WoW Not-So-Live Maintenance

scdeimos writes "WoW servers are currently displaying the following Welcome message:

Breaking News
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.

So 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."

Hmmm

[MartinJW]

Working as Intended

Non story

[Tridus]

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.

Re:

[alasaid]

Yup they never said they will cut out maintainence completely.

Oh noes!

[Eggplant62]

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!

Re:

[SkunkPussy]

"The WoW Realm Status forums page has nothing further to add at this time."

When did it ever?!

Re:

[MrNash]

Indeed, heaven forbid we try some of that human interaction stuff that people have been raving about. :p

Re:

[Shillo]

But remember: WoW = Works on Wednesday!

Re:

[Babbster]

Well, one thing that they may not have taken into consideration is that the feds (along with many local government agencies and the major US exchanges) have declared tomorrow a holiday as a day of mourning for Gerald Ford. So, this particular downtime is probably a bit uglier to those people than others as they might have hoped to get in a lot of extra time on their 4-day weekend. Me, I'm in the medical business so I don't get "extra" holidays. :)

Re:

[tepples]

I won't be able to get my WoW fix tomorrow morning. Oh noes! Whatever shall I do?

ACWW [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[Goldberg's Pants]

HUH!? No WOW, so go play AC:WW? I love AC, but when I canned my WOW account last month, I didn't say "Yay! Now I can play Animal Crossing"...

Though given a choice, I'd choose Animal Crossing. It works properly, isn't constantly broken by the developer, and doesn't charge you for being, in essence, a beta tester.

Re:

[geminidomino]

HThough given a choice, I'd choose Animal Crossing. It works properly, isn't constantly broken by the developer, and doesn't charge you for being, in essence, a beta tester.

You mispelled "hamster."

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

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.

Re:

[antizeus]

This appears to be incorrect.

Re:

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

Yup. I was about the patch day. But, it was the removal of the Winter Veil content mentioned below. The rest still stands to be proven.

implemented?

[Toridas]

They never "implemented" live maintenance, they were just testing it. They could test it again next week for all anyone knows.

Some Of Us....

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

You know, those of us who have never played World of Warcraft always find these headlines rather amusing. Beneath our stolid contempt that is.

Re:

[ironwill96]

So, pretty much the same reaction that those of us who have played WoW have?

These comments are all starting to look alike

[Ultra64]

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!

Re:

[VGPowerlord]

Here's the obligitory "You must be new here" comment.

Re:

[jwbing]

Perhaps the irony is lost on you. Let me explain.
Slashdot caters to many interests, one of them being WoW. You must realize this, what with all the posts about Apple, Microsoft, various *nix updates, and all that science crap. Those must be a waste of space too. The irony comes in when you post saying how dumb something is, when in actuality you really do care enough about it to waste your time and mine by posting inane comments.

To bring this post back to something useful, I am a fan of WoW. I have the

Re:

[wilgibson]

Why defrag before patching? You'll just have to defrag it after updating anyways :P

Re:

[DrunkenTerror]

I am a fan of WoW.

Thank you for clarifying that.

Re:

[daeg]

While this isn't major news, I'd suspect any maintenance news for any major system would be newsworth on Slashdot. Like WoW or not, they do run one of the largest game network in the world. The reason you see more WoW news than, say, news about the Windows Update servers, is because WoW is more open about their network and generally how stuff works.

Re:

[assassinator42]

Still seems out of place to me. This should be on some WoW fansite, not Slashdot. Besides, this "story" seems more about bitching at Blizzard than informing people of the maintenance. Anyway, it is "sectional content", so no big deal.

Re:News Flash: Blizzard makes unrealistic promises

[Tridus]

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.

Re:

[CoolGopher]

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.

WoW != Guild Wars

[wilgibson]

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.

Live Maintainence Patch

[Ribbo.com]

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 fir

Delete this nonstory

[WilliamX]

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.

Re:

[wilgibson]

I haven't been background DLing jack because Blizzard's download client sucks donkey balls! I'll just wait until patch day and and DL it in five minutes off of Filefront!

Re:

[Ribbo.com]

Aye, and the only reason i'm posting to this thread right now is the servers have just come down in Europe for 6 hours! :)

Re:

[obeythefist]

Thanks, trollman!

Now let's deFUD this one.

