crazy idea... how about rotating shard maintenance times???

balltillifall88 · April 2017

like the title says, why is the shard maintenance time not rotated? i have a 6 year old son and i usually work day shifts at my work and i usually work 6 days a week. tuesday is the ONLY day every week that i am guaranteed to be able to sit at home and relax. i get up, take my son to school, then come back home. and the ONE day a week that i get to set at home during the day with nobody here is the same time that the game is offline for shard maintenance. it is really starting to drive me crazy. i mean how is it fair to take the game offline during the same time every week? i understand that it has to come offline every now and then, but doing it the same time every week makes no sense to me, or am i missing something here? even if it was rotated just 1 day or something. like why cant it go back and forth between monday and tuesday? any feedback on this would be appreciated, i just think doing it the same day every week is highly unfair for people who might ONLY have that day to play.

omegarealities · April 2017

I think that there are a couple reasons they do it on Tuesday mornings.

The main reason is that the weekly event has finished. If they take it down on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday mornings it will interrupt the events.

Also, a lot more people play during the events. This causes the server to become bogged down. They can't shutdown immediately after the event, because that would force them to do the shutdown in the middle of the day on Monday.

Doing it on Wednesday or Thursday would force the server to continue to operate in the state of being bogged down.

Also Tuesday corresponds with the day that most new content/DLC is released for the game, as it with most games in the industry.

Tuesday morning seems to me to be the on logical time to do it.

kreatyve · April 2017

No matter what time or day they do it, it will always be an inconvenience to someone. You either get used to it, or you don't. It's always at the same time every week, except for with major content launches for PC, which take place on Tuesdays and sometimes (but not always) bump the console maintenance to Thursdays.

armadeonx · April 2017

It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.

armadeonx · April 2017

On the subject of "why mornings" - this makes sense for two reasons; a. the majority of the US player base are not logged in, b. if anything goes wrong, all of their support staff are at work and they have enough time to address any issues without going into overtime.

ecrana · April 2017

kreatyve said:
No matter what time or day they do it, it will always be an inconvenience to someone. You either get used to it, or you don't.

+1

Rotating makes absolutely no sense. This is a company and these type of tasks are usually kept on a schedule. Just like a janitor normally picks up a buildings trash on the same routine schedule.

omegarealities · April 2017

ecrana#2080 said:

kreatyve said:
No matter what time or day they do it, it will always be an inconvenience to someone. You either get used to it, or you don't.
+1

Rotating makes absolutely no sense. This is a company and these type of tasks are usually kept on a schedule. Just like a janitor normally picks up a buildings trash on the same routine schedule.

Could you imagine if the sanitation department announced that they would rotate individual trash pickup on a rotating schedule. "Effective immediately we will be rotating your trash pickup. This week will pick trash up on Monday, next week on Tuesday, the following week on Wednesday, and so on..."

johonxgalt · April 2017

Maintenance schedules are generally planned around a few things, when staff is available to perform maintenance, when the servers need it and when there is the least impact to the playerbase. If Tuesdays are a generally slow day, it makes sense to have it then.

terramak · April 2017

As other folks mentioned here, it mostly comes down to needing a predictable schedule, both for our teams and for players. It's certainly not ideal for us to be down when someone wants to play, but a (roughly) weekly restart is indeed necessary for our servers to remain healthy, and having a specific time each week allows our teams and players to plan with that in mind.

We generally balance our downtime schedules by asking when it'll affect the fewest players, while also doing our best not to ask our team members to be awake at times they normally wouldn't be (as that potentially leads to mistakes, plus can wear on a person's morale).

The Thursday / Tuesday dates are mainly to provide opportunities for contingency plans to be enacted during the work week, just in case something goes wrong.

(The above statements are generally guidelines, and can potentially change when necessity arises and/or circumstances change.)

oldbaldyone · April 2017

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.

Almost every online game I've ever played has had a regularly scheduled maintenance period, most weekly.

armadeonx · April 2017

oldbaldyone said:

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.
Almost every online game I've ever played has had a regularly scheduled maintenance period, most weekly.

Huh, maybe I don't play enough games lol.

kreatyve · April 2017

armadeonx said:

oldbaldyone said:

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.
Almost every online game I've ever played has had a regularly scheduled maintenance period, most weekly.
Huh, maybe I don't play enough games lol.

I don't think I have heard of an MMO yet that doesn't have at least weekly maintenance. I even recall one that I played while it was in beta that was doing daily maintenance (that game is already dead, so I won't even mention it).

zebular · April 2017

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.

oldbaldyone said:

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.
Almost every online game I've ever played has had a regularly scheduled maintenance period, most weekly.

armadeonx said:

oldbaldyone said:

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.
Almost every online game I've ever played has had a regularly scheduled maintenance period, most weekly.
Huh, maybe I don't play enough games lol.

kreatyve said:

armadeonx said:

oldbaldyone said:

armadeonx said:
It's usually at 5pm for me. This is the only game I have ever come across that needs to shut down the servers once a week but what can you do.
Almost every online game I've ever played has had a regularly scheduled maintenance period, most weekly.
Huh, maybe I don't play enough games lol.
I don't think I have heard of an MMO yet that doesn't have at least weekly maintenance. I even recall one that I played while it was in beta that was doing daily maintenance (that game is already dead, so I won't even mention it).

