EU donwtimes - please change to weekday mornings

blofthouse2004

This post is really aimed directly at Zenimax and i really do hope you listen. I also hope anyone who supports this post to reply.

I have read a post on regular maintenance downtimes for EU and it seems your going for Tuesdays and Sundays.

now i know for sure that most players will be thinking Sunday morning is a great time for playing.

I suggest you change these downtimes to weekdays in the morning when the majority of players will be at work. i realise this will affect some players but i think you have to try and please the majority with this one.

i hope i am speaking for the majority here too.

bauchicha

There is no chance that i will be paying monthly subscription if Sunday is scheduled maintenance day.

thingy003

Couldn't agree more. I have two young children and Sunday mornings were going to be one of my core playing times as I work during the week and Saturdays are for shopping and taking the kids out.

Whilst I obviously do not represent everybody who will be playing the game I would imagine that there will be many who will be in a similar situation and the bottom line for me is if I can't get online to play in my free time I will cancel my account.

Audigy

The servers are both currently located in the US. I believe, that's why the maintenance is so early for EU, as its late night for US.

Once they move the servers to Europe, I would assume a more appropriate time will be chosen.

Sharee

I agree. i can live with server downtime during primetime/weekends if it is an emergency but planning it at the same time where many of your players have time to play? Bah.

raglau

Firstly I'd like to say this is an excellent game, I am enjoying it and I personally am tolerating the teething troubles because I think they can be ironed out. I am looking forward to a lot of enjoyment with ESO.

That said, I think Zenimax need to rethink the maintenance schedule for EU. Sunday morning is not acceptable because it essentially means out of the 2 free days a week I get to play the game, you will take the system down for maybe 3 hours of maintenance. Whilst I love your game, I simply will not carry on subscribing once the free month is up because there is little point if you are interrupting my weekend gaming time. Again, I cannot speak for everyone, but the one day of the week that is *usually* free (I know a significant minority do work Sundays in the EU) for gaming, is Sunday. Even Saturday a lot of people work and of course the vast majority of your target audience works Monday-Friday.

So please rethink this in the interests of both us - the paying customer - and your ongoing business in retaining subscribers.

One of the reasons I am pro-subscription based MMO is because I believe this means quality of service shall rise. Unfortunately, placing a maintenance windows in the middle of weekend primetime - when you have the entire Monday-Friday working week to carry out these activities - is poor quality of service. Even the F2P MMOs do not interrupt gaming hours with maintenance.

I am hoping this is just a very strange oversight on Zenimax' part and you will amend the Sunday EU maintenance hours, or I think you will see it hurt business.

I encourage anyone else who thinks the same as me to post in this thread, so we can help Zenimax see Sunday planned maintenance is a mistake for both the business and the customer.

thingy003

Audigy wrote: »

The servers are both currently located in the US. I believe, that's why the maintenance is so early for EU, as its late night for US.

Once they move the servers to Europe, I would assume a more appropriate time will be chosen.

But if they are not planning on moving the servers for several months they may end up losing EU players who are not prepared to pay a subscription for a game that is not available when they want to play it. Wait and see time I guess.

raglau

This is the risk: A perception takes a moment to make and a lifetime to break.

If people do not signup in the rush of the new game, *and are then retained*, then those people will most likely are gone forever. It's like the car salesman trying to stop you leaving the showroom, he knows once you leave he statistically has far lower chance of getting a sale then if he keeps you in there, growing your interest.

Zenimax need to concentrate from this moment right now, on keeping and growing their userbase in all locations. I want them to succeed in this because I want to be playing ESO in 3 years time. I don't want this to be a flash in the pan and F2P in 6 months.

But, they need to make it worth that and that means from day one catering to localised needs, amongst other things.

So I hope they realise this, because that will help them out in both the short and long term.

thingy003 wrote: »

But if they are not planning on moving the servers for several months they may end up losing EU players who are not prepared to pay a subscription for a game that is not available when they want to play it. Wait and see time I guess.

gryffon2

Weekends are never a good idea for maintenance. Heck, mmo companies get attacked for having a forced downtime on the weekends due to a bug, planning the downtime as a weekly thing is just stupid. Tuesdays & Fridays would be better.

