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Cryptic - Stop Ruining Australian Prime Time Play !!!

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
EVERY night you take down STO at 8pm Australian time.

For us who hold down white collar jobs - we dont get home and settle in until this time - and as such we can not play STO during the week without staying up till all hours - not conducive to holding down a job.

STOP IT PLEASE !!!

Why are we being penalised like this?? It is not faiir.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I wanted to say something about timezones, and how convenient it was to other gamers, but I won't. You are just unlucky. One person's gain is an other person's loss.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    op is correct

    it is unfair

    change up the times

    it will take one 30 minute meeting and a memo
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    And it is fair to.......whom?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Sound is the first MMO you play OP.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    if you rotate the times then it is fair to all trek fans that encompass the globe and have a computer with an internet connection

    they really need to have 99 percent of the players leave here

    and have just trek fans

    trek fans like things like fairness

    mmo'rs want loot or to level or something
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Avarok wrote:
    EVERY night you take down STO at 8pm Australian time.
    First of all the STO server is not down every night.

    Secondly, please suggest a time in which you think that the development team should take the servers down. Don't forget that every time is prime time somewhere, and that the server down time has to be a time in which they are in the office. The dev team is in California.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Sorry, but 4 words: Get over it mate. We've been putting up with bad maintinence times in MMO's for years, you'd think we might be used to it by now.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Avarok wrote:
    EVERY night you take down STO at 8pm Australian time.

    For us who hold down white collar jobs - we dont get home and settle in until this time - and as such we can not play STO during the week without staying up till all hours - not conducive to holding down a job.

    STOP IT PLEASE !!!

    Why are we being penalised like this?? It is not faiir.

    No, they don't take it down every night. And I'm at work while your on line (in the middle of the night) does that mean I appreciate having the server crash when Im on in the afternoon when I should be sleeping? No.

    But it is necessary to make the game better to a point where it wont be down "all the time" as you would suggest. Until we get there, we just have to ride the ferris wheel until the carnie comes out of the outhouse and notices us turning in that big wheel to the sky.

    I feel your pain though. At the time of day I usually play, I'm playing with Aussies.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Avarok wrote:
    EVERY night you take down STO at 8pm Australian time.

    For us who hold down white collar jobs - we dont get home and settle in until this time - and as such we can not play STO during the week without staying up till all hours - not conducive to holding down a job.

    STOP IT PLEASE !!!

    Why are we being penalised like this?? It is not faiir.

    I can certainly understand and sympathize with your concern. The fact of the matter is though, no matter when we do our downtime, it is right during prime time for someone, somewhere.

    We put our window when we currently do, because it negatively impacts the fewest possible players. Furthermore, it is far better to have our downtime window stable, and fairly predictable.

    We have absolutely no plans to change this window at this time.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Avarok wrote:
    EVERY night you take down STO at 8pm Australian time.

    For us who hold down white collar jobs - we dont get home and settle in until this time - and as such we can not play STO during the week without staying up till all hours - not conducive to holding down a job.

    STOP IT PLEASE !!!

    Why are we being penalised like this?? It is not faiir.

    Serves ya all right for shooting Skippy :p
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I guess MMO downtimes are bad in the eyes of the beholder. The largest MMO in the world pretty much says " ..!.. " to all their Eastern Time Zone players. They've gotten complaints for years and didnt change anything. You'd think the entire east coast of the united states would get a consideration, but nah... WoW always takes it down all tuesday morning and afternoon. If ya live on the other coast, you'll be playin' right after breakfast!

    In the end all these companies have to pick a time to take it down, and they dont rotate it. I'm just happy cryptic doesnt TRIBBLE my timezone.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Avarok wrote:
    EVERY night you take down STO at 8pm Australian time.

    Every night eh? How do you even know what the game is like then?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I am ok with the time window being the way it is :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Phoxe wrote:
    I can certainly understand and sympathize with your concern. The fact of the matter is though, no matter when we do our downtime, it is right during prime time for someone, somewhere.

    Yes but this is ALWAYS in our prime time….:mad:
    Phoxe wrote:
    We put our window when we currently do, because it negatively impacts the fewest possible players.

    By not rotating the schedules you are alienating a player base that may not be so ‘insignificant’ as you think…Australia, South East Asia and to a lesser extent NZ
    Phoxe wrote:
    We have absolutely no plans to change this window at this time.

