(09-03-2013, 03:17 PM)Lost River Wrote: Mmn, it's more complicated than that, they're doing the upgrade digitally remotely, the physical changing of a server is being done in the US. It's a combination of both. Hence the long hours.
For example, Funcom has multi-national servers that their server nodes are all over the world including the US. Bouncing the server capacity across the seas to allow someone to exist on the same server as the other without sacrificing isn't something different. They're just linking across the world.
That makes sense. I've always wondered if the US data center is on the west coast because they really like to post updates in PDT time.
However, it seems to me that this answers the question about 'why then'. You would theoretically want to do it at night, for the US and UK. To me, starting at 5 PDT is early, not late, because it starts right at prime time. However, if they are also having to handle the update from Japan, you wouldn't want it any later. So, this is probably their best attempt at a compromise for both groups of employees.