Hey folks, while I'm actually really happy to see a passionate discussion about this (and I am taking notes) on this, I must ask you to please not let this degrade into trolling/petty arguments as it does nothing but harm the message from both sides.
I do agree that I could have posted the news a bit earlier, unfortunately, I was delayed, so the blame for that falls at my feet, so to anyone that was affected by it, I am sorry and I'll do my best to get the times out sooner (as I get them).
Regarding US vs EU times and why it's so bad for the US server: the reason is actually rather simple - there is usually a need for one (or more) of the developers to be online to get the events/FAs going properly.
If we look at what 'Prime Time' is in the States, that would be 8pm to 11pm Eastern and Pacific or 7pm to 10pm Central and Mountain. (My assumption is that one of these time blocks is what most people would want to see the FAs launch in).
However, converted to CEST those times are:
The EDT Prime time is 2am to 5am,
PDT would be 5am to 8am
MDT would be 3am to 6am,
CT would be 2am to 5am
Essentially those are somewhat awkward times for someone living in Central Europe.
That said I again do agree with the sentiment of 'you've got US servers, so why don't you have US times' however solving that in a way that is ok for everyone is rather hard as there is only so much that we can (and I'm sure even legally) ask of our developers.
I'm sure that some of you would argue that the deployment could be automated, and I'm sure it could be, however, we've all seen what happened with tournament rewards in the past - those were automated and went out at around 2am CEST, but when there were issues, everyone had to wait until the next day to get them fixed. If that were to happy to the FAs then the mess that we'd have to solve would be far worse.
So - as I said, yes ideally we do need a better solution for US, however, there isn't really an easy one.
If anyone has any ideas, they're free to write it here (however, chances are that we've either tried it or we know it to be unfeasible - but there is no harm in a suggestion!)