@Juji Just a observation. You always say like 4 hours and change for the updates but if i look back. They never have been within that time limit. Restart and stuff sometimes.
Have you guys ever think of a test server before such a big patch.
Yes this costs money and you have to explain it to the higher up. this is the easy part, make analysis of how much nccoin you usually sell after such a big patch (people are eager to play and pay). Take the average of that and per hour and explain how much they are loosing per hour the game is not up. Thinking it is easily a couple thousand dollars. AWS cloud server cost less than that and price is based on the load you use.
Second part talk to your devs (meaning the people who make the game coding wise). if they say everytime 4 hours and they fail everyime to do that because of 'unforseen' some reflection is in place. But since the game is so old and the dev crew is probably used to doing things their way it might be a though talk.
l2 is a good game, you just need to get things for a nice smooth cicd deployment and QA. moeny can be saved and money can be made with this,