Over the Juneteenth weekend I decided to catch up on upgrading my gathering gear in Final Fantasy XIV. With the help of 106 million gil in my purse, I was able to purchase all of the missing materials I needed to craft all 10 items of the Indagator's Set, the current best-in-slot set for gathering. But I didn't have time to craft the 5 gathering tools I needed to equip my mining, gathering, and fishing classes. Why? Downtime for a patch.
I really was spoiled by CCP's efforts to minimize downtime over the years. Yes, EVE Online still experiences a daily period of downtime of around 10 minutes, which is much better than the daily 60 minute downtime when I started playing in 2009. And if the devs manage to eliminate the daily downtime in their quest to build Project Awakening, so much the better. Because these 4-5 hour downtimes to install point patches in FFXIV gets old. And if I remember correctly, CCP didn't need 24 hours to deploy Viridian like Square Enix does to deploy expansions like Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Then again, FFXIV doesn't require daily downtimes either.
I've worked around tech long enough to know that when deploying new software kicking all the users off the system is useful to get everyone using the same version of the software. But I would like to see game developers try to take the visible steps CCP has in shrinking downtime to a minimum.
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