Maintenance Gripe

Stormfyre

This is a simple gripe about the maintenance time. Most people and Zenimax likely don't care but having it at the same time for years greatly affects a group of players.
I live in Australia. With the maintenance at 4EDT-12EDT each time (sometimes longer) it aligns with finishing work in the afternoon until late that night in bed time.

This means not only do we NOT get to play at all that day on every maintenance but we also cannot claim our daily log in rewards.
Especially annoying at event times.

Yes, I realise we need (and are lucky) to have regular mainenence but does it have to be a 4am EDT each time for downtime? Does it have to be the entire 8hours everytime?
Played MMO's for well over 20 years and often the patch, fix, reboot etc is a fast one but I havent seen this with ESO. It's always no play and miss rewards every single maintenance.

Not looking forward to 7.0 and it's no doubt maintenance every night.
Can we think outside USA/UK for a change? Doubtful but maybe some consideration from Zenimax at some point.

daim

US Server: Maintenence completed after 2 hours.
EU Server: Am I joke to you ?

Elsonso

If this were an EU company, they would do the same thing. It might be more convenient for EU people, but anyone outside of their time zone would be inconvenienced. People would be complaining EU workers being too lazy.

Tommy_The_Gun

Well, it is a work - free day for me... and I have to wait until 18:00 (at best, becouse, you know, I am prepared for "double" or "triple" Maintenence on EU). The weather outside is crappy so I can not even go & do stuff... oh well.

Lady_Galadhiel

Fazuszek wrote: »

[Quoted post was removed]

To be fair they work and do maintenance in their US night what is good for US players but bad for the rest of the world.
As already discussed in another thread,somehow they are not able to do 2 separate maintenances for both servers,something what would solve the problem.

LalMirchi

Fazuszek wrote: »

[Quoted post was removed]

I beg to differ, "patch maintenance – May 3, 4:00AM EDT"

I would class 4:00AM as night time.

Elsonso

Lady_Galadhiel wrote: »

Fazuszek wrote: »

[Quoted post was removed]

To be fair they work and do maintenance in their US night what is good for US players but bad for the rest of the world.
As already discussed in another thread,somehow they are not able to do 2 separate maintenances for both servers,something what would solve the problem.

They used to do NA and EU server maintenance at different times. They ran into problems, since apparently the two servers are not completely independent from each other. Now, they do them at the same time, but I think they also resolved their dependency problems.

Haenk

I agree, and disagree.
Development work is done in the US, so occuring errors during patch can be solved by the US staff, but probably not by EU staff - therefor there certainly is a point in doing the maintenance during US worktime.
If you miss the login rewards on mondays due to maintenance - that's really not a big loss IMHO. They already solved this by moving irrelevant stuff to the end of the month.

After all, there is no way to make everyone happy, as people are just spreaded around the globe, even with different working/gaming hours. Impossible to solve.

However - if you are a bit older (like me), you might remember the "ebay friday" - ebay did their maintenance on friday, so the whole platform went down for hours. But haven't for many years now. So there *is* a solution. Run a server in parallel, at patch time, do you patching, if this work is done, shut down both systems and copy over game data. Or have that game data be completely separate from the game itself. Certainly something could be done against long downtimes in 2021, it is just a matter of the amount of money you are willing to invest.

Elsonso

Haenk wrote: »

I agree, and disagree.
Development work is done in the US, so occuring errors during patch can be solved by the US staff, but probably not by EU staff - therefor there certainly is a point in doing the maintenance during US worktime.
If you miss the login rewards on mondays due to maintenance - that's really not a big loss IMHO. They already solved this by moving irrelevant stuff to the end of the month.

After all, there is no way to make everyone happy, as people are just spreaded around the globe, even with different working/gaming hours. Impossible to solve.

However - if you are a bit older (like me), you might remember the "ebay friday" - ebay did their maintenance on friday, so the whole platform went down for hours. But haven't for many years now. So there *is* a solution. Run a server in parallel, at patch time, do you patching, if this work is done, shut down both systems and copy over game data. Or have that game data be completely separate from the game itself. Certainly something could be done against long downtimes in 2021, it is just a matter of the amount of money you are willing to invest.

Money can solve the issue, yes. In this case, it requires a "spare" megaserver in both datacenters for each platform they want to concurrently do maintenance on. This is probably a rather expensive option, as these are not exactly inexpensive servers, near as I can tell.

Sylosi

What you should be asking is, why is there downtime for maintenance at all other than in exceptional circumstances?

