I've seen announcements in the game (as @jle30303 states). I've never considered that you could miss them - bright yellow, all caps (on PC).

TaSheen wrote: »

I've seen announcements in the game (as @jle30303 states). I've never considered that you could miss them - bright yellow, all caps (on PC).

Usually presented in three or four languages, too.

My 2 cents:

There was a message posted in the forums by Gina:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/636074/eu-megaserver-maintenance-june-15-8pm-edt-june-16-2am-cest#latest

The time it was posted no longer shows, but IIRC it was somewhere between 4 and 5 PM EDT. Jessica edited the message at 6:24 PM EDT, and I remember that when I saw the message-- which was not until around 8:30 PM EDT, after the maintenance had already started-- I noted to myself that Jessica's edit (whatever it was) had been made roughly 2 hours after Gina's post.

I had been on PC EU from around 6:45 PM EDT to about 7:10 PM EDT while waiting for leftovers to heat up for dinner, and was planning to get back on after dinner. But when I was able to get back on, maintenance had already started.

Fortunately for me, I had already done my daily crafting, ToT, and endeavors the night before after 11 PM EDT, but I thought I'd still had something else to do-- cycle through my alts to get their hireling mails, I think. I also wanted to work on completing the weekly endeavor and try to burn up as much of my enlightenment as I could, as I had 3 or 4 days' worth accumulated due to having been without any internet service for a couple of days.

When there is regular maintenance, the game notifies players of the maintenance in a popup message that's displayed before you can even log in, at the game launcher window. That message is displayed many hours in advance of when the servers are going to be taken down for maintenance. Yes, there are also in-game warnings in big yellow text in multiple languages that are displayed at 15, 10, 5, and 1 minutes before the servers are taken offline, but long before that there is that popup message on the game launcher window. Presumably the reason it's there is so players will know about the maintenance well before the big yellow last-minute warnings are plastered across the screen, so they can prioritize their gameplay accordingly.

In my case, the only "harm" done is that I didn't get to cycle through my alts to make sure I'd collected their hireling mails. If I'd been aware of the pending maintenance when I logged in shortly before 7 PM EDT, I would have made it my first ptriority to cycle through my alts. Instead, I wasn't aware of the pending mainrenance and thought I had until 11 PM EDT to cycle through my alts, so I used my brief before-dinner playtime to go to the Imperial City and do a district quest to help burn up some of my enlightenment while simultaneously trying to inflict enemies with weapon poison.

I don't know what's involved in preparing the popup message that appears in the middle of the game launcher window, and I also don't know when the planned hours of downtime were finalized, but presumably they were finalized by the time Jessica made whatever edits she made to Gina's post at 6:24 PM EDT, if not at the time of Gina's original post roughly 2 hours earlier. So it would have been nice if a popup message could have been added to the game launcher window at 6:30 PM EDT, if not before, to warn players logging in that the server would be taken offline at 8 PM EDT, so they wouldn't be caught by surprise by the first 15 minute warning.