the impression of rushing to keep it all together & then deciding to drop some elements at the last minute but push on anyway, then next day doubling-up downtimes to push the stuff they'd dropped. If we're correct, that's total "make it up as we go along" territory & the fact it's a serious possibility really gets to the core of my concerns.

It's not about total server uptime. It's about competent downtime scheduling. For example, take a restaurant that's open for 5 days a week but is shut on friday and saturday. Their uptime is acceptable, but their schedule is horrible. If the restauranteurs need a break, they'd be better staying shut on monday & tuesday. Or, even better, they should only take one night off (e.g. tuesday) and shut for a couple of weeks at the start of the year when most of their customers are away on holiday. Their time off would be identical, but their schedule would impact on their service availability to customers substantially less. In all situations the uptime is identical, but it's not uptime that's the business's problem. I outlined the maximum plausible play time for one of Bioware's average customers in a target market, and attempted to outline why Bioware's approach to scheduling was counter-productive on levels beyond simply raw uptime. That's a very valid (albeit very rough) metric. Lurching from one quick-fix unscheduled event to the next is not a coherent long term strategy, it's counter-productive to a stable customer environment, and the fact it's still ongoing 6+ months after release demonstrates significant systemic flaws within the company's approach which have yet to be properly addressed.

lol - very true. In reality I have no interest in a refund. I'm happy to pay for a good service, and I like most of what Bioware is trying to do with this game. I just have very limited time for obvious foolishness & their task prioritisation strikes me as obviously foolish. All points I raise are an attempt to outline & emphasise precisely how absurd it is. I find it particularly upsetting because these sort of management decisions show a team that isn't sticking to an established, coherent, sensible game plan. When the same mistakes get repeated over & over again (e.g. extra unscheduled problem solving), it's a sign of a bad system and a management team that's not successfully fixing their internal problems. I see too many companies stuff up because when the going gets tough they shut out the 'messy organisational stuff' & focus on micro-managing today's technical problem, when the real issue they need to fix is the approach that caused today's problem (and yesterday's, and the day before's, etc). "Flexible, time-oriented development scheduling" is another way of saying "making it up as we go along". It's the sign of a team that's overwhelmed & handling it badly - quite possibly refusing to even admit it. It's extremely depressing & frustrating for me to see a company I'd dearly like to succeed stuff up so badly, obviously & regularly. I want to support them, but I also don't want to witness another organisational train-wreck.

Unless you've left out a leading 1, at least some of those latency numbers aren't actually possible. The fastest US<->AU connection that's theoretically possible based on the limitations of the speed of light down a fiber optic cable is about 140ms. In practice, about 180ms is about as good as you can possibly get with the pacific ocean in the way. They might be accurate to (e.g.) Blizzard's "oceanic" servers, but those servers are physically located in the US anyway (10pts to Bioware for the genuine localised servers).

Apparently nowhere near as traumatic as some augment slots from old crit crafted gear not being fully swappable until tuesday. Thank god that greater problem was solved. And now on to solving world peace. I vote we confiscate all butter knives. Those things can be dangerous if someone's emotionally unstable and are clearly a major potential problem in maintaining peace. Bioware'll probably be with me, sounds on par with their priority system - who else agrees?

Those are not my available hours. I work shift. Those are an attempt at a reasonable estimate of potential playtime for someone who works 9-5 AEST (e.g. an average of an Asia region customer). NZ or Singaporean hours will be slightly different. Daytime EU & late night US players will be slightly different. But the primary timezone of the "average worker" in the Asia region servers is the simplest general approximation to underline my point. Late night US players actually have it the worst.. it's not like they can do much else but play games at that time of night. 3 maintenances in a week is too much & has an exaggerated effect on many player schedules, even if it is only a small number of hours in any given day/week/month/year. "When?" is just as significant a question as "how long?" If Bioware randomly hauls down the servers for extra unscheduled maintenances for reasons as absurd as tonight's, then Bioware's management priorities are absolutely at fault. An augment fix? seriously? that couldn't have been done last night or, better yet, left till tuesday? Stop, read tonight's patch notes, remember that tonight's patch started at 7pm on Friday night in (eastern) Australia and weigh it up the priorities those facts demonstrate. If you're honest about what constitutes a reasonable standard of service & genuinely consider the matter, then I expect that you would absolutely be on "my side". PS. Although frankly I'd like to think I don't have a side. I like this game. I'd like to play this game, I wouldn't be unhappy otherwise. What I'd like is for Bioware to acknowledge that their scheduling & prioritisation is making them look incompetent & negligent, and then I'd like them to sort themselves out & get onto a regular maintenance schedule which embodies better quality control & fewer rushed solutions.

Select items weren't showing up in a search in the AH for months. Some class quests were bugged for months. There's a thread full of faults, many of them more significant than what was fixed tonight. And that's unstandable. The natural state of an MMO is to be a little bit broken at all times, and that's why there are regular scheduled maintenances. Yet none of those get emergency maintenances, whereas a minor augment bug warrants the third shutdown in a week? I mean jeez, did it even occur to them that they might be able to roll last night & tonight's maintenance into one? It'd still be bloody annoying, and probably unwarranted, but it'd at least look halfway like the company wasn't being run by people who got flunked out of clown college.

Well that makes it all better then. 5 minutes of unscheduled maintenance for a bug of that mind-blowing enormity would be 5 minutes too long. If that couldn't wait until scheduled tuesday maintenance, then there is no bug that's unworthy of emergency maintenance. Frankly, after that, I want an apology from Bioware.