When Youtube goes down its sufficiently rare enough for it to be reported as "news" on tech sites.

For decades telephony systems have been able to have software updates without going down, thanks to things like Erlang (a programming language way ahead of its time).

And lastly let's take Guild Wars 2, a game 2 years older than ESO, that in 9(ish) years has had less downtime than you typically get in a couple of months of ESO.

Elsonso

They did not build the ESO servers to run for a long time without maintenance and did not design the architecture to allow for updates without taking the server down. Choices.

SeaGtGruff

Well, I made this observation/suggestion in a different thread, but I'll repeat it here...

Today should be when the PC EU characters database gets copied over to the PTS.

PTS and PC EU are both offline right now.

Maybe that's what's going on-- copying the data to PTS so PC EU players can test Blackwood?

If both the PC EU and PTS servers come back online at about the same time, that might be an indication that this suggested reason is correct.

Stormfyre

They obviously need to do maintenance. This is not new. Does it have to be same time every attempt? No.. they could stagger it or have a schedule so others arent missing out on a full day play time and events every single downtime.

Why do they need 8 hours every time? If it's a major patch fair enough. For a small patch fix, update (you can see it was patched right away after downtime by the patch download) then a test and off we go. Not 8 hours.

My viewpoint is from playing many MMO since 1999 and not seeing this amount of lengthy downtime each reboot/patch/fix. The other side is my original point of if this is the case, 8 hours required, it kills any chance of even logging into the game that day for Australians. Our play time 4pm-12am is now offline and time for bed and work next day. We don't even get to claim daily rewards.

Sylosi

Elsonso wrote: »

They did not build the ESO servers to run for a long time without maintenance and did not design the architecture to allow for updates without taking the server down. Choices.

Yes choices, rather than choosing to provide a good service for their customers, they decided to save money, much like the "performance issues".

Huyen

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Well, I made this observation/suggestion in a different thread, but I'll repeat it here...

Today should be when the PC EU characters database gets copied over to the PTS.

PTS and PC EU are both offline right now.

Maybe that's what's going on-- copying the data to PTS so PC EU players can test Blackwood?

If both the PC EU and PTS servers come back online at about the same time, that might be an indication that this suggested reason is correct.

Copying is something different then the "maintaining the server" message they give us right now. If they could at least be honest about the stuff they do...

Stormfyre

daim wrote: »

US Server: Maintenence completed after 2 hours.
EU Server: Am I joke to you ?

Just being honest. I have never seen 2 hours .. they always take the full 8 hours planned.

Gaggin

Patch time is 4-12am(if it goes that long) EST.

Greenwich time is 9-5, when most people are working, certainly not prime-time.

Moscow is 11-7, which is at the extreme and still misses prime-time.

Tokyo time is 5-1am, totally prime time.

EU isn't getting screwed over at all. They are actually working night hours to make sure it's online for ya'll in the evening. I see some ignorant comments about U.S. workers being lazy, which is really rich considering Europe is the continent that works the least and you're complaining about not being able to do a leisure activity during working hours.

kargen27

cymru3232rwb17_ESO wrote: »

They obviously need to do maintenance. This is not new. Does it have to be same time every attempt? No.. they could stagger it or have a schedule so others arent missing out on a full day play time and events every single downtime.

Why do they need 8 hours every time? If it's a major patch fair enough. For a small patch fix, update (you can see it was patched right away after downtime by the patch download) then a test and off we go. Not 8 hours.

My viewpoint is from playing many MMO since 1999 and not seeing this amount of lengthy downtime each reboot/patch/fix. The other side is my original point of if this is the case, 8 hours required, it kills any chance of even logging into the game that day for Australians. Our play time 4pm-12am is now offline and time for bed and work next day. We don't even get to claim daily rewards.

Doesn't make sense for the people doing the maintenance to have a rotating schedule.

jssriot

kargen27 wrote: »

Doesn't make sense for the people doing the maintenance to have a rotating schedule.

Seriously.

There's also the issue that ZeniMax is located in the US and they are a large corporation that has to be able to carry on with their usual business day at regular US business hours while also being able to respond to unexpected problems that might require extended maintenance. While I'm not privy to all the factors of why they schedule it when they do, but I doubt rotating the day/hours is something that would be easy to do. Also, I wouldn't wish that hell on their employees. As much I loath Zeni, the corporate entity, I do not wish ill for their employees who do the work of keeping this game running.

