Game maintenance is conducted every day at 12:00am Eastern, various maintenance routines are run to fine tune and tweak the game database for optimal performance for the rest of the day.
Between 12:00 to 12:10 you will not be able to play the game, but chat may work. Previously the server was also rebooted as part of maintenance but we are going to try it without the reboots for a while.
Further more to ensure that active and paid players receive the best possible performance inactive characters on unpaid accounts which have not been played for the last 60 days are routinely deleted during Sunday maintenance. Paid accounts are exempt from character and account maintenance.
We now conduct one daily game backup at 12:05 am during standard maintenance instead of 6 times a day like we were doing before.