(09-03-2013, 03:24 PM)lady2beetle Wrote:(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.
Yeah, it's because the primary data center for the entire game is located in Japan and that the servers are in fact linked across. If it wasn't, you wouldn't be able to access the servers from EU and JP at launch, only US or whatever your region was.Â
Seeing as their master hub is in Japan but linked internationally it also relieves the stress of having to manually update (minus this time of course) servers when everything can be done remotely from the master hub. It's more cost effective that way.
For example, TERA Online has servers per region instead of a server hub, it's why the game in NA can only be played in NA & CAD, EU can only play with EU, Korea and Japan can play with one another due to closeness and have dual-servers.
FFXI was done the same way as FFXIV was done. And as you said, a compromise was done easier, hence why the weird timing to do maintenance. Also, for example, Balmung has PDT time if you look at time while in the game if it isn't set to ET or LT.
