StackonClown wrote: »

Well according to some vocal members - its an american game and should only consider american players - no other country matters, including their holidays
funny how the game caters for many languages, currencies for crown store etc etc

"AI Overview.
Yes, The Elder Scrolls is a global franchise played and sold worldwide, with millions of copies sold across multiple continents.

Blizzard is also a US company, and they schedule maintenance at night for each corresponding region. I’m not even going to mention that WoW, with a much bigger infrastructure and player base, has 1–2 hours of maintenance for global patches and 15–30 minutes for regular maintenance, while ESO has 6–12 hours every week.

StackonClown wrote: »

but it seems they start at 4am at the local time of devs right?
So couldnt they start 6 hours later at 10am, stil being in the business day?
Also, is it really devs doing maintenance ?

That's kinda the point, though. Maintenance can be started by one dude shutting down the server tasks and starting a prepared maintenance script. The critical part is getting everything up and running again. When things don't work, you want a rested team that can stay for another 8 hours if need be.

Oceanchanter wrote: »

kafedristoran wrote: »

StackonClown wrote: »

Well according to some vocal members - its an american game and should only consider american players - no other country matters, including their holidays
funny how the game caters for many languages, currencies for crown store etc etc

"AI Overview.
Yes, The Elder Scrolls is a global franchise played and sold worldwide, with millions of copies sold across multiple continents.

Blizzard is also a US company, and they schedule maintenance at night for each corresponding region. I’m not even going to mention that WoW, with a much bigger infrastructure and player base, has 1–2 hours of maintenance for global patches and 15–30 minutes for regular maintenance, while ESO has 6–12 hours every week.

How WoW is even relevant to this discussion?

Guild Wars 2 does maintenances at their own schedules, holidays in other countries or not.

GW2 Maintenance doesn't shut the game servers off I thought? the way GW2 players explained was they move all the players to a different instance while they do maintenance. The big problem with maintenance in ESO (and most other mmos) is that the game is unplayable for hours

StackonClown wrote: »

why does every other MMO have way way way shorter maintenance or even zero maintenance by using standby servers?
I'm hoping its not again 'its an american company focussed on American users'

LOTRO has about the same maintenance time as ESO but it's not rare for maintenance to end 2 hours early. Granted LOTRO is an older game and isn't as extensive system-wise but the LOTRO team is only, 60? people

For fun have a look at this thread:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/360235/should-maintenance-have-etas#latest

It took 2 years of asking but Zeni finally started publishing ETAs for maintenance - I take the credit.. Thanks
Even on this point, I was challenged all the way by Zeni apologists who prefer an inferior outcome for the sake of an opposing opinion or supporting Zeni.

Sooo... if you sell, market and distribute a product globally - guess what you are a global product.
Please think beyond - "but I only work these hours.. " and 'too bad, we always always always cater for US players'

not good enough.

its like when one of the new team members talked about '3 points of mount training at once per day' - 'err umm err, why did we restrict it to1? err umm err, could we increase it.. err ye'

StackonClown wrote: »

not more apologists perr-lease.
Im giving an example of where ZOS was completely out of step with most other games and corporations and they finally admitted it.
Why dont you find another game with even longer maintenance that you can praise?

Would you like to go back to the days of maintenance with no ETA? - because it would have been like that had i not had the audicity and 'entitledness' to raise it.

Nothing is entitled here its the US players who are entitled who demand everything revolves around them.
btw it wasnt me with the day off, i didnt have time any way.

[snip]

I survived no ETA maintenance days, and I certainly wouldn't make fuss about it now.
Even with ETAs known there was a situation where the maintenance turned no-ETA just his year, because life happens.

The things people here complain about makes me think the US players are not the only ones entitled.
But whenever the US players are entitled or not - and some of them certainly are - matters not in this topic tho.

Company is in the US.
Follows US calendar.
Hires people from the US mostly who expect the company follows the US calendar.
Simple as.

"But other games..."

Since other games are relevant somehow, Hoyoverse always does maintenances at the same time; for my timezone Tuesday night, then I have to patch the game during Wednesday.
They don't shift maintenance schedules just because for some people it's not convinient, and all players are kicked out of the games.
They market their games to the Western world and still maintain their schedule.

Somehow they are doing extremely well for themselves.

I guess all the talk about competitors I see here and there is not about when and how the maintenance is done.

SilverBride wrote: »

Public Holidays are about the holiday being recognized and not so citizens don't have to work and can sit and play a video game for an entire day.

And not every profession even can enjoy a day off during a public holiday
Med staff, firefighters, retail workers of all kind, police officers, tech support in many companies - to name a few.

At least in my country, they are offered a day off as soon as possible if said holiday grants one, but it's at a later date none the less.

I guess its fine if maintenance happens during their day off since nobody mentioned it before.

Oceanchanter wrote: »

AScarlato wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Public Holidays are about the holiday being recognized and not so citizens don't have to work and can sit and play a video game for an entire day.

Who are you to tell people how to spend their day off? I get the impression you are retired and holidays mean little to you, but just conjecture.

