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?

This won't reduce complaints

[Negatyfus]

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.

Why the need for so much downtime?

[ixplodestuff8]

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.

World downtime inappropriate when sun doesn't set

[Morgaine]

The poster asks:

Was a couple of hours of downtime early in a workday really such a burden?

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.

Re:Why?

[Nasarius]

They claim [blizzard.com]:

As with any system that is processing large volumes of data, the World of Warcraft realms require regular maintenance to ensure they are operating correctly.

Really? I can't remember the last time Amazon.com was down for maintenance.

This maintenance consists of hardware and software updates.

Hardware - Come on, they must have enough redundant servers so they can take one offline at a time without disrupting anything.
Software - I suppose this means updates to the game data/code itself. A restart of the server program might make sense in that case, though I can't see it taking more than a few minutes.

Re:I can't really see much of a problem with this.

[Babbster]

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.

Re:Why?

[Miniluv]

The differences between Amazon and WoW is intuitively obvious. Amazon is a web delivered service, and therefor is statefulness wrapped around a stateless protocol. The statelessness of HTTP allows for tons of easy solutions to maintenance for virtually every component.

The second major difference is that nobody using Amazon affects anybody else using it. With the exception of inventory updates which can be cached on virtually every item Amazon deals in due to the volumes they're handling nothing any one user on Amazon does has a direct impact on any other user. This allows for easy scale out.

Contrast that with WoW, which is predicated entirely upon the opposite. Every user can directly impact the universe of every other user. This requires a comparatively huge amount of synchronization.

I've never been terribly accepting of WoW's maintenance schedule, and I'm happy to see them making this improvement. I do however have a decent understanding of the problem and recognize its hardly trivial to solve.

Re:Or in asia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, and revealing, that people who play WoW refer to fellow players as "coworkers"