Well, today's maintenance started at 3AM. Is that better for you?
It looks to me like they need tandem servers available so that one can run while the other is down for maintenance. That's only half the solution, though. They'd also have to have a second complete database mirroring the first one, and that could get rough. Replication after a restart of the primary server could take awhile.
Not sure you'd want to be limited to an "Oz" server with a maintenance schedule more suited to your side of the planet.
The British players have the same gripe. In fact, living in the Eastern U.S., I'm not crazy about the Pacific-time maintenance myself, as it falls into the 6AM-7AM window in which I could play before I have to get my son to the bus stop and kick myself into gear for the work day.
See, what we need is games and servers that don't need maintenance...hmm.
What'd be nice is if they rotated the maintenance around the main time zones of their customers. i.e one at CST or MST for the US, GMT or GMT+1 for EU and UTC for the Australia/Asia players.
It'd be better if they just damn well had multiple servers, so at least one for each region, but that seems to be too much to ask.
I hate the regions idea, one of the nice things about an online game is you can play with people from all over the world. It'd be nice if they offset it by a few hours at least, but I guess they'll just have to bring the server down when the least amount of people play.
Ok that still leaves Aus going down at midnight but at least gives us 6 hours to play in the evening, and the UK/Europe goes down early afternoon, on weekdays however this should not be so much of an issue.
I myself this week have lost 6 hours of playtime just from the weekday evening downtimes.
Can we please have a mod response to this issue, as you are not going to endear yourself to the australian players if we have 3+ maintenance periods a week in our prime time.
No matter what time the STO devs take the server down, it will always be in some country's prime time. You just need to deal with it I'm afraid. There's more to life than playing computer games.
Standard Primetime for an MMO is 4pm - 2am however as you can see from my timings the only one that still impacts is the Australian Primetime but at the end of it, not slap bang in the middle.
It just requires a little thought by the Server Ops team and the management.
Just shift the scheduled maintenance ahead one hour each time.
That way we'll all get our share of downtime.
Speaking as someone who has just gone through a week of 24-hour coverage for my customer, I don't think you're going to endear yourself to the development team by insisting on that.
2AM-4AM PST is probably best, but having folks working at that hour isn't always the best choice. Third-shifters aren't usually chosen from the best and the brightest.
I guess the down time is based on mainly on where the most subscribers are? If most are in the US then it would make sense to have the downtime in the silent hours within the US; it inconveniences less people. At the end of the day, if we want patches to be made and applied to the server then we have to accept the downtime. It's one of the pitfalls of playing server based games.
Speaking as someone who has just gone through a week of 24-hour coverage for my customer, I don't think you're going to endear yourself to the development team by insisting on that.
2AM-4AM PST is probably best, but having folks working at that hour isn't always the best choice. Third-shifters aren't usually chosen from the best and the brightest.
Just curious, when working 24/7 like you mention, you did get paid right?
Same goes for the developers of this game, and if they expect people to pay for this product, they should show some consideration.
Don't get me wrong, maintenance will always be necessary, but by rotating it, atleast you'll know it's done fair.
I'm in Australia and I have absolutely no problem with it. I find the occasional downtime a worthwhile payoff for not having to contend with American peak hour- have YOU had to sit through the queues that this forum is constantly filled with complaints about? I certainly haven't.
Rotating maintenance is something that sounds nice, but without rotating the hours of everyone in the company it would be very hard to pull off. Maybe when we aren't patching nightly, but definitely not now. Its one of the downsides of having a single global server, but it will get better as we don't need to patch as often.
Just curious, when working 24/7 like you mention, you did get paid right?
Same goes for the developers of this game, and if they expect people to pay for this product, they should show some consideration.
Don't get me wrong, maintenance will always be necessary, but by rotating it, atleast you'll know it's done fair.
I think it might have something to do with them having lives and families, they haven't been replaced with robots... yet.
What'd be nice is if they rotated the maintenance around the main time zones of their customers. i.e one at CST or MST for the US, GMT or GMT+1 for EU and UTC for the Australia/Asia players.
