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World of Warcraft Tuesday Maintenance A Thing of the Past
1up has the news that Tuesday maintenance will no longer be the way of the future for World of Warcraft. This is a big change from the weekly several-hour downtime that the company has used for the past two years. From the official post: "In the upcoming weeks, we will be testing the effect of a live maintenance, where regular maintenance tasks are run during off-peak with realms live. On Tuesday, December 26 there will be no scheduled downtime for weekly maintenance. We will perform all necessary maintenance tasks while the realms are live. We are anticipating the possibility that we may need to perform rolling restarts off-peak if we find that a realm restart is necessary; however the downtime for each realm would be less than 10 minutes if it was required." Is this really that big a deal? I know that the timeframe had to be inconvenient for EU players on the U.S. servers, but was a couple of hours of downtime early in a workday really such a burden?
I myself do not play, but a lot of my coworkers in Japan complain about the downtime... It happens after work over here...
But if anyone is seriously angry about this, then they should stop playing. No one is forcing them to pay money.
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I bet a hundred bucks that deep-vein thrombosis incidence mortality rates jump at least 500% in the unemployed 16 to 24-year-old demographic in the next month.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I play 2-3 hours every day and here in Europe, the mantainence day is wednesdays. While it's not a big deal a 2-3 hours pause in the servers, very often those breaks are 8-10 hours breaks (dunno the reason, some technical problems with the patches, I guess). So practically every wednesday is a lost day for WoW players. I'm not a compulsive WoW player, but WoW is a service and if you have the habit of playing some time at evening like I do, it is an annoyment to suffer those breaks.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I'm sorry, but Blizzard having had to reboot the servers for 2 whole years now was very bad coding on Blizzard's part. Imagine if you had to reboot the servers at your job everyday? I doubt they would be around long.
I am looking forward to seeing whether or not this works.
I am not entirely optimistic. I mean, yes, it'll be more convenient... Except for the part where you can no longer SCHEDULE for server resets.
"Oh, sorry, were you 95% done with MC? I guess you'll have to go back."
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Often the downtime was a lot longer than it was supposed to be. Usually it meant not playing the game for an entire day, and patch days were even WORSE. Now, of course, I've quit WoW to focus on school but I was part of the WoW craze too. Don't knock it until you've tried it, it can be rather addicting. Besides, people are paying $15 per month for the game, some people would like to take advantage of that as much as possible.
The Tuesday outages basically meant a short night of playing for me as I live in Hawaii. Because of the time zone difference, I played with a lot more New Zealand and Australian gamers than with US based ones. For them the outage came a lot earlier in the evening.
So while it wasn't a huge deal - it was irritating if you forgot that it was maintenance night and had something planned.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
One of the biggest production systems in the world no longer needs weekly reboots, I'd say that's a pretty big deal, technologically if nothing else. In Beta there was no weekly downtime, but when the game went live they fought serious scalability issues and thus began the weekly reboot. I don't know about the rest of you, but several hours each week != the 5-nines availability that I expect from machines I administer, so I've always found Blizzard's weekly downtime a copout, and an embarrassment.
rooooar
I know that that have always been tons of people complaining about down-time, more often when it's a few hours late. These people will not stop complaining; they will simply find something else to complain about. You see, when your very life exists around World of Warcraft, any break in service will cause a panic reaction-- and they people are the loudest of the bunch.
I'm not saying that every World of Warcraft player is an addict, but the people having a normal enjoyable time usually don't jump on the forums the second something is up.
Hardcore players used it to resupply their homes and get the minimal amount of sun needed to survive.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
They're testing the possibility... NOT moving in this direction yet. They are most certainly not (yet) a thing of the past. Very poor choice of words for the title.
And besides, one day a week, good grief. That's not that big of a deal. The same kids complaining are the ones that whined when their parents told them to go outside and play instead of sitting in front of the television. Everyone knows to expect this - it isn't a surprise and it isn't something new. No guild worth its salt plans a raid for Tuesdays. And no regular player expects to have complete, uninterrupted gameplay on Tuesdays either.
It was poorly timed for those in Hawaii (and for the Australians that played on the US servers). Personally, I'm going to miss it. I loved getting online before work and getting in a last bid in the Auction House before the shutdown.
With "10 minute" reboots, though, things'll get worse. They'll be unplanned (so you can't plan your raids around them) and everyone will spam the chat channels constantly complaining about how awful Blizzard is (while still giving them money every month).
I was getting pretty edgy with only 166 hours of Warcraft a week.
