There has been a fair amount of comments & questions in this thread on why we are looking at downtime; what’s the problem with a few minutes each day.
The first problem is that it interrupts primary play sessions for players in Asia and Oceania. Downtime at 11 o’clock EVE Time doesn’t affect Europe that much and doesn’t really affect the Americas at all. I covered this in detail in my 2019 dev blog on No Downtime Vol. 1 and the various options if downtime was not at 11 o’clock.
The second problem is that this is a larger impact than a few minutes. Shortly before downtime players start looking at the clock, trying to figure out if they have time before downtime to complete more of what they are doing. For example, can they run one more mission? We see this clearly on the online graphs that the population starts to dip around 10 o’clock and then it takes a while for players to start logging in again. It should look like the red line:
At the very extreme it can be argued that some impact of this daily reboot lasts from 09:40 until 13:20, i.e., from the pre-downtime peak until the population reaches the levels it would have been at if the play session had not been interrupted, or 3 hours and 40 minutes. Complicating this simplistic analysis of course are that players in Asia and Oceania would normally be starting to log off anyway in this period and 11 o’clock EVE Time is noon/lunch time on mainland Europe and people would log out to grab something to eat. We only have one datapoint on the uninterrupted play session, from Vol. 1 of this experiment in 2019, and this Vol. 2 experiment now will tell us more.