    We pay the same amount for our subscriptions as any other player in your ‘prime’ time zones..
    The players in our ‘unimportant’ time zones on average (based on the number of maintenance and patch outages to date) have roughly 30 hours less ‘prime time’ play time per month..:mad:

    Are there any plans to offer us subscription discounts? C-store bonuses as compensation?

    I doubt it, because then everyone who isn’t in our time zone will have a ‘cry’.

    At least ours is justified.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I might be kinda crazy here, but I wouldn't mind it happening just a little on Central time USA. I'm addicted as is ;) - but I feel for the Ausy, it would stink every prime time for the same folks. mabbe as the game grows into more than 4 months the take down time wont have to be as often

    edit-the downtimes don't really always last as long as you guys say, I coulda swore the downtime last night was not even the 2 hours promised. it was actually less
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Saxon-73 wrote:
    Yes but this is ALWAYS in our prime time….:mad:



    By not rotating the schedules you are alienating a player base that may not be so ‘insignificant’ as you think…Australia, South East Asia and to a lesser extent NZ



    We pay the same amount for our subscriptions as any other player in your ‘prime’ time zones..
    The players in our ‘unimportant’ time zones on average (based on the number of maintenance and patch outages to date) have roughly 30 hours less ‘prime time’ play time per month..:mad:

    Are there any plans to offer us subscription discounts? C-store bonuses as compensation?

    I doubt it, because then everyone who isn’t in our time zone will have a ‘cry’.

    At least ours is justified.

    I'd fully support Aussies and Kiwis getting a reduced sub rate while there's such frequent patching early in the game's release. It's bad enough for those of us in Europe who have it in the morning and afternoon, but constant downtime at you peak times really isn't fair when you pay the same. Or when it's particularly bad give our Antipodean brethren tokens for increased xp or for the max level characters perhaps a token to claim an increased mission reward.

    So no, not everyone who isn't in your time zone would cry about it. :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I do think we need to take note of what was said though, The way it is being doen now affects the fewest people. that has to be the "target" for any mmo. But someone is always going to feel in unfortunaltey, it's unavoidable the only hope there is , is to affect the fewest people which is what is happening.

    I know admittedly there is an arguement for rotating the times, but we forget that really times are also probably connected to the team's working hours. And that is only fair. And having a predictable window I think IS important otherwise it leads to more wind ups and no one knows where they are with patch days. With wow, it may have been a complete pain to some of us, but at least you always knew what day and what times it would be unavallable. I feel the same with STO a predectable window is something you can plan around.

    As for you Aussies though, I must admit as much as i really do think cryptic are trying to be fair...I can understand why you feel like you are getting the short straw...if possible maybe it does need to be looked at in some capacity.

    This is my only reservation about running the game all in one shard(i like one shard but this seems to be one big side effect). I can only sympathise to those affected, but you can imagine "one size fits all" to be even harder when you are distrubting a game wordlwide.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Saxon-73 wrote:
    Yes but this is ALWAYS in our prime time….:mad:



    By not rotating the schedules you are alienating a player base that may not be so ‘insignificant’ as you think…Australia, South East Asia and to a lesser extent NZ



    We pay the same amount for our subscriptions as any other player in your ‘prime’ time zones..
    The players in our ‘unimportant’ time zones on average (based on the number of maintenance and patch outages to date) have roughly 30 hours less ‘prime time’ play time per month..:mad:

    Are there any plans to offer us subscription discounts? C-store bonuses as compensation?

    I doubt it, because then everyone who isn’t in our time zone will have a ‘cry’.

    At least ours is justified.

    I feel ya man, but you are twisting things just a little, by that i only mean nobody said or implied that you were "insignificant" or unimportant. That's just how you are taking it. I am not saying you don't have the right to feel you have the short straw...but being a business that(right now i imagine) needs EVERY sub it can get...I really dont think your feelings are accurate about how you are perceived.

    I do feel for you but i dont think anyone thinks you arr any less important, it's more of a catch -22 than anything else
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I find it interesting that thats the smallest player based timezone. I could swear that hawaii had its own wierd timezone, we wouldnt wanna inturupt Guam's play i imagine.

    Also, i find it interesting that i have yet to see any people speaking chinese or russian in the game. What makes that weird is that theres a pretty huge timezone on that side of australia too.

    Isnt there a timezone for the middle of the atlantic ocean too?

