Update Schedule

What to expect each week
FFBE is regularly updated with new content, which may include new units to pull for, new story missions, new bonus quests inside the Dimensional Vortex, both permanent and temporary, new character or ability awakenings, and occasionally even new modes of play. Along with these substantive updates, bug fixes and minor corrections are also pushed out on a regular basis. FFBE uses a weekly schedule that doesn't vary much, for the most part:

Tuesday/Wednesday
Update: Tuesdays used to be when when your Bulletin Board would get announcements explaining the upcoming new content for that week. However, Wednesday or Thursday is now much more common.

Possible variations:
 * Once in a while, the announcements do still appear on Tuesday.
 * There may be as few as 2 announcements on the bulletin board, or as many as 6 (and potentially even more). In addition, the game has occasionally been known to roll out announcements in two parts, or to re-publish them after you have already looked at them. If the announcements seem small or underwhelming, check again later.

Wednesday
Wednesdays are when the weekly update patch is applied, every week, with no exceptions. On the west coast, scheduled maintenance to apply the patch begins at 10 PM on Wednesday night and continues until roughly 7 AM Thursday morning. After 10 PM on Wednesdays, you will not be able to play FFBE until the next morning.

Note: Occasionally, the patch doesn't apply properly, and the game can experience crashes and server kicks on Thursday (and sometimes even Friday). Any week that a serious issue in this vein arises, Gumi (the game's publishers in America) will handsomely compensate all players once they have fixed it, often with a substantial amount of Lapis, so there's actually a silver lining to such bugs.

Thursday
On Thursday mornings, the update patch finishes, and normally, players can log back in and begin to play as normal. Announcements will also be available to read, if they weren't available before. However, '''most of the content from each update does not go live until Friday. '''This gives the support team one more day to feel out potential bugs and compatibility issues.

Thursday is the "waiting day," where the content is present, but can't yet be accessed. It can be irritating if you're excited for a given week's updates. It is also often the next-to-last day for limited-time Vortex missions from 2 updates ago, so if there are any more rewards from those quests you haven't gotten yet, Thursday is the ideal day to go after them.

Note: Unlike new missions and unit summons, the minor aspects of the weekly update, such as bug fixes and new ability awakenings, do typically go live on Thursday.

Friday
Friday is the big day for each week's update. Starting Friday morning at 1:00 AM PAcific time, the new missions, bosses, and units announced on Tuesday will be available to all players. They will continue to be available for a limited time, typically 2 weeks. Thusly, Friday is also the last day for limited-time missions and events from 2 weeks ago. Furthermore, any "weekend quest" (so labeled in the bulletin board updates list) that might be available will start Friday, and be available through Sunday (and sometimes into Monday a little).

Other things to know about weekly updates

 * For the most part, the new units on offer to summon each week will still be available to summon after the 2-week event period ends; however, during the event period, attempting to summon them from their specific summon banner will grant you an increased chance of getting them. After that, they go into the regular mix of all available units.
 * The exception to the above is the event-limited unit, which is only available during its associated event, and is then gone from the gacha summoning pool for good. Units related to major holidays, such as Halloween, Christmas, Lunar New Year, and Valentine's Day units, typically fall into this category, but sometimes, other event units do as well. Read the bulletin board entry for the unit banner, or the character desciptions inside the unit banner itself, to discern whether or not the featured characters are event-limited.
 * Though a majority of Vortex event updates each week have a time limit, some do not. To tell which type is which, read the bulletin board entries for each event update, and see where in the Vortex it appears. Quests available "in the Dimensional Vortex" are usually limited-time events, whereas those available in the "Chamber of the Fallen" or the "Vortex of Desires" are permanent additions.
 * Anything labeled a "weekend quest" is available periodically, and will return in a month or two at most.
 * Continuations of the main story are always permanent additions, and will appear on the world map (rather than in the Vortex) once you have progressed through the rest of the story thus far.