ZOS, Your Maintenance Scheduling and Announcements are Extremely Unfair Towards Your EU Player Base

xuvvy

I have never played a multiplayer game that cared so little about its European player base to the point where these maintenances are announced at 3AM for European players and then conducted at late morning and afternoon hours for European players the very next day, while it's usually middle of the night or very early morning for North American players. Every time.

What's worse is that you seem to have some terrible development practices if your entire server space needs to be shut down simultaneously across multiple regions in order to conduct a maintenance that occurs multiple times a week.

ZOS, this is not okay.

PigofSteel

They will fix soon. Be patient its their good will to fix.

Soresina

It's not much better in Australia. Here we have lost both Friday and Saturday nights.

kargen27

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

Onyx_Werewolf_Gnome

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

Your point is moot as the issue is not that they should not fix things. The issue is that the largest part of their player base us foreigners are treated unequally, less than their own people on the American server. The N American maintenance generally starts in the early hours ET. Our maintenance occurs always during daylight hours.

kargen27

HedgehogFeet wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

Your point is moot as the issue is not that they should not fix things. The issue is that the largest part of their player base us foreigners are treated unequally, less than their own people on the American server. The N American maintenance generally starts in the early hours ET. Our maintenance occurs always during daylight hours.

The point I made stands as it relates to the OP.

The maintenance happens across all servers (PC) at the same time. Someone around the globe is going to be inconvenienced. My guess is they do it at a time that makes the most sense for the employees schedules. Much of the world now has a 24 hour economy so even if they planned to miss prime time in Europe for example they are still going to cut into some players game time. Someone is going to be inconvenienced. I am in the mountain time zone and play late night early morning. The scheduled maintenances cut my play time short usually. When that happens I find other ways to amuse myself.

We both know if ZoS delayed maintenance on one server or the other players would complain that it isn't fair that someone gets the fix before they do. Splitting times would still cause grief and rotating times so sometimes Europe gets hit during prime and some times NA gets hit doesn't work well for employee scheduling.

xuvvy

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

kargen27 wrote: »

HedgehogFeet wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

Your point is moot as the issue is not that they should not fix things. The issue is that the largest part of their player base us foreigners are treated unequally, less than their own people on the American server. The N American maintenance generally starts in the early hours ET. Our maintenance occurs always during daylight hours.

The point I made stands as it relates to the OP.

The maintenance happens across all servers (PC) at the same time. Someone around the globe is going to be inconvenienced. My guess is they do it at a time that makes the most sense for the employees schedules. Much of the world now has a 24 hour economy so even if they planned to miss prime time in Europe for example they are still going to cut into some players game time. Someone is going to be inconvenienced. I am in the mountain time zone and play late night early morning. The scheduled maintenances cut my play time short usually. When that happens I find other ways to amuse myself.

We both know if ZoS delayed maintenance on one server or the other players would complain that it isn't fair that someone gets the fix before they do. Splitting times would still cause grief and rotating times so sometimes Europe gets hit during prime and some times NA gets hit doesn't work well for employee scheduling.

Yes, it is much better to fix game-breaking bugs ASAP rather than to wait for a convenient time. The problem is that every single maintenance is announced less than a day ahead of time, sometimes less than 12h ahead of time. And these announcements are always most convenient for NA players, sometimes in middle of the night for EU players. And then the actual maintenance seems to always take place during late morning or afternoon for EU players, while it's either middle of the night (past midnight) or very early morning hours for NA players.

ESO operates on a cluster of physical and virtual servers. Not all servers need to be shut down at the same time. This means both that NA and EU servers don't need to have maintenance at the same time as well as the fact that the game could still be functioning during these maintenance hours in limited capacity within both the NA and the EU regions; once one half of the servers is patched, then the other half can be and these things can be done automatically, much like their server cluster (megaserver) is operated.

