I'm not sure if it is actually possible with STO but other games like guild wars 2 do it, when they do the shard maintenance, the servers stay up, and when maintenance is complete, players will have to do their normal patch to get the new content. As I said I don't know if this is possible for Star Trek Online or not. But wouldn't it be nice to play while maintenance and then just do the patch?
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Cannot redirect players to a different shard, whilst the other updates and vice versa....as there isn't one to redirect to. Afaik.
The reason they can't do this is the same as why programs insist they are closed before updating. The possibility for data corruption is too great. You have thousands upon thousands of players playing at that time, which means data being written to the server database at a huge pace all the time. As good as computers and programming are these days, they still can't cope with live updating of active programs.