What’s the Deal with Maintenance Windows?

Just a bit of a rant today…

Yesterday morning I woke up in expectation to do some leveling with my Warden in Lord of the Rings Online. I had planned out that I was gonna finish off the opening quests in Archet and set myself up for hitting Combe and Bree-land proper, but I was thwarted in my endeavor. It turns out Thursday is maintenance day in LOTRO so the servers were down.

Ok, so I decide I’ll head into Maple Story 2 and start leveling up my Priest. I had created a Wizard, a Priest, and an Assassin and while that sounds like an interesting prelude to a joke, I thought all three of those classes looked pretty cool. In any case, I jumped into the game on my Wizard instead of my Priest since I recalled that I was in the middle of a quest. Sure enough, I had to try to find and rescue Joddy and was partway into the mission when I left off. I started getting my bearings and remembering the interesting control scheme for the game when…it crashes. Hmm…what up? I restart the game but can’t connect. WTF? It turns out This game also goes into maintenance mode on Thursday morning.

What’s up with these maintenance windows that happen every week and during times when people would be playing the game? Can’t game developers make downtime’s in the middle of the night? Eve Online does and they have players all over the world. But MS2 East Coast server shuts down at 7 am PDT or 10 EDT and LOTRO’s servers don’t come up until after Noon EDT? It just seems like developers should try to keep the game online during times when players are awake.

Anyway, it’s frustrating.

I suppose it’s just nice that games stagger their downtimes. We all know Blizzard has Tuesday locked up and now I know LOTRO and MS2 are down Thursday. In any case, I had to skip playing and head over to League of Legends instead.

Daily Ramble 49: What’s the Deal with Maintenance Windows?