I don’t claim to know why the maintenance period has been extended so many times in this instance, but I believe this is the second time during patch windows that maintenance windows have had to be extended. To me, this is an indicator that the patch isn’t stable enough to go live, and for good reason. The builds we get in global Lost Ark are Frankenstein versions of recent UI elements and years old content. It’s very unlikely that the game is built in such a way that these elements are modular and can easily be pieced together. It requires a lot of dev work and testing, and increases risk of bugs/complete malfunctions like I assume is currently happening during this maintenance window. It’s unclear if the Western version of Lost Ark is planned to catch up to the Korean version, but the sooner it does, the less likely us players will experience heavy dissat from these unexpected outages.
I don’t know whether it is AGS that wants to slow down global version progress (to squeeze out monetary gain from slower release cycles) or SG that wants to slow it down (to allow flex for content development), but both parties stand to gain from this with AGS having more stable live operations and SG having to do less rework in order to support more builds of the same game. And players have been crying for this as the gap between HVykas (1460) and Clown (1475) does not justify the 2 month wait, especially since the normal release timeframes in other versions of the game were actually shorter than 2 months.
I understand that there are a lot of moving parts that would affect the rate of release and whether we would ever catch up to KR, but if this does not already have significant weight in these decisions, please carefully consider the strain these different builds put on all stakeholders in this game, especially during these strenuous times when they don’t work out.