    Im just guessin off the top of my head, ima go look at a timezone map soon as i post this,

    Point being: I call BS.

    Edit: ya, im totally sure that the Aus time zone is the one with the fewest players. It couldnt possibly be alaska or hawaii's time zones, or greenland's, or the middle of russia's, or the middle east's. :rolleyes:


    BS confirmed. Try again developer guy.

    Give em hell aussies.

    BTW: The real answer is that most of the players are American, so they choose the time thats least inconvienent to us. He just cant say that, cause it would be bad marketing considering its a pretty big world.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Hmmm a valid point QE2,
    But you also need to understand that in frustration what's between the lines is....from the first two paragraphs:
    ‘yeah sorry it sucks to be u’
    And the last paragraph….no need for me to paraphrase that one but I will:
    'not happening, not ever..in fact it was not really even considered'

    I accept all of the points raised so far. I work in IT, I do release management of all things…so I understand completely the reasons for this type of schedule as policy.
    I really enjoy playing STO when I can, and have no plans to cancel my sub regardless…and just like the ANZACS at Gallipoli we suck it up and deal with the situation ( :cool: We Aussies are good at this)

    But also consider this…
    Test users on tribble received a free unique ‘tribble’ as reward for 1 hour testing…
    We have lost (revised in favour of Cryptics lower than posted outage times, kudos to them) 40-60 hours of ‘prime time’ play due to this policy…and I doubt they have even considered any kind of compensation…

    That is extremely bad policy for ANY company..
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Saxon-73 wrote:
    Hmmm a valid point QE2,
    But you also need to understand that in frustration what's between the lines is....from the first two paragraphs:
    ‘yeah sorry it sucks to be u’
    And the last paragraph….no need for me to paraphrase that one but I will:
    'not happening, not ever..in fact it was not really even considered'

    I accept all of the points raised so far. I work in IT, I do release management of all things…so I understand completely the reasons for this type of schedule as policy.
    I really enjoy playing STO when I can, and have no plans to cancel my sub regardless…and just like the ANZACS at Gallipoli we suck it up and deal with the situation ( :cool: We Aussies are good at this)

    But also consider this…
    Test users on tribble received a free unique ‘tribble’ as reward for 1 hour testing…
    We have lost (revised in favour of Cryptics lower than posted outage times, kudos to them) 40-60 hours of ‘prime time’ play due to this policy…and I doubt they have even considered any kind of compensation…

    That is extremely bad policy for ANY company..

    You make some good points there, actually I admire your attitude. But thinking about the tribble server, yeah that made me think you are right. I didn't think to include events like that too. No actually rethinking this and the points you raised a rotation would seem to be the only "fair" way. Because you are getting the short end, I hope it's something people will show some support for as then cryptic "could" re-evaluate it's policy on this.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I've been playing Eve Online for over a year now, and I'll be the first to admit, this aussie was at first annoyed with the daily downtimes during our weekday prime time, but I got used to it after a while.

    What I'm still not used to is the alarm-clock ops I have to do to work with my corp...

    On the flipside, however, I have noticed that the AU weekend daytime is probably the best time to play - player numbers are usually down to 25% of EU/US primetime numbers, since those zones are usually asleep at that point.

    We win some, we lose some. Its the price we pay for living in the best country in the world. :D
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Saxon-73 wrote:
    Yes but this is ALWAYS in our prime time….:mad:



    By not rotating the schedules you are alienating a player base that may not be so ‘insignificant’ as you think…Australia, South East Asia and to a lesser extent NZ



    We pay the same amount for our subscriptions as any other player in your ‘prime’ time zones..
    The players in our ‘unimportant’ time zones on average (based on the number of maintenance and patch outages to date) have roughly 30 hours less ‘prime time’ play time per month..:mad:

    Are there any plans to offer us subscription discounts? C-store bonuses as compensation?

    I doubt it, because then everyone who isn’t in our time zone will have a ‘cry’.

    At least ours is justified.


    You know what? This guy is right (I don;t live in Australia so the downtime is currently fine for me). However, these guys DO pay the same amount for a subscription as anyone else and so at least have the right to expect their subscription to be as convenient and valid as anyone elses. I'd be happy with a rotation here. There's no way they'll do it though and upset the might US consumer.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Give australians some of that exclusive content like TMU uniforms and such to compensate for Australian's missing out on game time during the main time they can actually play.