It'd be better if they just damn well had multiple servers, so at least one for each region, but that seems to be too much to ask.
Especially since your idea would double or triple the subscription price and the retail box value.
Sadly this continues to be a bone of contention for me, as an Australian.
Prior to STO I have (and still am) been playing another MMO for almost 3 years now and they too are US based, they plan their downtime for 6am-11am on the rare occasions the servers go down for maintenence, which means that Aussies get to play to around 10.30-11pm.
Perhaps if/when the frequency of the downtime slows down and drops off the unfriendly to aussie downtime sitaution will be less of an issue, but while we are having downtime as a three to four times a week occurance it really does put a dampner on playing STO as an aussie.
There are some great suggestions for better downtime scheduling in this thread - please pay attention Cryptic! - certainly the shifting of downtime to 6am-8am or even 5am-7am would be better as it would allow aussies to get most of a normal evening of play in.
This is two days in a row. Kids in bed, time to play right? Wrong! Why can't they move maintenance around to stop aggro? Obviosly Australians can get stuffed it seems.
Blizzard obviously has the better management team as far as patches and zone specific maintenance times. Maybe this game has no longevity after all? Back to Wow perhaps already...
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no proxy,
just trying to play a great game
It looks to me like they need tandem servers available so that one can run while the other is down for maintenance. That's only half the solution, though. They'd also have to have a second complete database mirroring the first one, and that could get rough. Replication after a restart of the primary server could take awhile.
Not sure you'd want to be limited to an "Oz" server with a maintenance schedule more suited to your side of the planet.
The British players have the same gripe. In fact, living in the Eastern U.S., I'm not crazy about the Pacific-time maintenance myself, as it falls into the 6AM-7AM window in which I could play before I have to get my son to the bus stop and kick myself into gear for the work day.
See, what we need is games and servers that don't need maintenance...hmm.
It'd be better if they just damn well had multiple servers, so at least one for each region, but that seems to be too much to ask.
PST - 6am - 7am
EST - 9am - 11am
GMT - 2pm - 4pm
EST(Australia) - 12am - 2am
Ok that still leaves Aus going down at midnight but at least gives us 6 hours to play in the evening, and the UK/Europe goes down early afternoon, on weekdays however this should not be so much of an issue.
I myself this week have lost 6 hours of playtime just from the weekday evening downtimes.
Can we please have a mod response to this issue, as you are not going to endear yourself to the australian players if we have 3+ maintenance periods a week in our prime time.
That way we'll all get our share of downtime.
It just requires a little thought by the Server Ops team and the management.
Speaking as someone who has just gone through a week of 24-hour coverage for my customer, I don't think you're going to endear yourself to the development team by insisting on that.
2AM-4AM PST is probably best, but having folks working at that hour isn't always the best choice. Third-shifters aren't usually chosen from the best and the brightest.
Just curious, when working 24/7 like you mention, you did get paid right?
Same goes for the developers of this game, and if they expect people to pay for this product, they should show some consideration.
Don't get me wrong, maintenance will always be necessary, but by rotating it, atleast you'll know it's done fair.
I think it might have something to do with them having lives and families, they haven't been replaced with robots... yet.
Especially since your idea would double or triple the subscription price and the retail box value.
Prior to STO I have (and still am) been playing another MMO for almost 3 years now and they too are US based, they plan their downtime for 6am-11am on the rare occasions the servers go down for maintenence, which means that Aussies get to play to around 10.30-11pm.
Perhaps if/when the frequency of the downtime slows down and drops off the unfriendly to aussie downtime sitaution will be less of an issue, but while we are having downtime as a three to four times a week occurance it really does put a dampner on playing STO as an aussie.
There are some great suggestions for better downtime scheduling in this thread - please pay attention Cryptic! - certainly the shifting of downtime to 6am-8am or even 5am-7am would be better as it would allow aussies to get most of a normal evening of play in.
Blizzard obviously has the better management team as far as patches and zone specific maintenance times. Maybe this game has no longevity after all? Back to Wow perhaps already...