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.

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.

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 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 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.