Should maint. times rotate to bother all?

[brandt]

What would be wrong with every maint. downtime starting at the time the last one ended? Then no one group would always pay$$$$ for downtime. Yes good business would be to inconvience people less, or refund those that lose thier chance to play. Fast food places are open late to serve thier customers, why not occcasionally rotate times to please DDO customer base?

[sirgog]

/signed x 1000000!


Would love to have the American players get the same **** we get here in Australia of downtime during nighttime. Just once or twice is enough...

[Whippy]

I appreciate your point, being in the UK my afternoon playing is mostly affected by maintenece, which is not such a big deal as you guys missing evenings. However... unfortunately the cold hard facts are we choose to play a game on an american server... so you gotta live with their working hours. If they had to pay people double time to come in overnight to do the maintenence we'd have to pay for it in our subscription fees or by loosing content etc, as they had less money to pay people to develop.

[Lithic]

sucks to live in australia, but theres 2 reasons they use the time they do.

1) Maintenance times coincide with the least populated times. They want to minimize the number of people who's playtime they disrupt.

2) They don't want to pay everyone overtime to be there outside of office hours if they can help it.

[Yvonne_Blacksword]

I think down time for maintenance should be scheduled during weekdays excluding Mondays...(hard to get people moving Mondays) and Fridays (as broken things might have to stay broken through the weekend).

That they should start 2 hours (to allow installers time to get there and get ready and awake) after their normal work hours start in the area they work in ($$)

First one is due to reliability of workers, availability of workers and the need for previously undiscovered bugs to get observed and corrected.

The second one is to keep the overhead of running the staff down to a reasonable cost to prevent the need to raise the price of the game..

Emergencies happen. That is life.

Now...if this was the military and it was a sonar evolution they would start work at 0000 to limit the interference of working parties, berthing cleaners...people being awake and bored and turning off random equipment because it is there, load shifts, other CS evolutions...etc...and sonar always works better at night...

Welcome to my world...Would you like some coffee and redbull to wash down that no-dose?

[Quarion]

We do choose our downtime to be during the time when the least number of players are playing, so that any downtime affects the smallest possible population.

This time, we even specifically scheduled it to end before our Australian player's prime time evening hours. Kate Paiz was very adamant that she wanted to accommodate if possible.

-Quarion

[BigBadBarry]

Appreciate the effort Quarion...but I think someone got their world clock a little muddled.

The downtime you have scheduled, for those on the East Coast of Australia where 80% of the population live, is actually 9pm to 12am Aussie time...so that pretty much is peak time.

[redoubt]

I think down time for maintenance should be scheduled during weekdays excluding Mondays...(hard to get people moving Mondays) and Fridays (as broken things might have to stay broken through the weekend).



Agree!!!

Three day weekends often include Monday or Friday... Sure, everyone has different schedules... but I think most people fall into Mon-Fri at work. Tue-Thu seem like great times for maintenance to me! :D

[VonBek]

Would you like some coffee and redbull to wash down that no-dose?

Ooh! Yes, please!

[mdlaurie]

We do choose our downtime to be during the time when the least number of players are playing, so that any downtime affects the smallest possible population.

This time, we even specifically scheduled it to end before our Australian player's prime time evening hours. Kate Paiz was very adamant that she wanted to accommodate if possible.

-Quarion

Quarion,
I appreciate the thought behind this idea, but for future reference I would consider 9pm to 12am (GMT+10) to be Australian player prime time evening hours and I don't think I am alone in that.

[Brandall]

I would think that 12pm-3pm EST would be a better maintenance time, as in PST it would be 9am-12pm and the aussies would be asleep already. I live on the east coast US and the time is pretty inconvenient for me as i get to play for about 2 hours before work and 2-3 hours after, and 2-3 days a week i am unable to play in the mornings due to hot-fixes and maintenance, i would be extremely put off if i were an aussie and my evening DDO (probably the bulk of play time) were interrupted that often. At the very least it would be nice to get rid of the 'you've found a secret door' notice and actually use that space to announce server DT's, as I am sure that many people are like me, and play DDO rather than combing the forums for scheduled maintenance annoucements.