My Bank here in Sweden would be available 24/4. But alas, they go "offline" a couple of hours EVERYDAY. Granted, it is after midnight, but it stills seems cheap that a major online bank cannot operate 24/7. What is this, the 90's?
A lot of people seem to think that the maintenance periods we have had in the past were just for a reboot. Not true. WoW realm restarts take a few minutes, this is hours of offline time for database maintenance ect. The ability to run those tasks with the realms online is a great step forward. My only concern is that it will generate lag during the online maintenance time (my 'peak' time, due to living in Australia), but honestly, it would only be in the time that the realm would otherwise have been offline.
I don't understand why they need so much downtime, I play another mmorpg, and downtime is rare, usually once every other month, and never for too long.
Unless they add a significant amount of content every week, they shouldn't have to do that, and if they add a minor amount of content, they should do it once a month instead as a bigger package. While wow has several times the amount of subscriptions as the mmorpg I play, there are less people per server at any given time in a wow server, so it can't be a scaling issue, unless several "servers" run off the same set of machines. I also hear from my friends things like servers being full, wait lists and such. I think this shouldn't happen in any mmorpg, especially one that probably has a higher budget and profit than most.
While wow may be superior than most in content/game play, from my point of view, the handling of servers could of been done better, but in the end it only really matters to addicts, not the casual player (blizzard's target market I hear).
I'm not knocking wow, from the looks of it, it's an excellent game, and aside from the minor technical issues with downtime and servers being full, it does look like a good game, planning on using a 15day trial dvd during winter break after new years to give it a whirl.
Last time I checked, it said "News for Nerds" at the top of this page. Why not write up the technical reasons why it's happening? Is it rebuilding indexes on some crappy MySQL servers that we can laugh at? Is it applying weekly Microsoft patches to servers? I've never played the game so from my perspective, it seems absurd that the game has to shut down on a weekly basis. I just got finished playing OGame (see sig), and all hell broke loose if the servers ever went down (which they did on occasion, but it wasn't weekly... it was like once a year).
Couple of hours during the workday you say ?
Ok, let me explain my pov first. I've played MMORPG's since Ruins Of Kunark release (first expansion to Everquest 1).. Since then i've played Eq2, Uo, Daoc, AO, SWG, many betas - same games which never came out, some that did. Basicly i've have had subscription to some mmorpg spanning for a quite a long time and, to wow, since its release in europe.
And i have to say one thing.
BLIZZARD AND THEIR PATCH ETA'S ARE HUGE JOKE! Content patches, no matter what they promise, the servers are never ever ever back online when i get back home from work and i live on +2h timezone from servertime. Also, they promise one eta and then 1-1.5 hours later after that said eta (well, its not estimated for no reason, but still) they inform that there's new eta but they cannot promise anything and then list few servers that are affected. Which is nice. But would be better if they just would include all the servers because, if something goes fscked up, all the "up" servers are equally fscked up because of the server loads or something else.
So, if this actually works. Yey for blizzard. but in the meantime, i wont be holding my breath for servers to come back online...
yush
For some it was, for others it wasn't, but that's not the point.
The point is that downtime at ANY time of the day is inappropriate in a global service in this day and age, since it's always prime time for somebody somewhere. Lots of people play on "foreign" servers, because that's where their friends are.
Many other MMOGs have now eliminated patch-update downtime in favor of continuous background updates, and their maintenance is typically fully transparent: "We're doing scheduled maintenance at hour XX-YY GMT, but you're unlikely to notice anything". Another MMOG I'm currently playing is like that, very slick --- the only time I ever noticed the service being down was when they were moving their huge data center lock stock and barrel to a larger site. And there is never any downtime for new expansions.
Far from "Does it matter?", this is very welcome news from Blizzard indeed. It's about time.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Every tuesday morning I'm forced to actually get work done. Until the servers come back up, that is.
That's the only time I stop playing long enough to actually use the bathroom. Do I have to wait until the next server crash to take a dump?
GAH! I feel like throwing my head against a brick wall after reading "I know that the timeframe had to be inconvenient for EU players on the U.S. servers"
Yes, it's all very well-and-good for you people in America. You don't see downtime. I'm happy for you. Really.
But (and this may come as a surprise to the story poster), there are more then just US and EU people in the world.
Welcome to my little part of the world. Oceania. We are spread out roughfuly between GMT+8 and GMT+12 and cover such countries as Australia and New Zealand. Maybe you've heard of them before?