WoW is a live, mostly non-instanced MMORPG
Guild Wars is not an MMORPG at all (Just ask, they'll tell you). It's a competitive online RPG. It's fully instanced. You simply can't interact with any more than the people in the same instance with you.

World of Warcraft = thousands of players per-server.
Guild Wars = 8 players per server in most cases. In towns, there can many more than 8, but the town instances are totally limited to non-combat trading, chat, and simpl

Re:

[Jesterboy]

If by "inferior by design" you mean "designed for different things".

It seems like you have a strong World of Warcraft bias, but I wouldn't completely disregard Guild Wars. Don't get me wrong, I love both Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, but they are definitely geared towards different play experiences.

Contrary to your post, Guild Wars is quite expertly designed. It's system allows for players to get into engaging gameplay without being a huge time sink, even down to its implementation of patching. What

Re:

[jfodale]

I agree with most of your comments, save this one: "You can participate in long, epic PvP struggles." Sorry, capture the flag on the same map a zillion times is not a "long and epic PvP struggle".

Re:

[ZWarrior]

"You can participate in long, epic PvP struggles." = "Sorry, capture the flag on the same map a zillion times is not a "long and epic PvP struggle"

Personally, I have been on those long epic PvP struggles. I led a guild who caused one of the first major PvP wars on the Twisting Nether server. There were 120+ players on each side fighting in the Southshore/Tarren Mill area, outside of the Battlegrounds. The lag was high at times due to the numbers of players, but the level of fun was even higher. I know fr

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you interact with people outside of your instance in WoW? If you mean by random interactions with people in the outside world, that goes both ways -- you can either find help for a quest or find griefers or crowds who will block your progress for hours.

You talk about towns in GW as being only for chatting, trading, and non-combat activities. Were there other functions that WoW towns serve that I'm not aware of? What can you do in a WoW town that you can't do in a GW town?

GW isn't a "better" game beca

Re:

[obeythefist]

What can you do in a WoW city?

Auctioning, for starters (the Guild Wars devs really wanted to implement an auction system, but they pretty much abandoned it when they realised the heavily distributed-instanced nature of the game design simply didn't allow for it... oops).

Also, because WoW is very open ended, you also get to defend the city from thousands of squealing 14 yo Alliance pallies as they once again assault Orgrimmar because they outnumber horde 1.6:1.0 on average, but it's ok because they stop when

Re:

[obeythefist]

Vanish is bugged? From my perspective it works perfectly, rogues *always* seem to get away from me when things aren't going their way.

Which is why I'm rolling and powerlevelling a rogue as soon as BC comes out. It's a shame about warriors though... still the game would be boring if every class was equally powerful.

Re:

[geminidomino]

Yeah, shame about rogues. So overpowered that a 60 rogue can be pulled out of stealth by a level 10 mage's 1hp AOE damage...

Blizz has never gotten pvp balance right, why should WoW be different?

Re:

[obeythefist]

Hmmm and after the level 10 mage has gotten the level 60 rogue out of stealth, what do you think happens to the mage?

And what is the rogue doing fighting level 10 mages anyway, is he alliance on a PvP server or something?

Re:

[geminidomino]

Hmmm and after the level 10 mage has gotten the level 60 rogue out of stealth, what do you think happens to the mage?
 
 

He probably watches said rogue take 12 inches of nearby Tauren warrior and die horribly.

And what is the rogue doing fighting level 10 mages anyway, is he alliance on a PvP server or something?

Not fighting. I was fishing for Deviates in the Barrens.

Hi Editors!

[zyl0x]

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.

Right, but who cares? I mean, really?

[anduz]

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.

Most likely...

[GodOfMice]

...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...

Re:

[C0rinthian]

Seasonal content doesn't require a patch. (Considering it is exactly the same as last year) It's just turns on and off based on the date. They line this up with server downtime so that there is no wacky discontinuity.

Erm...

[CodemasterMM]

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.

Re:

[andrewd18]

Of course this has to be on Slashdot. Rather than interact with people while the servers are down, the WoW junkies find the most recent WoW news story on Slashdot and whine, or if there hasn't been one in a while, they whip up another one and whine there.

Eh...

[Inf0phreak]

Thanks for lettuce gnomes, /.?

(Yeah, it's a WoW forums thing)