My point being that there are a lot of things ZOS can do to make these maintenances occur less frequently or be less impactful for players and even just doing one of many things would be nice, such as having maintenances announced more ahead of time or having them conducted at a more convenient time for European players or not conducting them at the same time for both NA and EU regions... any of that will do. Other games do these.

And, no, nobody is going to complain that a maintenance occurred with a 3-6 hours difference between regions at the time where only about 5% of the players from that region were intending to play. I haven't seen a single post on this forum claiming that it's unfair how PC and console maintenances don't occur at the same time, so I don't understand where this argument is coming from. Additionally, it is better to make it inconvenient for 5% of your active player base than 90% by doing maintenance at prime population time.

Something not being perfect isn't a valid argument against an objective improvement. People didn't refuse to invent and establish the internet (WWW) just because they knew the internet wouldn't be perfect, they chose to do it because they knew it would be a significant improvement over existing modes of communication - with or without its flaws.

Anyhow, I fear that ZOS isn't inclined to do any of this unless they start thinking that it's driving away players and/or hurting their bottom line.

Grandchamp1989

I agree OP been saying for some time they need to re-think maintanence for their European market - but atleast they used to do it in the work days... The weekend is just a big no no....

kargen27

"And, no, nobody is going to complain that a maintenance occurred with a 3-6 hours difference between regions at the time where only about 5% of the players from that region were intending to play. I haven't seen a single post on this forum claiming that it's unfair how PC and console maintenances don't occur at the same time, so I don't understand where this argument is coming from."

We have seen them in the past. Usually in the first couple of responses there will be a post saying that console patches have to be approved and that causes the delay. Been many many threads that discuss this very thing.

"Additionally, it is better to make it inconvenient for 5% of your active player base than 90% by doing maintenance at prime population time."

Again, this is a game that is distributed pretty much world wide to a global economy that is running all around the globe 24 hours a day. There is no good time other than the time that is most convenient for the company.

"My point being that there are a lot of things ZOS can do to make these maintenances occur less frequently or be less impactful for players and even just doing one of many things would be nice, such as having maintenances announced more ahead of time or having them conducted at a more convenient time for European players or not conducting them at the same time for both NA and EU regions"

If there is maintenance scheduled during the week it is always the same day and time. There is no surprise when scheduled maintenance happens and there hasn't been for years. Unscheduled maintenance like we are getting now is just that. Unscheduled. That means any forward warning means delays in getting the fix. You can't announce ahead of time something you do not know is going to happen. They keep to a schedule as much as they can.

Onyx_Werewolf_Gnome

kargen27 wrote: »

HedgehogFeet wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

Your point is moot as the issue is not that they should not fix things. The issue is that the largest part of their player base us foreigners are treated unequally, less than their own people on the American server. The N American maintenance generally starts in the early hours ET. Our maintenance occurs always during daylight hours.

The point I made stands as it relates to the OP.

The maintenance happens across all servers (PC) at the same time. Someone around the globe is going to be inconvenienced. My guess is they do it at a time that makes the most sense for the employees schedules. Much of the world now has a 24 hour economy so even if they planned to miss prime time in Europe for example they are still going to cut into some players game time. Someone is going to be inconvenienced. I am in the mountain time zone and play late night early morning. The scheduled maintenances cut my play time short usually. When that happens I find other ways to amuse myself.

We both know if ZoS delayed maintenance on one server or the other players would complain that it isn't fair that someone gets the fix before they do. Splitting times would still cause grief and rotating times so sometimes Europe gets hit during prime and some times NA gets hit doesn't work well for employee scheduling.

Starting Euro server maintenance a few hours earlier is not difficult

RedMuse

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

If this happened only after a major content release I'd just shrug, but the three weeks leading up to the release was marked by the same constant and urgent taking down of the servers and I think only once when it inconvenienced the US/NA player base. In spite of them trying to run an international game they don't much seem to care if players beyond NA can play.

SantieClaws

This smells very much like fixing an exploit to this one. This one can think of no other reason for sudden maintenance at the weekend.

