Why Do you Folks Do Maintence At At This Hour?
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Sacadon✭✭✭✭✭firstdecan wrote: »wich server in wich timezone?
In EU is Monday at 4:00 AM. I don't think it is "when folks play more".
The first maintenances were in a very bad hour though. IIRC Friday evening. They changed it because a massive amount of complaints.
The only bad thing about the current hour is because it coincides with the end of the auctions of guild stores.
The auctions make it bad timing, but you also have a lot of people who log in to check mails before work \ school. It really would make more sense for them to apply the patches in the early am of a weekday, businesses that operate internationally try (with varying degrees of success) to operate using a "follow the sun" model where there is an operations team awake and alert to perform activities at any hour. Patching at 4am US time would be done by their EU staff (10am - 11am) and patching at 4am EU time could be done at whatever office they have in the Asia Pacific region (India, Australia, Malaysia, etc.).It's wise to do maintenance during business hours for the people that perform the work. This is to ensure that if something unexpected happens (as it tends to do frequently in this line of work), that they've all hands on deck to respond and get it fixed quickly. This is an industry lesson learned. Otherwise, doing while everyone in NA is asleep then when fit hits the shan, trying to get people out of bed and cognizant to fix the issue results in significant outages.
Most know that NA goes down Monday mornings till noon and plan accordingly. Zero downtime systems are ones that run stock exchanges, federal banks and are not custom built from a core engine up with a revenue model that has tight margins (aka: games). I do think it's possible to have a zero downtime MMO, just don't think they designed it that way.
I'm not sure what industry you work in, but most industries dependent upon computer services don't like to risk down time during business hours. Changes put in during change windows are typically staged and "rehearsed" in lower environments before hitting prod (whether ZoS does this remains to be seen). The availability of personnel to respond to emergencies during business hours is a rational argument, but most industries don't do that because they don't want down time during those business hours (in addition to the fact that IT workers are abused step children in most industries). I don't think ZoS is really concerned though, they have to be selling enough dresses, flaming horses and tiger mounts to not be concerned about thing like that.
@firstdecan , I work in IT. These days advising large IT organizations ( hundred million to billion dollar IT budgets) on how to run the business of IT. Worked my way up from the trenches, ran IT orgs for many years and now they pay me to help them.
Yes many companies still expect unreasonable work hours. But this is much less frequent these days. Core business hours for a game are and should be managed differently from a bank that should not go down during business hours. And I don't think ZOS has near the budget to play with that you think it does. Anyway...
Suffice to say, my grasp on IT orgs a cross various industries is very clear and I'll just leave it at that.
Edit: BTW, your follow the sun statements do make sense. But these are very pricy to manage. So for someone like ZOS that clearly doesn't have there stuff straight yet, even if they could afford it, they would need to mature their practices first anyway.Edited by Sacadon on April 22, 2015 2:42AM0 -
WhimsyDragon✭✭✭I don't really think it's reasonable to expect a company that works more-or-less normal office hours to mess with people's sleep schedules once a week for the patch. Maybe if it were a ginormous company and it wasn't just a game, you'd have a point about round the clock support. Plus I agree with the aforementioned comment about having all hands on deck if things go awry. Quite frankly, it's likely that they're already going in early on patch days as it is compared to usual.1