No matter when the downtime is choosen someone will be inconvienced, but weekends are when the bulk of your players will be online.

steveb16_ESO46

Weekend morning maintenance is just about the most stupid MMO idea I've heard of. This is a sub game for the time being. We're paying premium fee and we do not expect to lose weekend daytime game time.

If ZMO don't want to go FTP they need to be thinking 'customer', first, second and third.

Insane idea.

Duckfather

I agree. Having scheduled downtime on a weekend is Zenimax pretty well shooting themselves in the foot. I can't recall any MMO that I've played (on EU servers as opposed to US servers) having scheduled downtime on a weekend. And I've played MMORPG's from UO beta through to now!

Zenimax, please reconsider this scheduling!

Damanta

The NA server has it's downtime early in the morning, EU server late in the morning for their respective continents.

Why not use a nightly service windown when most people would be asleep? So for both the service windows would be 02:00-05:00 in their timezones.

Edit: this would most likely coincide with the service windows from ISPs (at least the one I work for :P)

Garriej

Yeah the downtime on EU primetime is insane.. teusday is one of my 2 nights of a week and i won't be able to play on one of them, thats just borderline insane.

Loqe

Never plan a downtime any time Friday - Sunday.
Best schedule would be Early mornings Monday & Thursday, that way you have friuday to fix any new erros occured through patch and can maximize playtime during weekend.

dragonsquarterb16_ESO

Who decided to schedule maintenance on a weekend? had they forgotten to take their medication that day? that's bonkers!.

djodars

After the initial launch phase is over, we will move the European megaserver to the European datacenter – but this will be a seamless migration for users, without additional downloads, logins or action required.

It most likely won't take months but it might take a couple of days / weeks.

Pyatra

I'm Pretty sure that when they separate the data centers then you will have down time adjusted for your region. Hopefully the data center migration will happen sooner than later.

raglau

The risk is that they will not retain customers in that period, and once those customers are lost, they are generally lost forever in MMO markets. Perhaps they might mitigate this by making a formal statement to the above effect, re the server move...

Pyatra wrote: »

I'm Pretty sure that when they separate the data centers then you will have down time adjusted for your region. Hopefully the data center migration will happen sooner than later.

weresloth

Audigy wrote: »

The servers are both currently located in the US. I believe, that's why the maintenance is so early for EU, as its late night for US.

Once they move the servers to Europe, I would assume a more appropriate time will be chosen.

According to this post, it seems the OP's concerns are valid:

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Bringing down the game during European prime-time is not something we do lightly, and it is not our intent for it to be the norm. This is a bit of a unique case for launch day. When we have our weekly maintenances, which may not always be needed weekly, the one for the European megaserver is scheduled for Tuesdays at 13:00 BST (14:00 CEST) and Sundays at 09:00 BST (10:00 CEST.)

I think it should definitely be on a weeksday morning (tuestay to thursday it's optimal IMO). Since you chose to charge a subscription fee, I think people rightfully expect that you guys can affort to pay overtime to minimize the impact of server downtime on the community.

Having scheduled maintenance in 2014 is already old-school, but scheduling it in the week-end would really be an error.

If you guys are not convinced that we represent a valid sample of the community's feelings about this, send one of your questionnaires and see how paying customers would react BEFORE you actually shut down the game on a sunday morning.

raglau

weresloth wrote: »

According to this post, it seems the OP's concerns are valid:

What is odd about Jessica's post is that in the first sentence she says, "Bringing down the game during European prime-time is not something we do lightly, and it is not our intent for it to be the norm"

She then contradicts herself with, "When we have our weekly maintenances the one for the European megaserver is scheduled for Sundays at 9am BST". Thereby stating it will in fact be the intended norm.

So either Jessica has made a mistake or Zenimax have, for some peculiar reason, not considered that Sunday AM is EU primetime. This leads me to believe that this should be brought to their attention in as she did initially state they do not desire to bring the game down in prime time.

weresloth

squicker wrote: »

This leads me to believe that this should be brought to their attention in as she did initially state they do not desire to bring the game down in prime time.

I agree. That's why I suggest that they run some form of poll or questionnaire if they really can't see where we are coming from, before they cause an uproar in the European community (which could cost them quite a bit of subs) for nothing.