    Hey, if you inconvenience a population above any other population business practice is to refund them or compensate. Happens with my pay-tv subscriptions and phone bills a lot.

    See also:

    http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=150932
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Just hold all patches and put them on once every two weeks, instead of every third day. The point about not wanting to change the time because you want it to be stable and consistant is a load of ********. It would not be hard to alternate when you put them on its just pure laziness and total rejection of a smaller player base, who like many have said, pay the exact same fee's as everyone else. To be honest, i dont expect much more from Cryptic.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Phoxe wrote:
    I can certainly understand and sympathize with your concern. The fact of the matter is though, no matter when we do our downtime, it is right during prime time for someone, somewhere.

    We put our window when we currently do, because it negatively impacts the fewest possible players. Furthermore, it is far better to have our downtime window stable, and fairly predictable.

    We have absolutely no plans to change this window at this time.

    Hi,

    As an Australian Gamer, I am fully aware of this standard in maintenance timing.
    Internatioanl Offpeak is Australia's Peak Time... experience MMO players are used to it.

    But there have been periods of this games short history where maintenence was every day, right on our play time, I think many Oceanic players (Australia, New Zealand, Island Nations, Coastal Asia) were very upset. Even I a normally patient soul lost it at one or two points.

    The point that I lost it was when I realised, all you were doing was patching the patch that broke the patch before it.

    I admit they have gotten better over the last few weeks, and far less occuring (until Khitomer I didnt remember the last one). Which I hope is a view of future improvement in maintenance. I am grateful that the Maintenance period is 2 hours is actually a very reasonable window.

    Its the window you have, that is fine, just dont use the window so often, and recognise that it effects a demographic of your players that are sometimes felt done hard by.


    However.... What I would to see is a statement of intention from Cryptic, along the lines of a promise to reduce, improve, and minimise these maintenances... and to only carry out emergency and unscheduled maintenance if game/server breaking issues need to be remedied.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    First of all the STO server is not down every night.

    Secondly, please suggest a time in which you think that the development team should take the servers down. Don't forget that every time is prime time somewhere, and that the server down time has to be a time in which they are in the office. The dev team is in California.

    I live in Washington state. But I agree with the OP it would be better if you took the servers down for maintenance at a different time. How about 10am to 12am or 1pm Pacific? That would seem to effect less people as most of America and Canada are at work or in school at this time and most of the countries that get the shaft over this are in bed. Just a thought.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I guess the bottom line is that someone has to be inconvenienced by down time, it is just extremely frustrating that it always has to be the Australasia time zone. The fact is that we pay the same amount as everyone else, but have basically been told to suck it up.

    I can accept that we're probably in the most favourable time zone that effects the least amount of players, and if it was to be weekly / fortnightly maintenance scheduled when things settle down then so be it. But at the present (or at least over the last several weeks) it has been numerous times a week that the server goes down smack bang in the middle of our peak, with or without warning, this can be very disheartening.

    Like many other Aussies, I have no intention on cancelling my sub at this point as I certainly enjoy playing the game, when it's working, but all we ask for is a fair go and to get the same amount of use out of a product that we pay the same amount for as everyone else.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    Phoxe wrote:
    I can certainly understand and sympathize with your concern. The fact of the matter is though, no matter when we do our downtime, it is right during prime time for someone, somewhere.

    We put our window when we currently do, because it negatively impacts the fewest possible players. Furthermore, it is far better to have our downtime window stable, and fairly predictable.

    We have absolutely no plans to change this window at this time.

    if cryptic had half the brains they think they do and care d as much as they think they did they would do the following:

    1 have a separate server for over seas so they have a different down time
    2. Move down time to Sunday nights fewest number of people anywhere probably play at that time
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2010
    I'm impressed by the sheer lack of flames from the Aussies, who have en extremely good case in my opinion (UK based, so minimal impact on me to date) - a far more mature and sensible set of posts than the one from Cryptic in my view, which simply stressed how unwilling they were to think.

    Boxhead, for my money, hit the nail on the head - if patches were properly tested rather than rushed through then there would be less patching of the patch patches! When a patch goes live and bugs are found then I can understand the desire to put out a bug fix pronto, unfortunately it seems like every such bug fix introduces a string of further bugs - take longer to test patches, and stop the knee jerk responses when bugs are seen.
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