Scheduled Server Downtime November 13, 2014

US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, November 13, 2014 at approximately 7:00AM PST.
Estimated downtime is 1 hour.

EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, November 13, 2014 at approximately 9:00PM PST. (Aprox. 5:00AM London Time on 11/14/2014)
Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

Time Zone Converter

Update Notes will be posted in the Game Update Notes (live) forum when available.

Keep an eye on the EverQuest II forums and social media for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.

Why dont you guys just say three hours and then if theres problems we wont get so much rage geez its not that difficult we all know its gonna be more then an hour more then likely

Today's update was an hour. Then some kind of bizarre SOE firewall/platform/who-knows-what made everything act crazy for 3 hours. As long as we don't have that again, the update will be one hour!

I think what concerned people is that the powers that be didn't even seem to be aware that there was a log in issue until that thread hit like 20+ pages this morning. If they were aware, they were certainly mum about it.

It will be one hour. I guarantee it. I have to work tomorrow. Unlike today. Or yesterday....

In the interest of fairness, would it at least be possible to rotate your maintenance times by staggering them instead of holding them exactly at the same time every day so that it harms the same group of people with an inconvenient work/life schedule?

Like, you could hold some maintenance periods at noon when all your customers with jobs (i.e. the ones likely to be paying you anyway) are more likely to be at work or having lunch anyway, instead of mornings or evenings.

Spread the pain a little.

Respectfully, it's done at that time to both accommodate the work schedule of their employees as well as to insure that they have an ample and capable staff on hand should things, as they do at times, go wrong.

In the interest of fairness, since you mention you have a job as well, would you enjoy coming in 6-10 hours later when the company schedules things around a few customers? How well do you think the entire staff would perform having their hours shifted around on a regular basis? How available would the outside support staff be if needed during non-traditional hours? Not to mention the additional costs involved of paying premium rates for outside support services after hours.

Since they have customers with different schedules (I'm off Monday/Tuesday with the wife) as well as people in different times zones from all around the world, it's best that they schedule around their employees since someone, somewhere will always be inconvenienced.

Actually, it can be dangerous to extrapolate my personal information from my stance. I'm quite disinterested in the entire matter because I don't even live in America and my free time happens when you're all in bed anyway. I just think it's a pragmatic solution to limit the complaints.

I do think traditional working hours are the bugbear of little minds - anyone holding onto a job usually knows working hours are "as long as necessary" and there will likely be a few special occasions throughout the year when a person has to work off the clock.

Anyone playing a game should know, that updates/fixes are "as long as necessary" and there will likely be a few special occasions throughout the year, when a player has to wait, until they get it right. Such as, right after an expansion, or other new content, is released.

Furthermore, I see no good reason to drag the Bugbears into it.

It might be wise not to argue into a false equivalence fallacy there, unless you actually are in favour of having exactly the same public policy for your customers as your company - in which case, I don't really see the need to address your viewpoints because we don't share any basis of agreement and no intelligent debate can be made.

yay i get to sleep in! thats one plus to having server down times

Severs just whent down, someone flip the update switch already?

it was just AB

I still dont see the harm in making it expected 3hours and if they come up early great if they dont there covered for stupid stuff like today....but as it stands right now since the servers just crashed its pretty clear where all there money is going EQN and not there current games...

Oddly the log in server seems messed up to me to, the char select screen only shows 4 of my many characters.... As such i wonder if it is more then just AB affected.

Looks as though I can do no other than agree with you there!

Have a nice day!

This is often the case when the launcher does not have access to your member status, gets autofixed when all servers are back in line. At least does for me.

The only things SOE really need to do better regarding downtimes is to communicate better, and that includes when the servers come back up even when all has gone to plan, which currently to my knowledge they don't do. When stuff overruns due to problems, they should update every half an hour, even if there is no new news, just to let us know they acknowledge that we are still there waiting. They should do this on these forums primarily but also Twitter and FB etc (these days a lot of people do use them, even tho some don't) to make sure they catch as many people as possible - especially if the servers come back sooner than expected. Not everyone lurks on the forums during downtimes, and it would be nice (for example) to get an tweet alert on your phone saying servers are back up early while you are doing housework to pass the downtime.

SOE can't win on time estimates. If they say 1 hour and it takes 3, they have loads of impatient people complaining that they can't play yet. If they say 3 hours and it takes 1, they'll have loads of people complaining that they'd gone off and done something else while waiting the three hours and then the servers came up too soon and they could have been playing for the last two. I've seen that happen - people get just as steamed.

Unless the estimate is exactly right every time which is impossible because computers (hardware and software) are fickle annoying things how ever well you plan, then some group of people will whinge.

Communication is key.

It's more than just for their employees though. It's also during the least load time of the majority of the equipment. You find the best off peak time and do your maintenance. You schedule the correct resources to come in and handle it at that time. Plus you add a slight buffer for QA run thrus and potential issue fixes.
Overall it's better to inconvenience a few instead of many. AND if it's listed at the same time, people can plan accordingly. Doing it at odd times leaves many who do not come to the forums seeing it as if there are major issues that a recent patch created and thus the servers crash. Better to not give that impression.
So overall, I agree with you, Griff. The people complaining about changing it have no idea evidently how IT and rack server maintenance works overall. Especially when you aren't using a pri/sec setup for redundancy due to data corruption.