I'm having fun and I want this game to succeed, and I think scheduled maintenance in week-ends is a mistake that can be easily avoided.

raglau

weresloth wrote: »

I'm having fun and I want this game to succeed, and I think scheduled maintenance in week-ends is a mistake that can be easily avoided.

Agreed, great game. If it fails because of some silly slip ups like this, I will be as disappointed as Zenimax.

Grizzly_UK

Maintenance on Tuesday afternoon and Sunday morning is simply insane thinking by Zenimax! That's one sure way to guarantee losing subscribers! While those days/times may not be exactly prime-time they're not far off, no MMO should schedule maintenance of any sort over a weekend and weekday afternoons aren't a good time either! Weekday early mornings (around 02:00) is the ideal, most subscribers would be offline at that time and therefore maintenance would affect the smallest number of subscribers.

It's plain and simple, bad and/or poor decisions in the first 30 days after an MMO launches just leads to lost subscribers.

weresloth

Grizzly_UK wrote: »

While those days/times may not be exactly prime-time they're not far off

Sunday mornings in particular depend a lot on one's lifestyle. Those who regularly hang out with friends Saturday night until very late, maybe spend Sunday mornings sleeping and aren't as affected.

But I still think Sunday morning scheduled maintenance is asking for trouble big time. It's far safer to take the servers down on weekday mornings when most people work / are at school.

Also because a maintenance can go wrong. What if it takes three hours instead of 30 minutes? Do they really want their game to be down on Sunday at noon, while they can minimize the impact of this kind of accidents by just a bit of careful planning?

I agree with their choice of charging a monthly fee (otherwise I wouldn't be here...) but they have to understand that, while an MMO can still be successful with a subscription model, by going that route in 2014 they raised expectations quite a bit. Now they have a lot less margin for error than a buy to play game, because whoever pays a subscription is much less forgiving, and rightfully so.

raglau

weresloth wrote: »

Sunday mornings in particular depend a lot on one's lifestyle. Those who regularly hang out with friends Saturday night until very late, maybe spend Sunday mornings sleeping and aren't as affected.

In some parts of EU, 9am BST is 11am. That is definitely gaming territory.

weresloth wrote: »

with a subscription model, by going that route in 2014 they raised expectations quite a bit. Now they have a lot less margin for error than a buy to play game, because whoever pays a subscription is much less forgiving, and rightfully so.

Let's put it this way. I pay £9 a month per user to Microsoft for Office 365. So I get access to the class leading email solution, a top range document management solution, website hosting, instant messaging and video conferencing covered by a financially backed SLA for 99.95% uptime, and planned outages in my hours of minimum usage, depending where I am in the world. That's the sort of service people are expecting for their £9 a month nowadays.

Vellandra79

Sunday morning maintenance is a stupid idea. And to say "we won't do planned maintenance in primetime" and then announce you'll be turning the servers off for planned maintenance on a weekend is just rude.

raglau

Wonder if someone from support would give us a response, it's a reasonable concern and am interested in Zenimax' take on it.

Charwyn

The developer confirmation of adjusting the maintance time due to relocation of server would be nice

Most_Awesome

The window they have is 04:00 - 10:00 GMT as that means ile be at work or if its my day off I'm a lazy *** and don't get up till 10:30 or if I'm late night gaming I start to fall asleep around 04:00 ish
- There you go I have made my decree and remember I'm a SWTOR Founder my word is law!

WylieCoyote1511

While I agree Sunday maintenance is not great.

This game is new and has quite a few issues at present. It's probably good there are people sorting crap out over the weekend.

I'm sure as things get better the maintenance times will change and get better etc.

raglau

Yes, if it's the case this is a short-term release window to get stuff fixed from the first release, that would be good to know. At the moment, the way it was written, is that Sunday AM is the ongoing maintenance window, which is concerning.

I think a short statement from Zenimax on the matter would clear it up nicely.

WylieCoyote1511 wrote: »

While I agree Sunday maintenance is not
great.

This game is new and has quite a few issues at present. It's probably good there are people sorting crap out over the weekend.

I'm sure as things get better the maintenance times will change and get better etc.