<rant>

A 24-hour update, then another 5hr 15min maintenance, followed by Steam integration issue which took another.. what.. 3 hours..?!?! wow..!!! For me, I've tried to avoid Steam as much as I can, I've seen other games experience integration issues with Steam in the past, so a native, direct game launcher is a much safer option usually.  That said, who's going to compensate me for the almost 30 hours of wasted time on my Value Pack, Kamasylve and Old Moon buffs..?? (I don't use Steam so at least it's not a total of 33hrs wasted buffs) I was hoping to fire up the game and set it to afk lifeskilling before I headed off to the office.  Well, no such luck this morning.!!  IMO, VP/Kama/Old Moon buffs should automatically stop counting down whenever the game is undergoing maintenance (including Steam related issues for players that use Steam to log in).!!

Then, I got home, logged into the game, tried to set up the UI (my own bad for forgetting to export whatever from the previous client).  The changes were not that many.  But again, I can't seem to get the UI to even save the targetting reticule's position AND the fact that I have my camera zoomed out to the maximum from my character to anywhere.!! THOSE 2 items are what I deem as necessary for me.  Also, there is STILL no way to change the font size of the chat input box..?!?! Seriously..?!?!

Also, attempted to set the region and language settings to English only but still seeing Thai in the chat.  Sure, if you want to allow those messages to be broadcasted to all players (probably via UDP), fine, but at least auto-translate it to the player's client language settings..?? same goes for Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia..!!! either translate them to the target client's language setting or not display them at all.

In this day and age, I'm still surprised that there is still a need for 'downtime' for maintenance, given the improvements in server/distributed/cloud computing technologies compared to 10 yrs ago.  Patches/Updates ought to be just streamed to the player's machine if they are already logged in to the game, without impacting the player's gameplay experience.  And to apply a new patch after it has been streamed to the player, all the player need to do ought to be a 'simple' refresh (much like running the ~nix command 'source cshrc' at the prompt to apply patches) from within the game without having to log out or exit from the game.  If they are not online in the game, they can then choose to download the patch/upgrade prior to starting the game, which is then immediately applied.

Also, the full patch notes ought to be made available at least 24 hours before the maintenance even begins, not after.

#maintenancefail

</rant>

Also, after going through the different announcements, we have:

Followed by:

AND you have this clause in the additional notes section of BOTH the Hot Time events:

So, tell me, what is the point of having BOTH Hot Time Events concurrently when they DON'T STACK..??? Kind of silly IMO

#yetanotherfail

and it seems like they also completely left out the option to change font so ...
#yetanotherfail