Why do mmos have downtime

What is the purpose of MMO "maintenance"? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 6 months ago. Active 4 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 10k times. What goes on during it, and why is it necessary?

Improve this question. Nick T Nick T It's to give people that play MMO's obsessively a few hours to have a real life. Mark or a few hours to sleep — Xantec. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. It's also a question of cost and predictability. Improve this answer. In regards to non-regular maintenance, FFXI actually does this really well.

Emergency maintenance obviously happens when it happens, but regular maintenance is scheduled and announced weeks in advance. People generally are happy with it and not taken by surprise unless they're totally oblivious , and the upside is that we only have a few hours of maintenance every weeks or so!

I was about to make a comment on FFXI as well. There general is no weekly maintenance. Less users means less data generated and less to purge. Community Bot 1. Khez Khez 1 1 gold badge 4 4 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges.

Wouldn't backup be software point of view? Or maybe both if it involves setting up new HDs? After all data is software To OP, im not sure what you would want to change. Do you want more time between everything? Because in my experience most people want even less downtime. What a lot of people appear to want is rather contradictory. They say they want to play the game, but then they say they want to spend less time playing it shorter quests…etc.

Could it not be people in fact want the endless tedium of, say, dailies to be over sooner? Well, I said if more downtime was introduced there would be a need to reduce the number of quests to compensate. The result would be about the same amount of time doing daily chores. Read my post why I think not being engaged in combat is very important for this genre. It would also be variation. I mean how many people say they enjoy killing non-elite mobs in the current game?

Endlessly fighting mobs, it seems to me, seems rather boring and undynamic as far as an average game session is concerned. This is why I prefer the old game more. That is, you spend 10 mins constantly killing. Now you have no mana, but you too are a bit tired from watching your rotation, enemy casts, buffs, debuffs, CDs, now you get to rest 30 secs along with your toon.

Uh oh, Fel Reaver is close by! You react too late, and the tin can bashes your face in in 2 hits. I do hope we continue on this, so I can keep killing normal mobs and dying to the big bad elite that wanders in to laugh at my low hp.

I mean on average is the opinion of the MMO genre really that rosey? But I agree with your sentiments about down time. Firstly regarding navigating the world by fighting the terrain and fighting mobs every 10 yards. There is no exploring or just looking around there is no time to simply look around.

Another thing about down time is with WQs, Callings, Paragon chests and even worse with the constant gear treadmill is there no sense of completion. Back with Netherwing you reached exalted, bought your Nether proto-drake and moved on, you were done. I am also well aware this won't change anything, I'm just interested to see what other's think.

They are a new company to mmo's. It may take some time but they will get there. April Its a fledgeling game. They are going to need to maintenance. Last time I checked, blizzard brings its games down for maintenance. I'm sure all other MMOs do Wait a second. I'm feeding. They could just as easily apply no patches, fixes,resets, not ban gold farmers and spammers, not address serious issues etc. I doubt that we will see the tech to patch a game while playing it anytime soon, as that would mean the data that you are currently using would be changing as you are using it.

Even the bigger games have to at the very least do server resets. My 2 copper. The game is still a new born babe, and that being said its got a lot of stumbling to do before it starts walking. That which we obtain to cheap we esteem to lightly, it is dearness only that gives everything its value.

It's one thing that has never bothered me. They need to do it and I have yet to find an MMO that doesn't have downtime. If they didn't hug the servers and tell them everything is going to be alright people would complain when things go horribly wrong and the servers crash and burn.

To Op. It sounds like you'd rather have a broken game full of bugs Hmm perhaps the new version of Darkfall would be more suitable for you. Nothing to do with the game being new as such, that only affects the irregularity.

Everything needs maintaining. When you get a car, will you be complaining that you can't drive it while it's being serviced? The maintenance today was done at during off peak playing times for most of the playerbases and ensures that the game is working much better when we are able to logon.

MMO PvE veteran looking for suitable guild: forums. Well all the left over monkeys from the banned cheaters and hackers are clogging up the server, they have to take it down and upload more bannanas to keep them from destroying the whole game, we wouldnt have maintenance if it wasnt for the gold sellers, hackers and cheaters, so blame them not ZOS I view the downtime as something I'm paying for.

I think a better example would be that you buy a new car, you're told the car is going to have to go in for maintenance regularly check-ups and oil changes , and that they'll provide some upgrades to the car as well. During these check-ups and all your car is going to be unavailable for you to drive..

Aside from that, software doesn't work like a car.. They need to come down for maintenance. Every MMO does it at least once a week, and the only other MMO I know of that's been released recently actually tends to have downtime more than once a week as well and it's been out for six months now.

I think your expectations for MMOs may be too high if you're expecting no down time, regardless of sub or F2P.