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?

You're on!

[dreddnott]

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.

A bit inconvenient for Hawaii/AU/NZ players

[snuf23]

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.

Re:Daily Reboots = bad coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Though I'm amazed with all of that cash they can't do what EVE does.

Hmm. What is it that EVE does?
I subscribed to EVE online. It was working fine, then one day it stopped working - no reason (or possibly a windows patch - I can't remember). I checked the forums, a few other people appeared to be experiencing similar problems. Okay, I said, I'll wait.
...
Four days later, still no workaround, nothing. I decide to email their support mail. Continue waiting. One week later, still no response on the forums. Still no response from the support email. Hmm. I think I'll unsubscribe. That's a level of service I can do without.

WoW on the other hand...
Wouldn't allow me to patch up to version 2. Serious issues with the installer. Eventually managed to speak to a human being (3 days trying) using their tech support. The guy knew WoW as a player, he also knew something about windows (surprising) and was British (even more surprising). He managed to point me in the right direction towards getting it fixed (it needed IE7 installed for some strange reason? possibly to do with .net libs?). I emailed him with the details of my fix, and got a thank-you response (in human!) .

Now, I don't know about you, and I have heard a lot of bad things regarding WoW support, but I know which level of service I prefer...