I know there's a lot of sadness and frustration about the downtime, but I like to give companies like this the benefit of the doubt:
I doubt they just woke up today and said: You know, I think now is a fun time to do a database update.
More than likely an issue cropped up that necessitated a database update, and that failure to do so *now* would cause immediate problems (and therefore this could not be postponed). We would probably be a lot more annoyed if they choose to postpone till after the event and that resulted in data loss and we loose all our progress for 2 weeks :P
As for frustrations due to suddenness of downtime, and the length of the downtime. This is fair to be upset with and perhaps has more to do with the budget of BB than anything. If they had the budget of larger MMORPGs, they probably could afford to have multiple real time redundancies and parallel upgrades in place. They could have the correct staff & equipment in place to better forward-plan downtimes. But fair be fair, this *IS* a 'minor' game with a much more limited budget so things like this should be tolerated.
Now, if they make a habit of doing this every couple of months, then that would be cause for concern. But things like this are not that frequent.
On a final note about being able to complete achievements/etc. I am not sure, but I suspect that the time allowance given to complete the various tasks also take into consideration a couple days of downtime. I.e., they give us 21 days instead of 19 days so they can budget for 2 days downtime.
Worth noting, BB usually has a reputation of sending us goodies in mail to make up for the inconvenience. I wonder what they will send us this time? They may send us a noble patch?!
I do not think anyone really knows whether the fix(es) been applied today are critical or urgent but I would assume it could have been quite possible to wait 2 more weeks for the fix.
But, same as with many other things and decisions that I've seen in this game, it is amazing the lack of respect and consideration this company shows to their customers... as for the people 'approving' this action... no comment, just... wake up.
How are we supposed to kill all of the golems on our island? The event runs for 21 days and you need 20 days to kill the golems (18 hour respawn? We do have to sleep sometime BB) but with all the downtime we've lost 2-3 days already! Get it sorted! Either extend the event or drop the number of golems needed for the achievements.
Ok, so instead imagine you go to see a film. You don't own the film but you're paying for the use of it. Now halfway through they turn the projector for planned maintenance and tell you that it's ok, you can come back in 14 hours to see the rest of the film. Still loling?
It would seem sensible that, emergencies excepted, the minimum notice time should be equal to the maximum buff time. Fortunately my rainbows will run to within 2 hours of the projected time the game will be restored, totally through luck rather than judgement. Kudos to BB however, started my prem early confident of the fact that downtime would occur to extend it to the end of the event, should be nearly there now.
That assumes a player who's sleeping next to the keyboard. Try instead the player who only has a few hours each day to play. If this maintenance overlaps with the time (s)he could play, it's a day lost. The respawn time of 16 hours doesn't matter because the player won't be there in 16 hours. Instead of being able to do 21 Golems at best (and that's assuming someone who can play every day) it's now going to be 20. If even 1 other day is missed due to personal scheduling problems or perhaps another maintenance, it's 19 and 1 less achievement.
Personally I'm much more annoyed by the downtime we had a few days ago due to scheduled network stuff. If you're going to offer a paying web based service (and yes, some people pay for this game) the least you can do is make sure you have a fallback for those cases. You can't do without the database, but you can (temporarily) move to another datacenter with your service making any kind of maintenance to hardware not a valid excuse.
My rainbows also expire 2 hours after the planned downtime ends. I'm not feeling very confident tho, because this game has a history of downtimes being extended even multiple times.
Except that we don't play 24 hours a day! If you kill the golem when you first log in each day then, in all likelihood, it will be ready to kill again when you first log in the next day. In reality it still takes 1 day for each golem with a little wiggle room for what time you can log in but the idea of not sleeping for 3 weeks and getting 31 golems? Don't be ridiculous!
Last edited by MOD_Daz; 26.10.16 at 10:12.