I work in the computer industry, and it amazes me how all these game companies have the same outage period on the same day of the week for maintenance. I started playing MMORPGs in EverQuest, and when Sony Online Entertainment bought Verdant (not sure this was for the better), we had regular maintenance on Tuesdays from 5:AM to 11:AM Pacific Time.
When I went to Star Wars Galaxies, they had the same schedule. Now this should not be a big surprise since the hosting company was still SOE. But when Blizzard introduced World of Warcraft, it amazed me they had the exact same schedule.
With regard to WarHammer Online, I have only noted one update of the servers but there may have been more. That update did occur on a Tuesday but not at the same time.
Since Blizzard introduced Wrath of the Lich King, the Maintenance period has increased. Now it starts at 3:AM until 11:AM, with no explanation. Blizzard is not very good when it comes to providing feedback to the customer. I think they expect the customer to take it. That is not a god position, since I know many people don’t have a lot of time for the game and value the time they can play. One day their outage went into the evening hours, no explanation nothing.
What Happened to Blizzard “No-Downtime Goal”?
In December of 2006, a Blizzard Employee posted the following:
Since the game’s release, one of our most important service goals has been to reduce the amount of time realms are down for weekly realm maintenance.
The various hardware upgrades and retrofits we’ve done over the past year have put us in a position to begin testing the ability to go longer than a week between maintenance periods. 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.
I guess they missed the mark on this!
Asta La Vista!!!
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