So it was probably unavoidable.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Rykoth

Y'all realize that ZoS is on the East Coast right?

Like, whenever WoW has downtimes, it's based on PST because they're West Coast. MMO Companies don't do downtimes based on if it "inconveniences" one group over another. They do downtimes when folks in their company are working, and make no mistake, you act like they're machines that don't deserve human schedules. They're people that bring the servers down and make sure they're good to come back up.

So uh, can we stop with this "they're inconveniencing me" nonsense? Please?

Onyx_Werewolf_Gnome

Rykoth wrote: »

Y'all realize that ZoS is on the East Coast right?

Like, whenever WoW has downtimes, it's based on PST because they're West Coast. MMO Companies don't do downtimes based on if it "inconveniences" one group over another. They do downtimes when folks in their company are working, and make no mistake, you act like they're machines that don't deserve human schedules. They're people that bring the servers down and make sure they're good to come back up.

So uh, can we stop with this "they're inconveniencing me" nonsense? Please?

They work during the night to keep American servers up. Starting a few hours earlier for the foreign servers would not mistreat their workers in anyway.

ApoAlaia

SantieClaws wrote: »

This smells very much like fixing an exploit to this one. This one can think of no other reason for sudden maintenance at the weekend.

So it was probably unavoidable.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

That did spring to mind, the fact that is on a weekend and there is no mention of a reason other than 'you might learn about it in the natch potes after the fact'.

We shall see. Fortunately I have adulting lined up for this afternoon so it was no ESO for me either way.

However I still maintain that discussing when maintenance should take place is missing the point, the point is that maintenance downtime should not exist. It is technologically possible and should be financially feasible.

It is for us, the difference is that if we were to do what ZoS does we would not have customers where ZoS has customers that will defend the practice to their dying breath, if nothing else because this is how things have been to this point so this is how they should be moving forward.

Everstorm

Least they could do is sync it with the F1 qualifiers. 🏎

Alucardo

Rykoth wrote: »

Y'all realize that ZoS is on the East Coast right?

Like, whenever WoW has downtimes, it's based on PST because they're West Coast. MMO Companies don't do downtimes based on if it "inconveniences" one group over another. They do downtimes when folks in their company are working, and make no mistake, you act like they're machines that don't deserve human schedules. They're people that bring the servers down and make sure they're good to come back up.

So uh, can we stop with this "they're inconveniencing me" nonsense? Please?

This excuse would be acceptable if they were a small indie company. Truth is, other AAA companies like Blizzard have been performing maintenance for EU at 3am-4am consistently.
Truth is, I've only just returned to ESO, and after playing other games, it really opened my eyes to just how embarrassing ESO is managed from a technical standpoint. The game is plagued with breaking issues, some which have been lingering around for quite some time, and from what I can see, their maintenance still conflicts with EU. This game is in such a sorry state, and it pains me because it could be really great.

Starlight_Whisper

kargen27 wrote: »

The fixes multiple times a week that happens after a major content dump are preferable to them waiting a week for the scheduled maintenance. These are not scheduled and that is why there is short notice. Again better to fix as soon as they can rather than sit on it for a few days.

Depends if I see block fix....

Neophyte

It’s like 6.30am over there, I wonder if they are happy being up at that time doing it for us on a Saturday 🤷‍♂️

Alucardo

Kingbawsack wrote: »

It’s like 6.30am over there, I wonder if they are happy being up at that time doing it for us on a Saturday 🤷‍♂️

It's called a job, and sadly it's something we all have to deal with.

Neophyte

Alucardo wrote: »

Kingbawsack wrote: »

It’s like 6.30am over there, I wonder if they are happy being up at that time doing it for us on a Saturday 🤷‍♂️

It's called a job, and sadly it's something we all have to deal with.

Yeah that’s what I was getting at while others are crying about it chilling out at home

Fazuszek

I think that many of u, forgot that we are COSTUMERS and PAY zos for their service - we are not talkin about some charity. Its a bussines relation, not friendship.