I've been playing MMOs since 1996 and have played nearly every one of them to ever hit the western market and many more overseas. Every single one of them have had regular maintenance cycles, almost all of them on a weekly basis, some of them more frequently and even daily. Anything server-based, which includes websites and databases, need regular maintenance. Even my bank's web site goes down for weekly maintenance for about 30 minutes. The busier the server or database, the more frequent their maintenance has to be. Most sites get away with monthly cycles, or even longer periods.

armadeonx · April 2017

Well I played Guild Wars 1 and 2 for years and they never did it unless there was a major update. Before that it was Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon and they didn't either (but I think they used a kind of host portal not dissimilar to steam, I can't really remember now) and going even further back, Tiberian Sun. Their multiplayer system was always up.

I'm kind of a 1 game person

Edit; actually, Guild Wars used to announce an update in-game. You'd log out and back in and it'd start updating immediately, as soon as you received and installed it you were back playing (usually a matter of minutes). I believe they used mirrored servers though. It's a more expensive way to go as you duplicate everything but it meant much better reliability and almost zero downtime.

zebular · April 2017

armadeonx said:
Well I played Guild Wars 1 and 2 for years and they never did it unless there was a major update. Before that it was Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon and they didn't either (but I think they used a kind of host portal not dissimilar to steam, I can't really remember now) and going even further back, Tiberian Sun. Their multiplayer system was always up.

I'm kind of a 1 game person

Edit; actually, Guild Wars used to announce an update in-game. You'd log out and back in and it'd start updating immediately, as soon as you received and installed it you were back playing (usually a matter of minutes). I believe they used mirrored servers though. It's a more expensive way to go as you duplicate everything but it meant much better reliability and almost zero downtime.

I used to play Guild Wars too and still play Guild Wars 2 on occasion and you are quite wrong. They did regular maintenance in GW1 too and still do in GW2. You can easily find records of their "Regularly Scheduled Maintenance" news blogs dating back over a decade. But yeah, their delivery method for game updates and hotfixes were nice.

armadeonx · April 2017

And I disagree. I played GW1 & 2 for about 40 hrs per week for 8 years and can categorically state there was not a regularly scheduled down time. I tried googling Regularly Scheduled Downtime and couldn't find the info but I did find a few posts worthy of note:

"It never stops to amaze me that such a complicated game like Guild Wars 2 never has downtime. Even stupid cardgames have maintenance offline hours of 2h." from here

"Anet can patch as the game runs, and only requires a client restart.
GW1 has had approximately 30 hours of downtime over about 7 years."

"
guildwars2guru.com/topic/39009-when-does-arenanet-normally-do-maintenance/

However I am always open to being proved wrong so please link those maintenance schedules.

zebular · April 2017

armadeonx said:
And I disagree. I played GW1 & 2 for about 40 hrs per week for 8 years and can categorically state there was not a regularly scheduled down time. I tried googling Regularly Scheduled Downtime and couldn't find the info but I did find a few posts worthy of note:

"It never stops to amaze me that such a complicated game like Guild Wars 2 never has downtime. Even stupid cardgames have maintenance offline hours of 2h." from here

"Anet can patch as the game runs, and only requires a client restart.
GW1 has had approximately 30 hours of downtime over about 7 years."

"
guildwars2guru.com/topic/39009-when-does-arenanet-normally-do-maintenance/

However I am always open to being proved wrong so please link those maintenance schedules.

Looking here, you can see that GW2 had monthly maintenance cycles up until November as well as still has regular forum, website, and billing maintenance cycles. Since then, they have perfected their "seamless maintenance" by being able to spawn servers as will. When a server (aka "instance") is empty, it goes down and has maintenance then becomes available again, all unseen from the player. Guild Wars also does maintenance on the back, with little noticeable effect on logged in players. Not many games uses the server technology Arenanet does and in an ideal world, all would. Alas, that is not the case and it is quite wishful thinking that this is the only game you've come across that has downtime for maintenance when literally they almost all do, save for not even a handful.

armadeonx · April 2017

Well I listed the games I've played so that's not a surprise and I never said they didn't perform maintenance (as that would be silly). I said the game was never down because of it.

Bear in mind they've been doing this for over a decade and mirrored servers are more expensive (as I said) but they are not new or revolutionary. In fact these days they are much easier to put together with the big improvements in virtualisation.

I really don't expect Cryptic to move toward this format though. But back on my original comment, given the (short) list of games I said I played, this really is the first online game I've played that shuts down every week.

This really is a long discussion to spawn from a single sentence though lol.

fearhodorwillie · April 2017

Sorry balltillifall88, I am in the same boat. Tuesday mornings are my only guaranteed free time every week, but, as all have stated more clearly than I can, a schedule/routine is the only way to maintain at least a semblance of order. I don't want to imagine the rage if maintenance was rotated or not on a set schedule.

crazy idea... how about rotating shard maintenance times???

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