Dear Daybreak, You listened (after many years) when we requested moving the TLP expansion launches off of 12 AM PST when no one is in the office. Can you please also consider moving launches for the non voting servers off of patch day? Or preferably even off patch week? Your record for uptime after patches isn't exactly stellar. Since the start of 2018, so far out of seven monthly patches, you had to hotfix five of them. And at least two of the patch days went late enough that you would have still been patching at the scheduled expansions launch time, if a server had been launching that day. Tomorrow, we have both a patch, and the launch of TBS on Phinigel. It is going to be a bummer for a lot of guilds if content doesn't work correctly on Phinigel, or if the servers are taken down for emergency patch in the middle of the race to beat the expansion, or if the servers are still down at 2 PM PST. I know patch+launch only happens about one out of every four launches for each server, but it would be nice if that one in four could be eliminated altogether. And I'm sure it would be nice for you to not have to juggle a new patch and an expansion launch on the same day, too. Since you never patch on the first Wednesday of the month, and can't always predict ahead of time which of the other Wednesdays a patch will fall on, maybe the easiest thing would be to adjust expansion releases to always occur on the first Wednesday of each month. Add or subtract a week or two to the next couple expansion launches on each server, until we all fall on the first Wednesday. From that point on, expansions would last either 2 months or 3 months, first Wednesday to first Wednesday, instead of eight weeks or twelve weeks. Overall it adds a couple days per expansion but I don't think anyone would mind that if we knew we never had to worry about a patch screwing up launch. Alternatively, move us all to Mondays like the voting TLP's, so we always have at least two days to play before patch.
I am not shocked... But I do understand that patches can go wrong and would not want them to rush. that said: I do agree, perhaps move them to Tuesday or Monday, so its not the same day of the week of a normal Patch day.
Kinda looks like they tried to lock / move the thread and failed. This patch is probably gonna be a mess tho, surprising absolutely no one. And this could have been totally avoided with better scheduling, by the way. Just don't put expansion launches on patch day. This isn't rocket science, folks.
No discussion as I can't see anyone disagreeing with something so obvious. As it is smart guilds don't have scheduled raid days on Wednesdays anyway.
We should have been hammering away at this point for weeks, and it might have sunk in. But this post came way too late, and here we are.
So launch went reasonably well, but there were issues with the login server that caused some folks to miss out on a big chunk of the rush. I hope you'll consider this to prevent issues in the future.
