What happened to the announcement!??

[LadyTerra]

Why didn't BB announce that the downtime this week was going to be a day early? Many of us do not start adventures that we think will go into downtime because that's how you lose resources.
I ended up having to rely on a partner to be able to finish an adventure that I was sure to complete on Wednesday, because the warning did not go out until late on Tuesday.
You have Twitter, Facebook, the main login page, the ingame login news, yet none of these mediums were used to warn players that maintenance was going to be 24 hours early.

Please do a better job about keeping your players informed of changes...and for crying out loud change the tip of the day log in news to reflect the delay in the "Easter" promotion.

[GingerBeer]

It was on the front page of the website

seemed pretty clear to me

[LadyTerra]

I ended up having to rely on a partner to be able to finish an adventure that I was sure to complete on Wednesday, because the warning did not go out until late on Tuesday.

I consider being well informed by announcing early downtime a full 24 hours in advance, not maybe 12

[GingerBeer]

Why didn't BB announce that the downtime this week was going to be a day early?

You have Twitter, Facebook, the main login page, the ingame login news, yet none of these mediums were used to warn players that maintenance was going to be 24 hours early.

I consider being well informed by announcing early downtime a full 24 hours in advance, not maybe 12

good to know we both agree now that they did announce it

[BB_Katealyst]

Hey LadyTerra,

Sorry that the announcement was not 24 hours in advanced. I generally try to get up a maintenance post 12 hours in advanced on the main homepage. The homepage message usually is the one up the longest, and we follow up with both a Facebook and Twitter reminder. Unfortunately, if we post earlier on some of these mediums a lot of players will forget about it. I have found posting a few hours in advanced on social media is good as a last minute reminder for a lot of players.

However, next time the maintenance changes from 'regular' maintenance time, I will try to get a post up earlier. In your opinion, if the maintenance is at a regular time, is 12 hours enough warning?

Let me know,

- Kate

[LadyTerra]

The problem Kate, is that experienced players now plan adventures around the scheduled maintenance. Too many of us have lost precious materials to interruptions in game play due to maintenance.
When the decision is made to do maintenance early, then an initial message should go out, via Facebook, Twitter and the log in page. Quite frankly, I don't land on the login page very long (though I saw it just briefly enough that Wednesday caught my eye), it would be better to have some kind of in-game message if things must be done on a moment's notice. You do this with the gem sale and with aggrevating frequency, I would think a better use of that interruption would be to let players know that maintenance will be early, plan accordingly.
I didn't lose anything this time, because I found a partner that pulled out all the stops to get the adventure done. This is not the kind of challenge I enjoy.

I don't need a reminder of regular maintenance, we are all used to Thursday downtime.

[BB_Katealyst]

Alright, I agree with you.

In the future if their is a maintenance that deviates from the standard time I will try to get messaging up earlier.

Thanks for the feedback! It is good to hear what can be improved, especially if it is something I personally control

-Kate

[bombcar]

Wouldn't it just be easier to make time not pass during maintenance? So if you have 5 hours left on a buff, and the servers go down for 4 hours, when they're back up you still have 5 hours remaining?

[Arismis]

That would be the logical thing to do were it possible.

[Dreamsfear]

Wouldn't it just be easier to make time not pass during maintenance? So if you have 5 hours left on a buff, and the servers go down for 4 hours, when they're back up you still have 5 hours remaining?

That's a double edged sword there. Not sure what kind of coding would go into it but lost time is lost production as well. I don't mind not being able to log in for a few hours but coming back and having the resources there over those hours is always a nice.