[TechNoFear]

Could you also please use the correct offset for YOUR timezone?

EASTERN has been GMT -4 since 9 March.

All notices, forum, launcher and ingame use GMT -5.

But your net ops appear to use GMT -4.

We had a difference of 14 hours a few weeks ago, 13 hours for a few weeks and now 12 hours.

Turbine using the correct offset would help......


This time, we even specifically scheduled it to end before our Australian player's prime time evening hours. Kate Paiz was very adamant that she wanted to accommodate if possible.

-Quarion

Australia is GMT +10 (East coast ) to GMT +8 (West coast).

This downtime (and the last few) started in Australia 7 PM West coast and 9 PM East coast.

When exactly is prime time?

[DelScorcho]

/signed x 1000000!


Would love to have the American players get the same **** we get here in Australia of downtime during nighttime. Just once or twice is enough...

This happened last week with the hotfix. We American players decided not to whine. Something to consider.:)

[Darkwolf]

Would love to have the American players get the same **** we get here in Australia of downtime during nighttime. Just once or twice is enough...

It has happened once or twice... more than that number in fact.

[Oreg]

I will answer with a story about airlines.

If a flight from NY to LA needs to be canceled due to maintenance, the airlines decided long ago that they would not bump people off the next flight to make way for people on the canceled flight. Conceivably, the canceled flight people could sit there through 4+ flights to LA and not get priority. The reason?

If you have to screw over customers screw the same ones over and over. A lesser number of people complaining loudly is more preferable to a larger number complaining mildly.

You may not like it but it is a proven customer service method.

(disclaimer: in Turbine's case I am sure it is because they are east coast time zone and it is when their people work normal business hours and don't require overtime or coming in after hours which generally leads to unhappy employees. Kinda obvious ain't it?)

[oronisi]

I'm just going to say: You can't please everyone all of the time.

So my vote is for the downtime to be when it impacts the least amount of players.

[Solmage]

We do choose our downtime to be during the time when the least number of players are playing, so that any downtime affects the smallest possible population.

This time, we even specifically scheduled it to end before our Australian player's prime time evening hours. Kate Paiz was very adamant that she wanted to accommodate if possible.

-Quarion

Oooh idea idea!

Track down whomever caused the bugs and as a reward have them fix them from 3-6 AM, EST :p

[Wheelz]

This happened last week with the hotfix. We American players decided not to whine. Something to consider.:)

That's the funniest thing I've read for a long time - the whining on the forums was incredible. A wondewrful sight to behold for what we get every week or so.

All they need to do is delay the maintenance start times by about 2 (or maybe 3) hours to help out the down-under peeps - and it will still be off-peak US time.

[TechNoFear]

This happened last week with the hotfix. We American players decided not to whine. Something to consider.:)

Actually there was a HUGE outcry. Much more than any we ever do.

The threads just seemed to disappear.

Check the 'Service' forum to see how many of the recent downtimes appear there.

[ENGRAV0]

/signed x 1000000!


Would love to have the American players get the same **** we get here in Australia of downtime during nighttime. Just once or twice is enough...

Hehehe, Move to America and be Happy. :) Had to, was just too irresistable, and I didn't see anyone else say it. Of course, there is another option:

Just deal with it, and hope that the next patch actualy works as intended, and doesn't lead to ANOTHER down time, like this one may well do. Hint Turbine, just change the AI back, someone somewhere does NOT know what he/she is doing, and it just moves the issue from one place to another. This is really rather silly. So people were, god forbid, HUMAN, and they outsmarted your AI, nothing you can do will match the human brain. You adjust your AI, and the players will find a way to convince it to do exactly what they (we) want it to.

-Can ANYONE tell me what QA stands for?