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)
You're on! (Score:2, Interesting)
Believe me (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting! (Score:2, Offtopic)
I am not entirely optimistic. I mean, yes, it'll be more convenient... Except for the part where you can no longer SCHEDULE for server resets.
"Oh, sorry, were you 95% done with MC? I guess you'll have to go back."
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Of course, there's been occasional restarts for various reasons all along, so it may not be noticeable.
I wonder what they'll do for patch days.
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Blizzard isn't evil yet. They haven't released Warcraft '07, incomplete for xBox360 two years running at 60 dollars a pop. Nor have the released the an expansion pack every month... Warcraft: Weapons and things to fight with!
Already happens.. (Score:2)
"Hey, we're going to make this the norm, but if it doesn't work, we'll reboot or do normal maintenance."
In the end, is this really news that a system has implemented 99.99% service?
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I don't think you read the same announcement I did. I got the impression that a lot of things which are currently being done on maintenance day, such as server-side-only hotfixes, will be done by adding more restarts.
Off hours is nice, but some people schedule stuff for "off hours".
But yes, I was aware that many things would be done live. I was talking about the thing where they said some things would require re
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Bosses stay dead to prevent guilds from downing rag every 2 days and farming the hell outta high end raids. Molten core can only be reset once every 5 or 6 days. Zg can can only be reset once every 3 days. Until its reset the bosses stay dead, however trash will respawn. The announcement i read is next to the login boxes on the main screen after you start the game.
The resets will not be disruptive. Most of the time they provide a
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Bearing in mind that most current top end instance runs require perhaps 2-6 hours, a 30 minute ingame warning will rarely be sufficient.
BUSTED, FANBOY!
Incidentally I have never once seen a 30 min warning, I consider myself lucky to see 15 min warnings and usually I get booted with no warning whatsoever.
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You do remember we're talking about a game here, right? And that the qualifying factor for opinions is not the amount of time you have logged in, it's the amount of money each subscriber pays to play, right? And that amount is... equal. Equal, like each customer's right to make a comment (even if it's not the most well thought out argument).
Keep in mind that your encyclopedic knowledge of instance mechanics comes from learning... not prescience. Once upon a time your understanding
Downtime was often longer than expected (Score:1)
A bit inconvenient for Hawaii/AU/NZ players (Score:5, Interesting)
So while it wasn't a huge deal - it was irritating if you forgot that it was maintenance night and had something planned.
Of course it's a big deal (Score:1)
This won't reduce complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Downtime was a good thing (Score:5, Funny)
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Not exactly (please READ the article!) (Score:1)
And besides, one day a week, good grief. That's not that big of a deal. The same kids complaining are the ones that whined when their parents told them to go outside and play instead of sitting in front of the television. Everyone knows to expect this - it isn't a surprise and it isn't something new. No guild worth its salt plans a raid for
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I quit the game because I go
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Oh thank God (Score:3, Funny)
Not just a reboot. (Score:2)
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The big test will come after the first catastrophic hardware failure.
Why the need for so much downtime? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 sc
Why? (Score:3, Funny)
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Really? I can't remember the last time Amazon.com was down for maintenance.
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 rest
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And it says they require regular maintenance, I am sure Amazon require's regular maintenance too, it just doesn't require downtime because not everyone is constantly accessing all information. User computer's do not need to be upgraded either.
Not sure when self hating nerds started hating WoW, it is pretty much all of their wet dream. Orcs, elves, gnomes and in beautiful animated splendor. It is a social place for people too pale to talk to real humans, and on top
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Huh? Of course people are constantly accessing all of Amazon's information. Do you want to tell me which part of their service they can take offline for a few hours while no one is using it? Obviously they have redundancies, so they don't need downtime.
I played the 10-day trial, enjoyed it, didn't feel a need
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For example, every single milliseconda person's WoW account is capable of multiple updates to the server's database. A player's entire actions must be queued, executed and responde
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There are still an enorm
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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
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In any case, it seems the WoW network engineers have figured out a way to do it much more efficiently than before. This of course doesn't necesarily mean that it's as easy as Amazon, or even that it's harder. We just don't know enough details to compare them intelligently. So there's not muc
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I spotted two problems in your post:
1. WoW has been running since November 2004. That makes it two years, not one.
2. SWG, like all other SOE properties, has weekly maintenance, usually as long or longer than WoW's.
(Side note: I haven't played SWG in years, I just remember being annoyed that the servers were always down on... Sunday mornings, I think it was.)
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Or are you talking out of your ass?
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Give me a few days and a large budget (which Blizzard certainly has), and yes, I can design a real-time system with multiple redundancies that can be taken offline piece by piece. It's not about "smart", it's about understanding how these systems work and some basic engineering principles. The system already has multi
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Mostly because the technical aspects of WoW are not something easily discussed. I'm a casual player, and by admission have spent a casual amount of time trying to research the technology that drives the game. So far, most of what I've read is speculation and conjecture, with the rest being statements like "multiple realms share the same database backend." I'd love to discuss
Blizzard ETA's (Score:2)
Ok, let me explain my pov first. I've played MMORPG's since Ruins Of Kunark release (first expansion to Everquest 1).. Since then i've played Eq2, Uo, Daoc, AO, SWG, many betas - same games which never came out, some that did. Basicly i've have had subscription to some mmorpg spanning for a quite a long time and, to wow, since its release in europe.