Unlike the EU (and the US), who have their own nice little servers 30ms away - us Oceanic people are OBLIGATED to use the US servers, located in the US, a not-so-small 450ms jump over the Pacific Ocean.
After a year or so of Oceanic people throwing their heads into a wall, Blizzard decided to make a couple of "Oceanic" servers.
The server time on these machines where set to GMT+10, and gave rise the the ability of playing at the same time as everyone else. Sadly, these severs continue to be hosted in the US - still 450ms away.
But the other small issue is that Blizzard runs their weekly-maintenance at the same time as the US servers.
When I say "same time", I don't mean, "3am" which means a different physical time because the server time is set to GMT+10. What I mean is that it's the exact same time - everywhere - at the same time. When the US servers go down, so do the Oceanic servers.
As a result - this means, Tuesday's weekly-maintenance doesn't happen at 3am for Oceanic customers, but rather, 7pm and finishes about 2am.
Yep, right in the middle of prime-time.
Unlike EU players who make their own willing decision to use US servers - we are REQUIRED to use these servers. We simply have no other choice.
Whilst the player base of Oceanic isn't quite as large as the US, it's still significant. I think we have what, 5 servers dedicated to us at the moment? And they are all full to the brim, every time Blizzard puts in a new one, it's full within days.
So, in closing, this may not be a big deal for people who live in the US, and play on US time - but this is a HUGE deal for us Oceanic customers.
A majority of players are on during the day, but for the 2nd and 3rd shift crew, myself included, this is huge. Tuesday maintainance was always a hassle, nixing play time one out of seven nights a week. Assuming the live updates aren't too buggy (which they will be, for a while at least) this will remedy the biggest problem I have with WoW. Thank you Blizzard.
Indeed, if it had been 'a couple hours', it wouldn't have been a problem. But rarely was it so. In my personal experience (I was on Duskwood-US from shortly after that server's birth until about two months ago, when I gave the game up) the downtime would often last into the digits. That's hours. I can remember several tuesdays, coming home from work around 6pm and not being able to login because my server was still down. They'd give a list of 'affected servers' on the login screen, it was usually about 25-30 servers a week going down. Maybe it was the same servers giving problems week after week, which would explain why many players wouldn't notice it. I don't know, as I said, my experience is limited. But this would be a big deal to me, if I still played.
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Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
1up news? Wow thats like someone hanging around outside of a public restroom and saying "Joe Blow just took a nasty deuce in there check back for further developments."
I found this announcement amusing because Blizzard has been doing this off and on already. In the last several months there have been weeks where maintenance was skipped, at least on my server. What has happened now is that they already have it in place and are just giving political cover:
"Hey, we're going to make this the norm, but if it doesn't work, we'll reboot or do normal maintenance."
In the end, is this really news that a system has implemented 99.99% service?
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
To those who are "level 60" or what not - there is life for you after World of Warcraft. I know it's hard to see now, but you eventually will come around. No, not even light, controlled play is acceptable. Get off the computer and go hang out with friends or at the gym. You will get far more satisfaction out of socializing or physical workout than you ever will out of becoming Level 60 in a dweeby game.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Cry more.
And tuesdays were a big reason: it was my day off work. I could get up before the gf, and enjoy my good old lvl 39....oh wait. The game was awesome, and PvP rocked. The queues to log in, the disconnects, and nerfing of my nightelf priest into oblivion, and not being able to play for over 10 hrs of my "weekend" led to me voting with my dollars and go back to CoH. Maybe I'll give it another go.
This was me and my gf
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
It's about time they decided to upgrade to a live patching system. As another poster mentioned, the need for hours of patch time every week seems questionable. It seems they've taken a page from Guild Wars, whose live update system is one of the nicest features of the game (imo). There are no maintenance days, and rarely is there any downtime. The patches are downloaded live by the client and installed on the fly, which is the way it should be. We'll see if the new Blizzard devs can get it right or if it will be a disaster.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
Blizzard isn't exactly great at running an MMO - every patch brings downtime (always more than was scheduled), lots of bugs, long queues, and server restarts. It was laughable that Blizzard had to take down their game for several hours every week - imagine if Visa or Wal-Mart did something like that.
Welcome to the 90s Blizzard.
It's entirely on topic...
This change does in fact have raiding implications. Off-peak hours are not so for everyone, and who knows what kind of stability/lag problems will crop up during maintenance.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
It was a pretty big deal in terms of the gaming industry simply because it made it pretty easy if you had to pick a day of the week to blow your advertising wad. What other time of the week can you believe that there are at least 100k gamers surfing the web, not playing a game, and in contact with their social network to spread the word of some cool beta/game/etc. ?