As a costumer i expect decent quality of service, not this level, of insulting patches/fixes.

And no, i DONT CARE about their workers, working during the weekend/night. Its their JOB.

iksde

PigofSteel wrote: »

They will fix soon. Be patient its their good will to fix.

they are fixing it since closed beta

ADarklore

I can understand people's frustrations with the frequent maintenance this week, however, almost every one of them were to fix problems... and the one this morning I suspect (waiting for notes we were promised)... was to fix the problem with companion gear disappearing that was also an exploitable issue involving gear duplication.

Furthermore, yeah, it sucks to be the European countries where the time difference is more impactful... however... ZOS is a U.S. based company where their employees work normal business hours and have a very small crew of 'off-shift' workers available during non-business hours. Therefore, they do their patches and maintenance at times that are less inconvenient for their EMPLOYEES, it has nothing to do with their players or making things less impactful for U.S. players.

Onyx_Werewolf_Gnome

ADarklore wrote: »

I can understand people's frustrations with the frequent maintenance this week, however, almost every one of them were to fix problems... and the one this morning I suspect (waiting for notes we were promised)... was to fix the problem with companion gear disappearing that was also an exploitable issue involving gear duplication.

Furthermore, yeah, it sucks to be the European countries where the time difference is more impactful... however... ZOS is a U.S. based company where their employees work normal business hours and have a very small crew of 'off-shift' workers available during non-business hours. Therefore, they do their patches and maintenance at times that are less inconvenient for their EMPLOYEES, it has nothing to do with their players or making things less impactful for U.S. players.

Their employees work during the night to keep the American servers running, starting a few hours earlier is not going to be hard.

Starting your night shift at 22.00hrs or 00.00hrs is not less convenient than starting it at rather than 03.00hrs for their "EMPLOYEES" as you call them.

It is 100% about keeping American servers up during the day & stuff the foreigners who comprise the biggest chunk of ESO's revenue stream

iksde

ADarklore wrote: »

I can understand people's frustrations with the frequent maintenance this week, however, almost every one of them were to fix problems...

and we barely see a single significant/very needed/serious bugs being fixed over years of maitenances

small reminder ZOS still doesnt care to even communicate about block bug fix which is handicapping literally every tank in game, not only ones who bough chapter or something and so tanking especially not BiS class (dk, necro, maybe warden) is even worse and close to impossible to do on HM vet endgame even with full most selfish sets, build

Im very sorry for companions problem which for sure in majority of content you wont take and not everyone have access anyway but with still not adressing when block cost fix majority of players in group content will be handicapped - if tank have prblem if it then rest of group will have as tank wont be able for example to taunt every mob or even more dangerous mobs becasue they would isnta rekt him out of resources leaving some dangerous mobs for rest of group etc etc

LadyLethalla

Soresina wrote: »

It's not much better in Australia. Here we have lost both Friday and Saturday nights.

This.^^

But... having come from console where there was one, maybe two patches between content releases... that inventory bug introduced with the last console patch won't be fixed until next week's Blackwood release. Seeing how this was only 2 hours of my prime playtime, on my Saturday night - in addition to last night - I'm not that fussed.

Alienoutlaw

we all live in different time zones, so whenever you have the server offline it will impact somebody somewhere

xuvvy

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

we all live in different time zones, so whenever you have the server offline it will impact somebody somewhere

This argument is nonsensical and fallacious. Somebody somewhere is better than everybody everywhere. I will repeat this one final time: a solution that isn't perfect is still a solution and better than no solution.

Rossmann

Kingbawsack wrote: »

It’s like 6.30am over there, I wonder if they are happy being up at that time doing it for us on a Saturday 🤷‍♂️

"Yeah let's ignore our entire EU player base because our 10 server maintenance guys are sleeeeeeepyyy.

Best regards,
ZOS"

FantasticFreddie

Multiple things can be true at once.
I think zos is doing the best they can with the resources they have available at the actual employee level.
Their best sucks for EU server.