Most people are asleep at 1am . people who have to work are up at 5am getting a little time in to play before the day begins but are interrupted at 5 am server downtime constitutes many of us I am sure.
I have no actually knowledge, but if it were me, I'd have looked at the figures for when the lowest number of players were logged in, ie minimum server load, and made that server down time. It's only down for 10 - 15 minutes these days anyway. Used to be much longer.
It's a good time to make another cup of coffee for me.
While 5AM might be more convenient for some time zones it can be much more inconvenient for some of the other 30+ time zones. Not everyone lives in the same time zone.
I thought it was around 5 am for that server time zone - since the Asian shards go down at 5 and 6 pm CST. I am one of those playing at 1am and there are many of us. It is a good time to catch up on everything that one is too busy to do during peak hours. An example would be; oh I don't know, like fill BODs for the trees.
Yes, the servers go down at 5:00AM server time for 15-30 minutes, depending on the amount of cache clean-up. It has literally been this way for the life of the game - 25+ years.
Thinking about it logically, it makes sense. The late night or all night gamers will be logging off to finally go to sleep and it's just before people are waking up to log in for the day (or for a bit of play before work).
It's really a nonissue, especially given that servers are only down for half an hour at most - and usually it's half that time anyway. Get up, get a cup of coffee, take a quick shower ...
~ Jennifer-Marie
"Insanity is a naturally occurring mutation; humanity has just managed to perfect it." -- JMK [[me]]
Does UO give an onscreen warning? Really it should. Did not know it went down nightly for that long a time. Agree not many are on at that time of the morning but that could be disastrous to the compulsive player that is on in certain situations.
Does UO give an onscreen warning? Really it should. Did not know it went down nightly for that long a time. Agree not many are on at that time of the morning but that could be disastrous to the compulsive player that is on in certain situations.
As Marge said, it does give a message in the corner of your screen that says "servers are about to go down please find a safe place". This is maybe 2-3 minutes before the shard goes offline. About 30 seconds before the server goes down you see another message that says something like "servers will be going down shortly"; this 30-60 second period between that second message and the server going down are the only revert. Most shards are only down 15min (I think Origin was only down like 8min the last time I was on during server maintenance).
We've actually come a very long way on the server maintenance. 20 years ago (my peak UO playing days) the message would pop up and it would be anywhere from 30-45min before the servers actually went down and revert back then was probably an hour before it actually went down. Once down though it would easily be 45min for maintenance if not more. It was to the point that I built chars on other shards to kill time.
It was always a guessing game of when things stopped saving (we really lost like 2 hours of play time) but that's when there were server wars and people would all gather at places like Brit Graveyard waiting for the message like a scene from the movie The Purge...once that message popped all hell broke loose...ahhh the good olll days!
Comments
"Insanity is a naturally occurring mutation; humanity has just managed to perfect it." -- JMK [[me]]
or
4 am eastern time zone middle of the night
"Insanity is a naturally occurring mutation; humanity has just managed to perfect it." -- JMK [[me]]
We've actually come a very long way on the server maintenance. 20 years ago (my peak UO playing days) the message would pop up and it would be anywhere from 30-45min before the servers actually went down and revert back then was probably an hour before it actually went down. Once down though it would easily be 45min for maintenance if not more. It was to the point that I built chars on other shards to kill time.
It was always a guessing game of when things stopped saving (we really lost like 2 hours of play time) but that's when there were server wars and people would all gather at places like Brit Graveyard waiting for the message like a scene from the movie The Purge...once that message popped all hell broke loose...ahhh the good olll days!