Darth Hater

Many Star Wars: The Old Republic players had their weekend play time interrupted when an unexpected maintenance period brought servers down for several hours. Stephen Reid has responded on the official forums with some explanation behind the decision.

Stephen ReidOur Live team took the decision to roll out today's 1.1.0c patch during Friday night/Saturday morning with the knowledge that it would affect a higher than usual number of players. Unfortunately, we had to make changes that required server downtime. The Live team felt those changes were urgently required and that was why the maintenance was scheduled. Generally speaking, we try and ensure all required maintenance happens during our weekly maintenance period, but this was one situation where we had to move forward quickly; to not do so could have led to severe performance issues across the service as a whole.

The full post can be found after the jump.

Full Post

Stephen ReidHey everyone; I appreciate everyone's views on this topic and I can understand the feelings being expressed here.

Our Live team took the decision to roll out today's 1.1.0c patch during Friday night/Saturday morning with the knowledge that it would affect a higher than usual number of players. Unfortunately, we had to make changes that required server downtime. The Live team felt those changes were urgently required and that was why the maintenance was scheduled. Generally speaking, we try and ensure all required maintenance happens during our weekly maintenance period, but this was one situation where we had to move forward quickly; to not do so could have led to severe performance issues across the service as a whole.

I want to address a couple of other points from the OP:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Demorgoth
1: You post a warning less than two hours before the servers are brought down. Ok, if this is an emergency, tell us it's an emergency. Don't call it 'maintenance' when you decide to pull down all the servers on a Friday night with less than 2 hours notice.

This is a little inaccurate. I'm not sure where your timing comes from, but our original post regarding the downtime was posted at 5:10PM CST (Austin time). At that point, we were unsure of the start time for the maintenance so posted without it. The post was updated with the exact timing of the maintenance at 8:54PM CST, which would give just over five hours notice of the exact timing.

Five hours is not a generous window of notice, and for that we apologize. In this instance, we updated with the precise timing as soon as we could, but we'll strive to improve.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Demorgoth
2: The post is highly ambiguous. If you're pulling the servers down on a Friday, put Friday in the title. If you're pulling the servers down today, in 2 hours, put that in the title to get the word out. The title gives the overwealing impression that the Patch + Maintenance are on Jan 31st.

Overall, this is a fair point. Generally speaking, every Friday we post details of our upcoming maintenance period to give plenty of advance notice. Because of the timing of this patch, we thought it might be easier to roll both notices into one. We didn't feel the ambiguity was too extreme, as the upcoming patch was detailed up front, but I can see how it might have confused some. We'll improve.

As stated, the patch was deemed necessary and urgent enough to be rolled out on a Friday night/Saturday morning (Austin time). We didn't take this lightly, and don't expect or wish it to be a regular occurrence.

To those of you in Europe, I want you to know that we'll be discussing maintenance windows and how we can improve their timing this coming week. We may not have an update immediately (and not before the scheduled maintenance on January 31st) but we have been paying attention to your opinions.

Thanks again for the feedback - it helps us know where to improve.