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WoW Not-So-Live Maintenance
scdeimos writes "WoW servers are currently displaying the following Welcome message:
Breaking NewsSo much for Blizzard implementing Live Maintenance in WoW to bring an end to Patch Tuesdays! The WoW Realm Status forums page has nothing further to add at this time."
All realms will be offline for scheduled maintenance.
* Date: January 2nd 2007
* Time: 5:00am — 11:00am PST
For more information, please check our realm status page.
Thank you,
Blizzard Entertainment.
Working as Intended
This is only a story if you make something up about them eliminating maintenance days in the first place. Thats not what they said.
What they actually said is that they were working on reducing the number of maintenance days by doing some things while the realms were live, and that they were trying it for the first time December 26.
Somehow that got morphed by people into "there will never be another maintenance day," which is flat out wrong.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I won't be able to get my WoW fix tomorrow morning. Oh noes! Whatever shall I do? Clean house? Work? Interact with family members? Oh noes! Not that!
This "Not-So-Live" maintenance is the "Not-Really-Possible-To-Do-Live" 2.0.3 patch.
Last weeks maintenance went off without a hitch, so expect it become more like one day a month when bugfix patches are rolled out.
They never "implemented" live maintenance, they were just testing it. They could test it again next week for all anyone knows.
You know, those of us who have never played World of Warcraft always find these headlines rather amusing. Beneath our stolid contempt that is.
May the Maths Be with you!
When did SlashDot Games become a WOW fan site? Are we going to start hearing about every WOW update each week?
This is just a waste of space and time. Stop posting about dumb crap like this!
I never expected them to get rid of maintenance days. That's how it's always been done and I'm guessing there is no way for them to update without taking down the servers. It's not like GW where you get a system message saying there is a new patch, log off when it is convenient and download it.
Especially when players make up promises they didn't make!
Blizzard actually said they were working on having fewer maintenance days, and that they woudln't have one December 26.
That was entirely correct.
Somehow, people took that and read it as "there will be no maintence days, ever."
They never actually promised there would be no maintenance on January 2, or any time after December 26. Made up promises don't count.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
When did SlashDot ... become a $subject fan site? Are we going to start hearing about every $subject each week?
This is just a waste of space and time. Stop posting about dumb crap like this!
Ahh the irony of taking the servers down to install a patch so that the servers won't come down. :)
I think we will see a lot more emergency fixing. I have 5 lvl 60 chars and my frost spec'd mage seems to get problems with the elemental he summons. The elemental refuses to attack until you manually make it fire a frost bolt off at a monster. Just clicking the agressive button and "pet attack" (special action 1 usually) does not make it enter combat, but it's fine if you make it use frost nova on the mob first.
Of course it could just be the fact that i'm not that smart. Who can tell.
Delete this non-story. Bliz never promised no more maintanence days, just reduced them for normal maintanence tasks. This Tuesday is a patch day (or have you not noticed the 140+M file you've been background downloading recently, that should have been your first clue), and thus NOT "normal maintanence." Non-story, should never have been posted, and full of misinformation.
I've played both World of Warcraft and Guild Wars for a while, and I must say that the whole WoW network architecture is inferior to GW's. Proof: patch Tuesdays, IF lag, server-wide lag on over-populated realms. One might argue that WoW doesn't use that much instances to balance load on their servers, but hey, they've had two years to fix these problems now.
As far as I know, GW has had less than 30 hours of downtime since its release so far. The update system isn't intrusive and doesn't require you to quit until you want to.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying GW is the better game. I still believe WoW's PvE and general gameplay is better than GW's. But GW definately has the technical stuff done right. In WoW I always felt the backend was poorly coded.
How exactly did this make the cut? I mean, maybe it's a slow news day, but posting blatantly false news stories is pretty dumb.
Blerg.
I am personally surprised by seeing this full maintenance window, because the previous motd certainly implied that they would, from then on, be able to do their weekly maintenance without server downtime (except for a restart if needed). I don't expect them to not have to take the servers down for content patches, but that's not _maintenance_ per se anyway. *shrug* oh well, no biggie.
Articles like this sure makes me happy noone at slashdot were into posting useless MMO info back when patch periods were weeklong, and often followed by months of rollbacks.
...this is the only way they can pull the Winter Veil content out of Azeroth. What would happen if the content suddenly dissappeared? Crash in 5, 4, 3...
Does this really belong on Slashdot?
Who really cares if WoW is down for a few hours or one entire day?
Shit happens, people; get a life.
If my favorite MMO was down for a day, I'd normally be disgruntled for 5-10 minutes, then shrug it off and go play or work on something else and come back to it the next day.
... which we will expect in our NEXT game. For me, one of them is that there will never be any outages. Ever.
I work in telecom. If we had even a 5-minute outage, we'd never hear the end of it. 99.9999% uptime is clearly achievable if people care. But if customers accept crap, crap they'll get.
It's theoretically possible to remove some types of content without a server restart. Things liked instanced raid zones could be locked so no one could enter them, and once everyone exitted, you shut down the instance. If someone decided to never exit, there could be a point at which they are forceably removed from the zone (no crash necessary - just teleport them to the permanent zone where the entrance to the raid zone was).
Other content could theoretically be disabled without crashes. Temp powers turn off, temp items disappear, temp NPCs wonder off and disappear, etc.
The only type of updates that I can think of that would *require* a server be taken down would be of two types:
1) Replacing the server daemon software with a new build (that could, even theoretically, be swapped out gracefully - new people login to the new instance/process. Existing users are given a grace period to keep playing and log out. Anyone who hasn't logged out within like 12 hours could be forceably kicked from the server, then when they logged back on, they'd be connected to the new version of the software).
Of course, if you are replacing the software to remove some bad exploit, you want to kick everyone immediately so that they cannot continue to exploit the vulnerability.
2) Database upgrades/restores or to stop an on-going attack: If, for some reason, they needed to go through and do some change on every characters' inventory, etc, they would probably have to take down the server, or if they wanted to roll back to a previous backup of the character database (for example, someone cracked the servers and did some major damage to the Db.)
I suppose it's entirely possible there is something I'm missing, but those are the only two types of maintenance for which I couldn't come up with some theoretical method of hot-patching. Like I said, seems to me that, while it might be that currently they have to take down the servers to update content, mostly that shouldn't be necessary if they planned ahead for the content changes.
Thanks for lettuce gnomes, /.?
(Yeah, it's a WoW forums thing)
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Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^