World of Warcraft Tuesday Maintenance A Thing of the Past 151
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?
Or in asia... (Score:4, Informative)
Believe me (Score:2, Informative)
Ignorant story posters (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] and New Zealand [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Daily Reboots = bad coding (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, it's a big deal. (Score:4, Informative)
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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