Players were shocked by unexpected downtime last night right in the middle of Friday night/ Saturday morning gameplay for SWTOR. The forums went down, too, meaning frustrated players couldn’t even go rage about why they were kicked off their favorite game. Some took to Twitter to complain about it while we awaited the return of the servers and an explanation as to what had happened.
A forum post explained it earlier in the day but few people caught it. Most of us were informed of the server shut down by the in-game notifications as we were playing. That post on the Official forums goes onto explain the upcoming scheduled maintenance:
Date: Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)
All game servers and swtor.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours.
Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.
Read more at SWTOR forums.
So what was the reason for this peak playtime shut down? The patch notes explain that it was to roll out a service restart to address players having issues with getting booted to the character select screen while trying to play. So this can be considered a game-breaking bug for those who were affected so good for BioWare for being on the ball with a fix right away. It’s too bad those not affected by the bug still had to suffer with the downtime but alas, that’s how it goes sometimes!
