My natural gaming availability is 8:45pm to about 10:30pm, and ad-hoc times apart from that. I might log in; tinker; get called away; come back again. Timing has also restricted my WoW raiding, with the family resigning to be largely one member less on a Friday night for my raid. In a game without a pause button, one thing that does lend itself well to ad-hoc playing is crafting and auctioning. I think that is where my I started my goldmaking career - finding an activity to suit my availability.
EVE's scheduled shutdown starts at 9pm local time (Australian Eastern Standard time). Having a scheduled 1/2 hour every night not being able to play during my peak game time put me off.
I find it annoying being kicked off when I want to play; but the actual downtime is rarely the full half hour; with this evening being more like 15 minutes. I have in part rescheduled some of my available time to fit into the game time. It isn't as disrupting as I feared, but it is disrupting.
One thing that MMO's do is encourage you to log in regularly, and give you things to do to stay logged in. Server maintenance disrupts that. Eve gives players in our timezone a disadvantage. Then when Daylight savings comes around, it disadvantages a different set of players. (There are also advantages but today I am whining)
Imagine you were an MMO player who has a preferred playtime was during WoW's regular shutdown - you simply would choose a different game other than WoW. In Eve: for the adults on the Australian eastern seaboard; the players in Hong Kong (and probably the teenagers in Western Australia
Now I work in I.T. I fully understand the requirement for restarting servers, and in theory understand some of what they do during shutdown. I also dislike whining for the sake of it.
Today's post describes what my problem is. Future posts (coming soon) describe:
- technically what happens during a (generic) shutdown, and how to work around it; and
- how to sell it to an Eve population.
I tend to kick off some invention jobs before downtime, precisely so I can kid myself that I'm getting something done between 9 and 930pm ;(
ReplyDeleteI don't mind it. Generally use it as a reminder for me to go to bed (New Zealand).
ReplyDeleteI have more luck then, in Europe the maintenance is at lunch time, from 12:00 to 12:30, so I am usually at work during weeks days, or at weekend, getting ready to lunch.
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