Currently the weekly reset hits at 2am Monday morning for East Coast US, which is 6pm Monday afternoon in Australia I think. Is there a reason this is when it hits? Since it is after close of business for the devs, if there is an issue it could be quite a while before it can be addressed (that or the devs are forced to work late every Monday).
What if we moved it back 8 hours? Would make it 10 am for the devs, so closer to start of business instead, and if any issue happened they would be there to handle it. Would make it 4pm Sunday for the East Coast, allowing folks that have a normal job on Monday to get in a few hours after the change before going to bed instead of either staying up too late, or waiting until Monday night to try out new troop/event.
Would the higher active playerbase at that time put too much pressure on the servers?
We have it at that time because it’s the lowest concurrency of users for the day (about 35% of our peak concurrency which happens 10-12 hours later).
There’s 2 reasons that it’s a good time to do it then:
Our servers triple their activity during that period, which means it uses roughly the same resources as we would have at peak… which saves us a lot of expense.
If there is an issue (and as we all know, reset is a COMMON time for issues) it affects the minimum number of people possible.
We almost always have 2-3 people monitoring the changeover to fix problems. Sometimes (like last week) they’re not the correct people, and we have to contact someone for help, but mostly we can deal with any issues that crop up in a reasonably timely fashion
The downside is that we don’t have our CS (support) services available during that period, so players have to wait at least 18 hours for support responses, but at least we DO have enough technical people on call to fix the underlying issues.
Sounds very logical and I appreciate the answer! I figured server load figured into it, but I didn’t consider minimizing impact of issues as well. Like if wrong arcane stone(s), you want as few people as possible filling support tickets before it gets corrected.
Personally, the event starts for me at 5pm on a Monday afternoon after my first day back at work. I get to familiarize myself with the event during the day, then as I go home on the train, go hell for leather.
