Guild Wars 2

I would like to ask why server maintenance and patch rollouts are generally performed on North American servers during what is largely considered NA “primetime” hours.

I think every MMO I’ve played with NA servers has generally considered the late-evening/night hours in North America to be the point of peak server population in this region. Is that somehow not the case here in this game? Or is ArenaNet instead calculating peak population for NA and EU combined? And, if that’s the case, why have two different server hub communities but force both to use a single time slot (whether it be for patching/maintenance or server events)? I think, if you want to be viewed as a triple-A MMO title, you have to be prepared to pander to each audience in a way that is most convenient for their specific region.

Last night you performed a server maintenance which prevented players from logging in for several hours. My best friend and I finally got some sync-time to play GW2 together after more than a week of busy schedules preventing us from gaming together, only to waste most of that time struggling to log in. That was pretty disappointing. And I wish I could claim it was a rare occurrence, but we find that with this game in particular our gaming sessions are frequently interrupted by planed patch updates and downtime scheduled smack in the middle of primetime. Worse, my DSL is on the slow side, and thus I sometimes spend nearly an hour downloading some of these patches (which pretty much chews up most of our available gaming time).

I’m used to MMOs that take care of this business during the early hours of the morning, always explaining that specific period is their point of least usage. Why is ArenaNet’s NA maintenance window scheduled differently?

I think this depends on where in NA you are too. I’m PST so I get annoyed when I get kicked at 9pm my time. But that’s midnight on a weeknight EST so that’s not a big prime time for them.

Most patches land at midnight or noon my PST, again not so big a deal during the week (and ideal for the east coasters as that’s 3am/pm for them), really annoying on the weekend though. I think sticking to the noon/midnight and weekdays only when possible would be ideal for almost everyone.

Was it across all NA servers? I know Yak’s Bend had maintenance periods over two consecutive days… but while it was prime time in the Americas, it was more like 8-9 in the morning in AUS.

My gripe isn’t that there is maintenance during these times, my gripe is that there is a seriously lack of attention to letting players know what is going on. Whether it be on the initial log-in browser or on the website.

Reading over the forums last night as people tried to log in they were getting an error that pointed that there may be some sort of problem with their connection, firewall or perhaps they are a student and their school is blocking them. And I’m sure quite a few were worried that they were somehow hacked, causing panic.

This error caused many people to try and troubleshoot their own computer devices, applications…etc.

I would highly suggest that in the future Anet at least post a small note SOMEWHERE letting players know what is going on. And posting a message IN GAME isn’t a viable solution for those of us just sitting down to play and trying to log in.

Yeah, I agree a Server Status or Maintenance Status banner on the main page would be handy. Then we could all just log in and see ‘oh there’s Maintenance going on’

Anet has continuously shown their favoritism to Euro. NA gets Daily resets in prime time, get server maintenance prime time, start of events (especially one time events) occur during business hours… Its quite sad.

Parisalchuk.9230:

Anet has continuously shown their favoritism to Euro. NA gets Daily resets in prime time, get server maintenance prime time, start of events (especially one time events) occur during business hours… Its quite sad.

If the problem (for NA) is that they are favoring EU, then I’m struggling to understand why they won’t perform updates for EU at the best time for EU, and updates for NA at the best time of NA. They can’t be done at the same time for each community without irritating the heck out of one of them.

Seems like when maintenance is going on I can still connect and play, all I get is a “Thanks for your patience, Server Maintenance is complete” after awhile when they are done.

This is the only MMO I’ve played where the servers are almost never down for long.

o.o