shuting down

i really wished you all would shut down late at night when traffic is at it lowest we pay good money to play and with the land and bizz we have and it really mess up things when you do it on a reg bizz day i love the game and love what you guys are doing but please spend a little extra money to pay your staff to come in on like a sunday night to do all these updates. you all make thousands and thousands of dollars a day so you can afford to do this.

I'll gladly second that motion, great idea

Problem with your request is...Night in what 'timeline'. Currently, SL always downed for update very Wednesday night to me already. And sunday night by US timeline would be monday morning in the opposite side of the world, which I'm sure will be someone's weekend as well.

What are they even updating? None of the features in the changes seem to me to be anything besides a client-side change =S

Registration process, I know. I'll go looking for update details.

As for updating on a Wednesday:
EVERYONE KNOWS IT'S WEDNESDAY, therefor no need to annouce three weeks ahead of time "oh, yeah, the grid will be down on Thursday, June 29th 8:30pm SLT, so please plan your events and sceduals around that."

Instead, expecte every Wednesday 'morning' to be a potential update day and to plan events, etc. around that.

Would you go in to work at 2 AM?

I have many times before...

This IS something I have always wondered about...it would seem to be shooting yourself in the foot. They aren't making any money during this down time...so why make it during the day when people want to be in SL, why not make it the middle of the night (SL time) when fewer people would be in SL in the first place? Other games (MMORPGs) do theirs from midnight - 6am at whatever is local time to them. I have always wondered why Linden Labs chooses to do theirs during the business day...

1) Because then they don't have to pay their employees for being up at ungodly hours of the morning (midnight in Seattle)
2) Because back when they set the scedual, they didn't have the money to do #1 (very small paying userbase)
3) If they plan to have SL being used widely all over the world, there is no "valley" of useage for when people want to be on and working. So...
4) If there is no "best time" then might as well make it at a "reasonable time" for the people doing the work.

1. They probably already have some employees up at those hours...

2. Boy do they now...

3. In business it pays to cater to the largest base...something they already do in SL. For instance, a friend of mine has had his land completely and totally walled in by a casino buying all the land around him and putting up walls around his land making it look like it's just an advertizing sign for the casino. The guy that owns the casino pays a lot in fees to Linden Labs, my friend pays much less. Linden Labs response to the complaints of my friend were to tell the casino to make the walls phantom so people could still fly through them and get to the land inside...even if they couldn't see it and no one had any idea it was in there. Following this "business plan", the time zones favored by a midnight - 6am SLT update are the ones with the most users of SL...cater to where the money comes from.

4. The work is done long before the actual install. The grid is taken down to do the install. True, there have to be people doing it and monitoring it, but not a huge team of employees, a small team will do nicely. I would have thought the dent in the revenue stream from doing it during business hours would have been enough to warrant doing it in the wee hours of the morning. Other businesses have found that to be the case...I merely wondered why LL didn't.

No in business it caters to have a target audience for your service and to profitably run your company. Their target audience is the people who are willing to recognize this is a recurring downtime for scheduled maintenance that does NOT need to be explciitely stated. This is a KNOWN update time.

Its a recurring issue because the feature list is not static in SL. They are not like other online MMOs where the only new feature in a system is 'yet another' class which uses the same code but is an extra database entry. Its not just another few monsters (using the same code). Its not just more weapons (using the same code). Its not just (insert other feature that is not a real SYSTEM udpate).

During these hours the company has the most staff available at a given time in order to do the required testing. After completion it will immediately have the highest user base back in game as a stressor incase something minor comes up.

Lastly when it comes down to it there isnt really THAT much difference in the concurrent user base at random hours. There are slightly slower times but its not significant. Schedule yourself around this issue because its a fact of the system.