Where I work, we do not have the luxury of maintenance windows. It's not too difficult to get zero downtime on a web-based service if you have solid deployment methods. Something like WoW is a little more difficult, although you can get pretty close with the Guild Wars approach (running multiple versions of the server at the same time and allowing users to finish what they're doing before restarting their clients to patch).
As a night owl, with graveyard shift roommates who like to play after getting home, we often ran afoul of the scheduled downtime. Especially on nights that they extended the maintenance by taking the servers down earlier than usual.
Regardless of the playtime issue however, this solves one of my problems with the auction system. I prefer to use 24 hour auction time limits to minimize my relisting. Time countdown on auctions continues during server downtime, so I seldom listed items from Monday early a.m. through completion of Tuesday maintenance to save myself the wasted listing cost, or to hedge against expiration bidders from getting my auctions for list/reserve rather than buyout prices.
As a side note, I have worked in several 24/7 high volume (many millions of transactions a day) IT departments so downtime for weekly maintenance can be designed out of systems for surprisingly less cost than you might imagine, and without any significant impact on performance or reliability.
Believe me - people have. If you have an hour, or five, you may want to read through the countless posts of Oceanic customers bitching on their forums. I mean, seriously, it's been a thread-a-day for the last two years. Blizzard just doesn't care... or, maybe they do, which is why they are making these changes.
Yeah it is that big of a deal, I still pay for that scheduled downtime and I can't play. Obviously there is no guarantee that the servers are going to have 100% uptime, but it's not like Blizzard suspends your paid time while they are doing maintenance. I'm usually home on a Tuesday and I can't play until after 2 PM. This change is great and I hope it works out.
Let's remember:
1) what was always scheduled to be a 'couple of hours' very often (perhaps 2/3 of the time) turned into 8-10 hours immediately or shortly after the new patch was applied, servers were up, and then they had to fix something that was newly broken.
2) Most users pay $12-$15/month for 24/7 access. Take down the servers 4 times a month for 4 hours each = 16 hours. That means I'm losing 2% of my available play time. If I'm in Oceania, I'm losing that time during my prime time hours. NOTE: Blizz has been pretty good about compensating people with time credits when the downtime is ridiculous, like DAYS.
Not that it's a big deal (I personally have PLENTY of things that need doing elsewise) but it's not utterly insignificant, either.
-Styopa
I tried out Eve Online once. While the game itself wasn't to my liking, I loved the fact that they have a single global server. It's, to my understanding, really many physical servers, but they designed it to scale, so that they can increase capacity simply by adding more blades in the rack, basically.
I don't fully understand their architecture, but I've often wondered why they are the ONLY game to take this approach. And, if multiple servers really are necessary, why has no one EVER (to my knowledge, I could be wrong) made it possible to easily move your character to another server without paying like $20 per character per move? I remember back when I was reading about features that Shadowbane was supposed to get (that was before it was actually released), it was supposed to allow you to travel from one server to another temporarily, for events, or to hang out with your friends. No 'character copy' - there was supposed to be some sort of in-game portal/teleport that would allow you to jump to another server. Anyone know if this ever went live, or was it an undelivered feature?
Still, the ridiculous, artificial partitioning of online games server either has to end, or at least they need to give players an easy way to temporarily hop on another server, either just to game with friends on the other server, or to load-balance (ever been stuck on a busy, laggy, server, and wished you could hop over to a less laggy server?)
I'm in Korea. I get off of work on Tuesdays at 10:00 PM. WoW is down from the moment I get off work until about the moment I go to bed-- the service is basically unavailable to me one night every week. This is *extremely* annoying.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=59665994&sid=1
Here is the official release from blizzard. If I read it correctly, they say that they are planning to head that way and they are currently testing this on live server. Nothing is definate yet, they may have weekly maintainence or they may not have weekly maintainence. All depends on their result of "testing" Its too early to jump to conclusion yet.
MySpace, Digg and even Second Life do not go down for hours at a time every week (as WoW invariably does, with it's sure-fire maintenance overruns), the only MMO worse than WoW in this respect has been Eve Online with it's daily hour long maintenance (which also frequently overruns).
