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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...
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!!
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.
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.
I was getting pretty edgy with only 166 hours of Warcraft a week.
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).
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
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.
It isn't bad coding if the system was design to be rebooted daily/weekly. Certain resource intensive tasks need to be performed while the server is down. If the server was online, it would take much more time then if the server was down for a couple minutes and degrade the game to an unplayable state. Keeping thousands of servers online 24/7 would break Blizzard's budget (even though they are making over a billion a year). It is not economically or technically feasible.
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.
My
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Your argument is about as ignorant as any I've seen. It seems to be that if you don't like something about a service you're purchasing, you can either shut up and keep paying or quit the service entirely. On the contrary, I would assert that paying the monthly fee entitles one to voice their complaints about the game. You certainly don't have to read said complaints if you don't care about them.
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)