We like scheduled downtime -- when it is announced days or a week in advance. Smack in the middle of Sunday? Noon to 2pm? I slept in today, planning to play from about noon til six p.m. and now half my play time is gone.
For my 20 bucks a month, I want equality in downtime. Schedule half this stuff in US midnight server time.
So, to make your Euro time zone customers happy,
- Let your customers know a day or two ahead when the scheduled downtimes will be.
- Offer us the option to be billed in dollars if we bought the game in dollars and have a U.S. billing address.
- Schedule some of the downtimes outside our prime playing time (1200-0100 GMT).
- Use an exchange rate that is closer to *now* when calculating how much to charge (12.95 euro is close to 20 bucks)
Hell, use a whiteboard. Post on it the last scheduled and short notice downtimes. When you need to schedule the next, do it 12 hours skewed from the last and update the board.
Comments
yes earlier notice would be nice and once things settle down I expect there will be one maybe 2 patches every week with plenty of notice but now they are trying to do as much as possible as quickly as they can.
11am - 1pm is not our prime time. Most people are at work or at school.
Do you really think those guys want to be working from 3am to 5 pm on a Sunday morning. Would you.
Frigging exchange rates are changing all the time what are they supposed to do. Pay someone to watch the markets non-stop and some else to change the webpages for them every hour. When it goes in our favour ae you willing to pay extra to make up the difference.
Seriously, get a grip OP. I'm in the UK and dont give a rats TRIBBLE about the current scheduled downtimes, why? Because no matter what time they choose, they will **** someone off. And if they tried to rotate downtimes then someone would no doubt scream how THEIR own downtime is being somehow specifically targetted and that the devs dont give a TRIBBLE out their timezone.
Seriously. Use the time to go and do those things you've been putting off in real life.
EVERY timezones prime time is often between 6pm and 12 midnight (give or take an hour. Btw 11 am - 1pm GMT is not prime time for your timezone. It may be YOUR prime time for playing, but not your timezones primetime.
As for notification, they are trying to tell us when its going to happen, but sometimes its just not possible. Get over it.
I wonder if you're the same Bryn_Alesy that called me a troll in game, then went on to cuss and use caps to try to tell a guy looking for a "Very rare" aka purple BO that there is no very rare BO and he should just by BO's from the npc in Starbase 01.
Secondly, last night the server was down during American prime time.
Also, no offense but this post screams "me me me" because what about the players in Australia and Japan? Sorry, but 2pm regardless of the day is NOT your prime time.
Unfortunately, 3-5am PST ends up being 8-10pm in Japan, and similar time in Australia, which IS prime time. Yet, you see no demands being made from aussies, nor myself about how we want equality and big bad Cryptic is being unfair and favoring Americans.
13 Euros is $17.70. After they pay the banks for the money exchange, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually lost money on 13 euros.
I'd also like them to schedule some maintenance outside of my prime playing time. AKA 5-10pm GMT on weekdays would be perfect for me.
PS - If you don't like the price of games, never move to Japan. And also, your post comes off as being really elitist. Just my opinion, from Japan. Its kinda sad too... the world portrays Americans in such poor light, but from reading many of these types of posts I would think that Europeans are worse than Americans.
I suppose all nations have their rotten eggs though. Can't judge a book by its cover or something...