Lack of information

[Fafhred]

Hi,

I was eventually able to start the game successfully last week; until then I had only been able to start it once a few years ago, created my character, but the game screen was garbled and the game unplayable; following attempts would not start the game at all, again (until now).

So, now I am eventually in, and this morning I was trying to make some progress when a message appeared saying that the server would shut down shortly.

I waited a bit, so far trying to start the game still displays:

=============================================================================
CONNECTION ERROR

Online service currently unavailable. please try again later or visit our forum for more
information.

[Retry] [Open forum]
=============================================================================

So, after a while I came to this forum; there is absolutely no information to be found about this shutdown...
Not what it is about, not how long it is expected to last...


Update:
This ( http://forum.pirategalaxy.com/viewtopic.php?f=248&t=28369 ) was posted while I was proceeding to forum registration and posting here, however that does not address my point.

 

[Necrofly]

Hello Fafhred,

Almost every Wednesday is “Maintenance Wednesday" for our Servers. At this time mayor updates and bug fixes will be done.
There will always be a note at our Homepage (http://pirategalaxy.com/en/) that the servers are currently under maintenance (right under the headline “Changelog”). As soon as this note is gone, the Servers are back online.

If you are still having problem to login, please contact us via the Support Homepage

 

[Fafhred]

Well, I did look there before looking on the forum, there was definitely not one at that time, so it must only have been placed some time AFTER the shutdown; at any rate that post does not mention duration either, I would not be surprised if it was only posted at the END of the downtime ...

Could I suggest a sticky on the forum is that is always the same day, time and duration, and/or amending the shutdown notice with an expected duration?
Veteran players would not need it, I expect, but that is something I usually see on other games, and new players would expect something like this.


About starting the game, the problem was never with logging in, what used to happen was probably with former versions of the game (before the horizontal load indication bar), which would never (except ONCE a bit over 2 years ago) finish loading.
So far in past week or so, all worked 100% of the time (I had not tried again for a long time).