/. about it on Christmas day. :-(
Servers do not need to be taken down to do backups, and updates to code should only require a downtime in the order of a small number of minutes. It's just lazy programming or bad management that don't care enough about the user experience to prioritise this feature (or both), it's not like it's a small team of developers in a startup struggling to make a game here - they are obviously good developers and they have the resources to get it right. It's great to see they are getting round to it at last!
The quality of the the title is generally outstanding, certainly compared to the quality of titles in the industry as a whole. It's a rock solid game with great attention to detail - brilliantly executed and immediately appealing to both first-time MMO players and more 'hardcore' gamers. However, the apporach to server management is dreadful and starkly contrasts with this.
As I write this, EU Battlegroup 5 (a cluster of 5 different servers) is totally offline so players on that server can't play and may not be able to for some time (I expect it will come up boxing day, if we are lucky). Unless Blizzard improve the process for managing servers the user experience is still going to be poor in this regard.
Sadly, the customer support bad too : unlike in Soth Park:WoW you can't *really* phone support, you have to use a web based interface or raise a ticket in game, where upon a flunky will fail to understand the problem (using diversionary tactics such as not reading your tickets properly and failing to understand words of more than two syllables), tell out right lies (such as claiming there was a server roll back when there wasn't and that's why it's fucked up and they aren't going to help you, even though your problem is specifically addressed in the AUP and it says they will do everything they can to fix if it does happen) flat out ignoring your queries (had this with billing) and of course they don't care if your server does go down, they don't have a way to escallate that sort of thing it seems.
And so, you end up posting on
Given the results, I cannot agree with your conclusions. Less efficient than the optimal result, yes. Awful, no.
I'm sure you're aware of the granularity that WoW records through logging/xaction records. I'm of the belief that the maintenance is to audit the system, analyze patterns (to look for exploitation), and do optimization. Everyone knows that they were also doing cleanup of memory leaks and AI hangups that they have eventually been able to snuff out. Their Bug Tracking is efficient and extensive.
I conceded there is no phone support. You can say it. It's true. The in-game ticket system is a joke. On the other hand, the customer support in-game is very very extensive. Blizzard supports those who can run the game, divorcing them from the deluge of inane 3rd party technical questions that they aren't necessarily interested in providing support for. This is a GOOD tactic and I cannot fault them for it. While it's misleading to pretend to give support through tickets or phone, remember that any CSR you talk to online can dig out the ENTIRE list of items your character has ever held, by timestamp, original source, and eventual destination. The maintenance was always worth it once you learned to navigate the "Blizzard CSR system"
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
I think that also, now that they dont have to do the massive PVP rank calculations, it is much less stressful on their system.
Good-bye
Is this really that big a deal? I know that the timeframe had to be inconvenient for EU players on the U.S. servers, but was a couple of hours of downtime early in a workday really such a burden?
Hi, Asia? "Off-peak" is the middle of the evening here. Don't mind us though, we'll just do some math while we wait. We'll count Aussies or something, since nobody else seems to.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The poster didn't ask that...Zonk did. And you would think he would know better.
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I should have avoided Blizzard after bnetd, I didn't. Now I really won't invest in anything that company produces. Not that it matters much now since the original Blizzard North employee's have all jumped ship.
./wave aegwynn/stormscale, pre-pve shatter ftw.
Blizzard, they banned my account for botting. Like I want to go through the hassle of grinding a million sweaty toads or running the same instances, AGAIN, after I've already leveled two 60's and ranked to 11 manually. I much prefer playing the game for fun (PvP) rather than grinding a bunch of noob NPC's. Instead of having me as a customer (holding two accounts) they banned one of 'em. While the addicts re-rolled, I canceled my other account. Of course about a week later they sent me a beta invite, and SURPRISE, you have to re-activate your account for access. lol. I'm gonna sell that shit on ebay for 50 bucks.
The explanation is easy, of course. Blizzard is at war with Oceania. Blizzard has always been at war with Oceania.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
it was weird because of my children, I don't get to play at all at night, so when I wake up early, I might be able to get an hour or two. This always seemed to happen on a Tuesday, and they were always off line for maintenance. I was probably just lucky, but it seemed to happen a lot, and was frustrating since they didn't come back online until after I left for work. Anyway, I stopped playing again for awhile, but I am glad they are doing away with the six hour schedules.
I still played WoW a little bit while back, and during the patch i'd usually be at school, so it wasnt a big deal for me. If i was at home i'd just play Guild Wars haha. I actually heard that the Guild Wars population would rise by like 25% when WoW was down, mainly because WoW players were just bored and needed some more MMORPG action.
Im Coming To Take Your Town
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