This situation is having a huge negative impact, particularly on the smaller guilds. It hurts big guilds, but most of the big guilds are (relatively) stable. The small guilds are having the worst of this. I've had no less than 4 people coming to me for advice this week because they have been struggling with trader bids for their smaller guilds, or PVE, PVP guilds that are trying to get into a stall. The problem is that these small guilds tend to have fewer officers that can try to wait out the maintenance to see when it comes up. If their main bidder has to work, they're out of luck. It's already hard enough for small guilds. They have to chose whether to go after an established guild which is likely to start a bid war and the established guild can usually afford to raise their bids the next week. The other choice is to go after a weak spot and this is normally where they fail because often 3-4 small guilds all go after that "weak" spot at once and only one of them can get the spot. I routinely hear of small guilds losing bids at double the normal bid value for the area because of this.

We have long been talking about the stress this adds to GMs lives. I think that ZOS underestimates just how much GMs are sacrificing to run these guilds, or how much these guilds add to the game for their members. This change WILL cause more GMs to quit, more guilds to fold and more players to leave this game.

I am hearing a lot of other GM's talking about this very topic in the game. With the time differences people are up all hours of the day or night trying to get that last bid in before the servers go down, just to long in when they finally find out servers are up and not have a trader and then its the mad dash to try and find one. Would it really be so hard for ZOS to adjust the time of the trader reset. I don't care about the updates on when it is just the trader reset would be nice. To be able to have it work like it did before the maintenance time change.

Lady_Ems wrote: »

I am hearing a lot of other GM's talking about this very topic in the game. With the time differences people are up all hours of the day or night trying to get that last bid in before the servers go down, just to long in when they finally find out servers are up and not have a trader and then its the mad dash to try and find one. Would it really be so hard for ZOS to adjust the time of the trader reset. I don't care about the updates on when it is just the trader reset would be nice. To be able to have it work like it did before the maintenance time change.

Also when it is a patch maintenance, people with faster internet download speeds get the first bite of the cherry wrt unhired guild traders- it's sickening if you lost your bid to finally get logged in to see traders with less than 1 page of goods up for sale that were just able to download the patch and get logged in quicker than you and snap up unhired traders.

Epona222 wrote: »

This isn't a complaint about having maintenance at whatever time, any day, I don't care.

What I do care about as GM of an NA trading guild is that this recent change to maintenance times is horrendous - at least before the normal maintenance time was changed I had 1 minute before the servers went down to see whether my guild had got their trader, if we did I could go out and do other stuff. Now the switchover happens in the middle of maintenance, so (to do the best for my guild members) I have to sit here until maintenance is over at an undetermined time every Monday.

I don't mind maintenance being on a Monday or any other time, but can the guild trader switchover please be moved so as to not make the lives of numerous GMs even more stressful? I would be happy with maintenance on Monday and trader switchover on Wednesday, or trader switchover on Monday and maintenance on Wednesday - please just make it so that it doesn't overlap, please please please.

Yours truly,
Very stressed GM.

As leader of one of the biggest EU guilds, I can say that it was super annoying, even the time is crap, but it got changed for us.

To be honest, the whole trade guild system is fairly stupid, but I just want my dudes and dudettes happy in the guild, so no sleep!

It's the uncertainty of not knowing when the servers will come back which makes it so very annoying. Not all Guilds have an officer who works from home, or is unemployed, retired, or on long-term sick leave! Most people have to get up and go to work or study, and don't have the "luxury" of sitting in front of their computer until the servers are up.

I don't mind the 6am Eastern Time maintenance - it's certainly not a horrendous time for people in North America. But please make it a different day from Guild Trader switchover!

baratron wrote: »

It's the uncertainty of not knowing when the servers will come back which makes it so very annoying. Not all Guilds have an officer who works from home, or is unemployed, retired, or on long-term sick leave! Most people have to get up and go to work or study, and don't have the "luxury" of sitting in front of their computer until the servers are up.

I don't mind the 6am Eastern Time maintenance - it's certainly not a horrendous time for people in North America. But please make it a different day from Guild Trader switchover!

I agree completely - but as a retired person, I can assure you that this waiting for the server to come back up is not how I would prefer to spend my day! And my time is no less valuable than anyone else's (I probably have less of my life left if you want to look at it that way!) It doesn't matter so much that I am able to, I shouldn't have to. If trader switchover was on any other day, I could log in, see whether we got our bid, then if need be join the scramble for unhired traders and it would take less than an hour - because in all reality if you lost a bid and didn't find anything in an hour, you're stuffed. Because there's maintenance in the middle I am stuck here and it's often for several hours, don't even know whether we won our bid yet. There is no good reason that I can think of why it needs to be a situation of me chained to my desk for several hours on a Monday, when it could be the matter of an hour's work or less if it didn't coincide with maintenance.

What ticks me off is that we've communicated to ZOS before that this was an issue. And then they go ahead and make this a regular thing?!

It is a very real quality of life (not just in game life, actually impacts on real life) issue for GMs of trading guilds.

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom @ZOS_RichLambert Please do something about this. Either move maintenance or move the bid close time.

Now been 3 hours - I can't go do anything else until I find out whether we got our trader bid, I have a responsibility to my guildmembers. So bored *cries*.

I know the issue has been raised before, but I wonder if Zeni actually realise that a lot of trade guild GMs are sitting here right now stressing and fuming and waiting for the servers to come up?

Epona222 wrote: »

I know the issue has been raised before, but I wonder if Zeni actually realise that a lot of trade guild GMs are sitting here right now stressing and fuming and waiting for the servers to come up?

They don't care about the people running trade guilds in this game, they made that evident when they changed the downtime to 6am EDT

nooblybear wrote: »

Epona222 wrote: »

I know the issue has been raised before, but I wonder if Zeni actually realise that a lot of trade guild GMs are sitting here right now stressing and fuming and waiting for the servers to come up?

It's a fact that I've heard in all the previous feedback meetings that I've attended.

That's depressing.

Yeah I got a launcher patch a couple of minutes ago.

Launcher showing NA is online