Patches/Fixes Schedules...

[lariva]

2 AM EST = 8 AM Paris time, now what exactly is the problem with starting to work at 8AM?

Maybe they don't want to be working at 2 AM!

They probably have a life (unlike a lot of us players!)

[zumwalt]

Also take into consideration that the US server farm is based in New York.
So that means they need people in the office in New York at 2am, people in the France office at 8am, if they wait 6 hours, which is what they do by starting around 1pm or 2pm France time, that is 7am, 8am EST, allowing people to get into the US office.

There really is no 'Magic Hour' anymore.

Edit:

I have a slightly different oppinion on it as it is, my oppinion stems from the fact I have a job that I work from 9am till 6pm EST, so I am hardly, if ever, effected by the down times.

Even if the server is down when I get home, I got other things to do, laundry, dishes, clean the house, watch tv, etc.

Call me odd, but the game being down is not the end of the world for me.

[xenofur]

just a sidenote: stop whining about your frigging patch times or maintenance times, every major patch we had was between 1200-2200 local time in germany and sometimes even longer

[zukor]

Also take into consideration that the US server farm is based in New York.
So that means they need people in the office in New York at 2am, people in the France office at 8am, if they wait 6 hours, which is what they do by starting around 1pm or 2pm France time, that is 7am, 8am EST, allowing people to get into the US office.

There really is no 'Magic Hour' anymore.

.......

Call me odd, but the game being down is not the end of the world for me.

Well, they already have GM's on duty 24/7. Since the main work related to the patch occurs in France, I'm not sure the availability of people in NY would make much difference.

Who said anything about the "end of the world"? People are just making suggestions for improvement. Don't read more into this then it deserves, or make unwarranted assumptions about others.

Doctor Z.

[zumwalt]

Z, 2am - 6am EST, will NOT happen, based on what I stated, regarless of the european time, its still AM time that is out of working hours.

The patches start during working hours for both Europe and US EST.

Any server patch that requires hands on, including in a server farm, requires them to have people onsite doing work, everything so far suggests they do it when all of the employees are at work in both countries.

There is no need to bring in US employees at 2am to start working on a patch, which is 7am Euro time, even if they started it at 8am euro, which is 3am est, that means the US crew has to be at work at 3am, and work through 5 hours of overtime before they get to there normal shift.

Its just not going to happen.

[zukor]

just a sidenote: stop whining about your frigging patch times or maintenance times, every major patch we had was between 1200-2200 local time in germany and sometimes even longer

As I said above, changing the "patch time" would benefit those in Europe just as much as those in the US.

I can't understand why you guys are down for 10 hours or more every patch, including prime gaming time. I would consider that worth complaining about. You may think that customer service isn't all that important, but with so many MMO's out and more just around the corner, people can and will go elsewhere over issues like this. It's simply good business practice for Nevrax to put the customer first whenever they can.

Doctor Z.

[zukor]

Z, 2am - 6am EST, will NOT happen, based on what I stated, regarless of the european time, its still AM time that is out of working hours.

The patches start during working hours for both Europe and US EST.

Any server patch that requires hands on, including in a server farm, requires them to have people onsite doing work, everything so far suggests they do it when all of the employees are at work in both countries.

There is no need to bring in US employees at 2am to start working on a patch, which is 7am Euro time, even if they started it at 8am euro, which is 3am est, that means the US crew has to be at work at 3am, and work through 5 hours of overtime before they get to there normal shift.

Its just not going to happen.

Well, we're both making lots of assumptions here, so I'm not sure how much further I should go with this. Assuming your reasoning about needing extra people at the US server during patch times (beyond the GM's already at work), the current patch times are around 6A to 10A or noon EST. Thus, even if your assumption holds true, which I doubt, you already are putting in two hours of "overtime" times however many employees are needed. So what we are talking about is shifting things so that 2-4 more hours of "overtime" (if that's even how these people are contracted) is required, multiplied by the number of extra people needed for the single server during the patch.

Is that really such a big deal, compared to providing better customer service? And again, this is making many assumptions, some of which are probably not true. My guess is that it wouldn't cost them anything extra to shift the patch time to 2A EST.

Doctor Z.

[zumwalt]

Well, you are right, we are both making assumptions, I am making financial assumptions, and thinking logically why they would start the patches after 8am EST when the US crew is physically at the site.

The highest playablilty of the server would be if it was a mirrored farm, meaning that one farm is always up, the other idle, when one goes down it is just a hickup of time to re-login, since its mirrored, your toon is updated on ever save on both systems.

Farm meaning more than say, 5 servers for 1 set, the NA server farm, I am assuming is more than 10 machines working together.

This way, when a patch occurs, they patch one machine farm, kill everyone off, set the login server to point to the patched farm, and then patch the unpatched farm, wala, speedy, and 99.9% available, no 10 hour downtime.

This is both time and money.

They don't even have a customer support phone number for anyone to call, no mater what country you live in, this is the biggest inconvienence of all, and they haven't fixed it.

ALL other MMO's out there have a corporate headquarters, with billing, CS, etc phone numbers to call, Ryzom is the only one I know of without this most basic customer support system.

We have Klient thats it.

Yes, its great to suggest a change in patch time, but I am assuming it won't happen.

[plarfman]

ummmmmm does it even really matter when they patch it its not like your life is going to end because its down. I dont think there going to change there employees scheduals to make you happy just a thought.

[paradise]

I dont think there going to change there employees scheduals to make you happy just a thought.

Really? If I had a company in a highly competitive business, I would ask my employees to change their schedules to make my customers happy. But that is just me.