Issue here is not having issues, as a more than 30 years professional in computing I know this can happen more often than you may think…what he is asking for is much more important : stop doing those maintenances during Europe play time, this is beyond boring. Every single mmo did the exact same mistake, fact is Europe is one of the most important area (talking about number of players of course), why is it always the only area hugely impacted by maintenance when the mmo is hosted by US companies ? Are they really that blind ?
Just update EU servers during EU night, what is so complicated ? And if not possible (???), just make it roll between main areas, not always during US sleep time, Eu users pay the same price after all.
That is why I mentioned rolling restarts, so each server goes down in small batches or something similar for a short period, maybe 15 or so minutes then they go back up, then move down the line. This way no server would be down for extended periods and a whole region isn’t down at the same time. This method is effective if it’s something they can do.
I think they consider this time, when a lot of players are actually working or they are in the office and cannot play during the day. Only a small portion are home (home office, vacation, sabatical, no job, etc) and they are affected.
Which actually I consider the worst thing, is that also this totally new game, did not learned anything in the last 15 years of MMORPG era.
About players satisfaction, about downtimes and how to plan better.
Time will tell if they will ever listen to the community or ONLY to “influencers” or “streamers” haw they might call themselves these days.
It is quite obvious, when we play games in Europe, people in US are working and paying people extra to work at night is slightly more expensive… and if there are issues people would need to stay at work longer, it is easier when they are still working and can fix issues during standard hours.
They should be able to test updates though and could roll them to different regions at different times, but might not be easy when some things are tracked globally and need to be updated as well.
Yes but servers are in Europe (hence the ping) so maintenance teams are in Europe as well…we are talking about Amazon, thi sis not a tiny broker at the corner of the street, they have teams all around the world.
Agreed. In-game upcoming maintenance notification upon log in/out would have a nice touch as well. Scheduled maintenance by time zone is also nice to have but the Asian mmorpgs don’t generally observe this for the West so i’ve gotten used to primetime updates.
With a worldwide release, it is going to be ‘primetime’ for any time zone.
AGS is a US based company, so of course they are going to do downtimes based on US server times. I do not know what you expected from this.
As for how long this is taking, this is too be expected for a new MMO, especially with all the worlds they have now. I expect for each world/server they have, it adds additional work load and time to add the patch to each world/server and troubleshoot each world/server to make the patch was correctly applied.
Imagine if your Amazon order showed up 7 hours late … I guarantee Amazon would offer you gift cards and anything else you wanted to make you happy. Amazon gaming offers you pain and impossibly long queue times. I really wonder if its the same company sometimes.
I’m sure most of us HAVE played MMOs before … Just not from a trillion dollar company with literally unlimited resources. Rolling patches during slow time (2am - 6am) is pretty standard to allow additional time in case maintenance takes longer.
Yes, AGS maybe US based, but a significant percentage of their customer base, I would suspect 50% based on number of servers and where they are located, and as such that is how the maintenance strategy should be focused.
Its not rocket science for a US based developer when designing a global based game to take maintenance times into consideration. It is disingenuous to suggest otherwise when 50% of your customers could not be US based.
This should be the end of the discussion really. I do not understand what you expect out of a US based company. They will go off of US server times, as they are based in the US. The number of players outside of the US server times will not change this fact.
If this was done on EU server times, then posts like this will still exist - just people in the US complaining they cannot play during their region’s primetime.
If the EU made their own MMOs then they can choose whatever downtime they like. You would think the countries lacking in creativity would of figured this out by now.
I would agree with you if it was a US only based product. But its not, it is a a global product, and should be treated as such.
I am aware that if maintenance was done on EU times, then the PAC area would be effected, just as PAC would effect the US, that’s how time zones work. So the only way to be fair to all players, is either do region based updates, which might not be technically possible, or do rotating maintenance schedules.
I guess the selfish position is that it is a US based company, so only our US customers matter to us. It really does go against the ethos of AGS parent company of ‘the Earth’s most customer-centric company’.
The “Wah! I can’t play the game because of maintenance!” posts are super funny as they were on the WoW forums. Keep them coming. The ragier the better.
It’s a testament of how good the game is.
The game has been out for less than 2 weeks. I’m sure this is result of some logistic growing pains. I’m actually kinda impressed with the launch. This has been the smoothest game launch, I’ve ever seen.
Most of these style of online games are unplayable for several weeks after launch.
Yes, the HQ of Amazon is in the US, but they have server sites all around the world and they SHOULD be able to do rolling time zone maintenance. By the way, here in the EU we pay MORE for the game than the US players do.