And i have to say one thing.
BLIZZARD AND THEIR PATCH ETA'S ARE HUGE JOKE! Content patches, no matter what they promi
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n00b
=)
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And this is supposed to impress us?
Try one of Verant's two day rollbacks in the early days of EQ (ie entire server rolled back two days, all loot, exp, etc, earned during those two days gone), and then come back and complain about about Blizzards poor ETAs.
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Yes, the feared roll back. Alot of those still happened during the time i spent to suck of evercrack. But they got better and later on, i dont remember any rollbacks happening and also, they didnt bother me... But lets think about this. So, Verant did that as their first big mmorpg ? And they had the biggest crowd playing at one
World downtime inappropriate when sun doesn't set (Score:5, Insightful)
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:World downtime inappropriate when sun doesn't s (Score:2)
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Servers do not need to be taken down to do backups, and updates to code should only require a downtime in the order of a small number of minutes. It's just lazy programming or bad management that don't care enough about the user
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It's a common refrain that the server makes 90% of the MMORPG. This does not necessarily mean that the server management has been dreadful, given the popularity.
Given the results, I cannot agree with your conclusions. Less efficient than the optimal result, yes. Awful, no.
I'm sure you're aware of the granularity that WoW records
Re:World downtime inappropriate when sun doesn't s (Score:2)
It is a huge burden (Score:1)
Holy... (Score:1)
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.
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So it's good for you, but I don't think what they did was really that bad. Besides...when you look at it...maybe forcing everyone to take a break one night a week isn't such a horrible thing. And if you do feel it is horrible, you need
Easy explanation (Score:3, Funny)
The explanation is easy, of course. Blizzard is at war with Oceania. Blizzard has always been at war with Oceania.
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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.
My
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I quit WoW (Score:2)
This was me and my gf [penny-arcade.com]
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Welcome to the times (Score:2)
It's about time they decided to upgrade to a live patching system. As another poster mentioned, the need for hours of patch time every week seems questionable. It seems they've taken a page from Guild Wars, whose live update system is one of the nicest features of the game (imo). There are no maintenance days, and rarely is there any downtime. The patches are downloaded live by the client and installed on the fly, which is the way it should be. We'll see if the new Blizzard devs can get it right or if it wi
Yes, it's a big deal (Score:2)
Welcome to the 90s Blizzard.
Marketing (Score:2)
"Is this really that big a deal?" (Score:2)
for those who don't play. (Score:2)
1) what was always scheduled to be a 'couple of hours' very often (perhaps 2/3 of the time) turned into 8-10 hours immediately or shortly after the new patch was applied, servers were up, and then they had to fix something that was newly broken.
2) Most users pay $12-$15/month for 24/7 access. Take down the servers 4 times a month for 4 hours each = 16 hours. That means I'm losing 2% of my available play time. If I'm in Oceania, I'm losing that time during my prime time hours. NOTE: Blizz h
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You do realize you are talking about 30 cents a month?
World so big! (Score:2)
Hi, Asia? "Off-peak" is the middle of the evening here. Don't mind us though, we'll just do some math while we wait. We'll count Aussies or something, since nobody else seems to.
For me it kind of was... (Score:2)
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Pathetic.
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You are basing your assumption on the fact that EVERYONE who plays WoW, plays every single day. Which I will prove false, right now.
I play WoW, occasionally, school and work, and now just work makes me have other things to do. There were several times in my life where I woke up on a tuesday morning, nothing to do, and looked forward to playing for a few hours, or maybe a marathon catchup session. Then you try to sign on and see that the servers are down.
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In retrospect, I shouldn't have fed this particular troll, but, like most good trolls, his viewpoint isn't uncommon.
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Ding fries are done.
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We both pay the same $/month. Only difference is some of us play so much that it strains blizzards servers and some of us are an insignificant amount of hours/month.
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Re:Daily Reboots != bad coding (Score:1)
I'm sorry, but Blizzard having had to reboot the servers for 2 whole years now was very bad coding on Blizzard's part. Imagine if you had to reboot the servers at your job everyday? I doubt they would be around long.
How do you know? Sounds like they didn't have a true high-availability architecture and now they have enough redundancy in their production environment that they can make changes to application instances (i.e. modifications and improvements to the game) without the user experience getting altered. Basically, they spent money on more servers...
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I'm sorry, but whatever you just tried to write was just very bad writing on your part. Imagine if you had to make sense at your job everyday? I doubt THEY would be around long.
Who is they? Your job? You? The servers?
Blizzards job... well, they are not a person. The person doing the
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