You'd think a US-based business would try to accommodate their customer base on days they are more likely to have off from work and have time to play their product by not scheduling maintenance on these days and rescheduling that for times of lower player count.

All this talk about "accomodating customer base" makes me think of entitled Karens that demand the store to be opened at longer hours and make a fuss about their prefered brand not being stocked at this moment, oblivious and ignorant about how things run on the backend.

They work other days that aren't a holiday - they can schedule days with less players. It's about making sensible decisions to benefit your customers as a business. Pleasing customers you want money from should be top priority for most companies and not afterthoughts like some people here are comfortable being.

This isn't asking for them to extend hours so I don't even see how you think that is the same thing. Also if your customers want a specific product that already aligns with your business and you can make the decision to provide it to them with little disruption, you should probably do so.

Source: I'm a business owner and providing top service to my clients is #1.

Rather than bickering, add this as a request in the new Suggestion Board and let people vote on it and have ZOS evaluate it through their process.

https://elderscrollsonline-feedback.featureupvote.com/

AScarlato wrote: »

Oceanchanter wrote: »

AScarlato wrote: »

Oceanchanter wrote: »

AScarlato wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Public Holidays are about the holiday being recognized and not so citizens don't have to work and can sit and play a video game for an entire day.

Who are you to tell people how to spend their day off? I get the impression you are retired and holidays mean little to you, but just conjecture.

You'd think a US-based business would try to accommodate their customer base on days they are more likely to have off from work and have time to play their product by not scheduling maintenance on these days and rescheduling that for times of lower player count.

All this talk about "accomodating customer base" makes me think of entitled Karens that demand the store to be opened at longer hours and make a fuss about their prefered brand not being stocked at this moment, oblivious and ignorant about how things run on the backend.

They work other days that aren't a holiday - they can schedule days with less players. It's about making sensible decisions to benefit your customers as a business. Pleasing customers you want money from should be top priority for most companies and not afterthoughts like some people here are comfortable being.

This isn't asking for them to extend hours so I don't even see how you think that is the same thing. Also if your customers want a specific product that already aligns with your business and you can make the decision to provide it to them with little disruption, you should probably do so.

Source: I'm a business owner and providing top service to my clients is #1.

I mean no offense, but it must be a mom-and-pop type of local business by the sounds of it.
Its easy to please local customers having one or two locations at most.

If it was anything larger I'd expect some understanding there are a lot of moving parts in companies of this size.
And perhaps a conclusion scheduling maintenance on Mondays is the most optimal way to do it, since all those moving parts have a steady rythm to work with + Mondys are least busy days most of the time since people go to school and work.
Occassional public holiday at that time in some other country or not, maintenance goes brrr.
I would even probably see some nuance that different companies have different rythms, approach, capabilities, schedules, which is why ActiBlizz does their maintenances for WoW differently from how ZOS does them for ESO.

But what do I know.
I'm just a former employee of a game dev studio with a game or two I was a part of, and years of different office positions under my belt.
I surely know nothing about the backend of big businesses, right?

My clients are AmLaw 100 law firms and Fortune 50 companies.

Sometimes inconveniencing myself is worth pleasing clients. Of course unlike modern game devlopers, I'm not in a field where we publicly disregard and disparage our customer base.

Anyway you seem really invested in calling customers Karens and ignoring sensible decisions to support customers for some unknown reason, but you do you.

I'd lie if I said it impresses me how far are you willing to go to please someone, since I know nothing of the nature of the work you do, nor how big your business is.
One thing is to fly solo, another with a small team, different beast entirely having a large company with thousands of people working under you.
Doesn't sound like it's close to ZOS' size, or even near game dev for that matter.

You know how to sell it tho, so may your business grow strong and good luck in your future endeavours.

That said, the convo gets too personal for both of us.
NDAs put me at disadvantage, and I don't want to doxx myself, so that's how far I'm playing the career experience card.

You're motivated to twist my words, since I used the term "Karen" only once.
If you took what I've said personally, then it's out of my control.

I find the term to be fitting for some customers tho.
I won't sit and pretend like some of the demands and suggestions aren't ludicruous, entitled, impossible, non-optimal, counterintuitive, or straight up nonsense.
The idea of demanding maintenance schedule to be changed cause some other country has a public holiday is close to be one of those, and made extensive arguments to why.

It's almost like I understand why the things are the way they are, and simply make peace with it like an adult, and focus my energy on things that really need to change.

ZOS opened a feedback channel for us, so you could submit your suggestion.
Perhaps your experience as a business owner working for some 100 law firms in the US convinces them to do a rotating maintenance schedule, because inconviniencing themselves is worth pleasing the few players that have a day off during downtime.

its fine to disagree - but my main point was exactly what one of the ZOS team members said "but why cant we do it differently??" referring to mount training, 1 per day versus 3.

it seems some people are aggressively demanding we accept the ZOS status quo and never ever dare to question it.
Please go back and check my thread on ETAs. Its laughable now that we wouldn't have them, yet some militant users were demanding the lazy no ETA approach.

Yes, lets use the feature request option - fair point