ThorianB

cymru3232rwb17_ESO wrote: »

This is a simple gripe about the maintenance time. Most people and Zenimax likely don't care but having it at the same time for years greatly affects a group of players.
I live in Australia. With the maintenance at 4EDT-12EDT each time (sometimes longer) it aligns with finishing work in the afternoon until late that night in bed time.

This means not only do we NOT get to play at all that day on every maintenance but we also cannot claim our daily log in rewards.
Especially annoying at event times.

Yes, I realise we need (and are lucky) to have regular mainenence but does it have to be a 4am EDT each time for downtime? Does it have to be the entire 8hours everytime?
Played MMO's for well over 20 years and often the patch, fix, reboot etc is a fast one but I havent seen this with ESO. It's always no play and miss rewards every single maintenance.

Not looking forward to 7.0 and it's no doubt maintenance every night.
Can we think outside USA/UK for a change? Doubtful but maybe some consideration from Zenimax at some point.

Maintenance is done in large part to minimize impact on the player population. It might impact you more because you live in Oceania but it would impact far more players to cater to your time zone. Oceania doesn't even have as big of population as California or Spain. North America and Europe have a combined population of more than 1 billion people. That is 22 times the population of Oceania. Is it good business for a game company to inconvenience 22 people for 1? I know it sucks, but isn't that kind of a selfish ask?

Also maintenance ends mid morning ZOS time. So if something goes south or they need fix something, They still have half the business day to solve problems which leaves them a lot more options.

I don't know why patches and maintenance takes so long. I think its rather ridiculous myself. Maintenance on most games is 15 -60 minutes. And most patches can be done in 2-4 hours with major updates take the better part of a day. But everything with ESO takes 2-8 hours. There could be a very good reason for this that isn't just inefficiency at patching and maintenance. They may not be able to improve on it and it may be more work because they use a in house engine based off the havoc engine which likely makes things complicated when it come to patches and maintenance.

Sylvermynx

cymru3232rwb17_ESO wrote: »

daim wrote: »

US Server: Maintenence completed after 2 hours.
EU Server: Am I joke to you ?

Just being honest. I have never seen 2 hours .. they always take the full 8 hours planned.

I was on the US server at 7 am US MT this morning - so it didn't run the full 8 hours. It was around an hour less.

Cirantille

I don't know
This was not such a big deal even when I lived in Europe
Because usually these are work hours so you can't play anyway
Or university if you are studying
I know it can be annoying but there will always be people at inconvenience
For example if you wake up early or decide to play at late night you can't in NA either or if you are in west coast etc

Stormfyre

Cirantille wrote: »

I don't know
This was not such a big deal even when I lived in Europe
Because usually these are work hours so you can't play anyway
Or university if you are studying
I know it can be annoying but there will always be people at inconvenience
For example if you wake up early or decide to play at late night you can't in NA either or if you are in west coast etc

Correct as the time isnt too impacting on Europe.
I live i nAustralia and it's the entire play time for a day every soingle time and we cannot claim rewards/events as well.

Stormfyre

OMG.. again maintanence for entire afternoon/evening.
What is so important it cant wait thsi time.. "a book color has been changed to blue"..

redlink1979

Regarding the schedules, you need to remember that ZOS is an U.S. based company. Their schedule is set according their time zone.

Elsonso

.

redlink1979 wrote: »

Regarding the schedules, you need to remember that ZOS is an U.S. based company. Their schedule is set according their time zone.

More to the point... at a reasonably normal time when the US-based employees can do the work and get any support that they might need.

Flameweaver1951

Stormfyre wrote: »

daim wrote: »

US Server: Maintenence completed after 2 hours.
EU Server: Am I joke to you ?

Just being honest. I have never seen 2 hours .. they always take the full 8 hours planned.

Not yesterday. US Xbox was completed 4+ hours before Xbox EU maintenance finished. It was almost as if they only had one team doing the maintenance and chose to complete US before starting on the EU servers even though both realms were taken down at the same time.

Tandor

Stormfyre wrote: »

daim wrote: »

US Server: Maintenence completed after 2 hours.
EU Server: Am I joke to you ?

Just being honest. I have never seen 2 hours .. they always take the full 8 hours planned.

That's simply not true I'm afraid.

Mythreindeer

I’m in the US. I typically play in the evenings after work and in the very early hours for awhile because I’ve always awakened very early my whole adult life, I just can’t help it. So on maintenance day I can’t play in the early AM when I usually do crafting and a daily or two. Know what I do?

Play a different game.