Maintenance. It happens pretty much every Tuesday morning, and generally lasts for five hours, plus or minus 20 depending on if it's a major patch day or not. It's happened every Tuesday since the creation of Azeroth, and really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's played the game for more than a week or two. Every Tuesday, around 3AM, the servers go down.
So naturally, I felt a little bit like Gomer Pyle when I woke up this morning to find the servers were in fact, down.
See, Blizzard normally puts up a little message on Monday evening letting you know what's happening the next day. Servers will be down, rolling restarts, whatever. While I was a little suspicious that there was nothing on the page, I chalked it up to the fact that hotfixes were being applied instead.
I was wrong.
While I had every intention of finishing my Alchemy powerlevel this morning, I instead spent 15 minutes looking for confirmation that maintenance was happening, and another 15 trying to figure out why I couldn't download SC2 again. I'm not real quick before my coffee.
Tonight I'm off to see Harry Potter. Yes, I know Snape kills Dumbledore (AMG SPOILER FROM BOOK 6!), and while I didn't really enjoy 7.1 (I prefer the books to the movies), I am interested in seeing how they end it in the movie. Personally I'd rather see Transformers or Captain America, but my wife wants to see Harry Potter, and I want to keep eating my wife's cooking.
Showing posts with label maintenance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maintenance. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Thursday, June 24, 2010
News Flash - Tuesday's are bad mmkay
If you've played WoW for more than two weeks, you've probably noticed a disturbing trend (if you've been playing for less than two weeks and are reading this, you're probably my wife). The trend that I speak of is not a long queue time for DPS in randoms, the abundance of memorable idiocy, or the "random loot is random" comments from that one warlock who got the only DFO that's ever dropped for your guild.
No, the trend I speak of is the weekly maintenance on Tuesdays. Sometimes the maintenance is a rolling restart, sometimes it's four hours of downtime, and occasionally the downtime extends for twenty-four hours. It's not uncommon for maintenance to extend beyond the initial post time, though I'd be willing to bet that the number of times this actually occurs is fewer than the number we remember (kind of like the bad PUG runs stand out).
You ruined my Tuesday!
Bad news folks - Tuesday has been maintenance day since the release of WoW. It wasn't until later in the 2nd year when restarts even became viable, and even then Blizzard announced that they would be every other week at best. During the early days of Vanilla you could count on every Tuesday being 4-6 hours of downtime, and back then patches weren't publicly tested like they are now. Patch notes were released the day of the patch, and you'd often log on to find problems that you'd never known could exist.
With the PTR and patch notes now though, add-on developers and players can test their systems long before a patch goes live. Extended downtime still happens, but that's just a fact of life. Blizzard has gotten much better at communicating extended downtime, but really you should just expect it every week.
Strangely though, you still see upset players every Tuesday. These are the ones who act surprised that there's downtime at all, and expect a patch to be rolled out with less than 15 minutes of disruption. Raid leaders gnash their teeth as you idly try and run into a zone, getting kicked back for hours becuase the instance servers are down. Anyone remember the boat landing in the Hinterlands during the AQ gate opening?
So why bother?
I'm generally surprised when I see guilds that schedule raiding on Tuesdays. I can understand it if they are in the running for server/world first titles and kills, but this is less than 1% of the playerbase. For us mere mortals, is it really worth the hassle and headache? Sure, a month after a major patch has been out, Tuesdays will probably be fine for raiding - but during the initial push you're just asking for headaches. Instances will be down, addons will be broken, and half your raid will be playing the DC drinking game.
If you're more of a causual type guild, who only raids a few days a week, planning raids on Tuesday is just asking for your schedule to be broken. The same goes for players with limited time who are just looking to burn a few hours doing randomes/dalies/whatever. Tuesdays are likely to be bad days.
So, plan to do something else on Tuesday, and then be happy when things work as they should - instead of being upset when they don't. Also, when Cataclsym comes out, if you could just not log in for a while so I can level to 85 without incident, that would be great.
No, the trend I speak of is the weekly maintenance on Tuesdays. Sometimes the maintenance is a rolling restart, sometimes it's four hours of downtime, and occasionally the downtime extends for twenty-four hours. It's not uncommon for maintenance to extend beyond the initial post time, though I'd be willing to bet that the number of times this actually occurs is fewer than the number we remember (kind of like the bad PUG runs stand out).
You ruined my Tuesday!
Bad news folks - Tuesday has been maintenance day since the release of WoW. It wasn't until later in the 2nd year when restarts even became viable, and even then Blizzard announced that they would be every other week at best. During the early days of Vanilla you could count on every Tuesday being 4-6 hours of downtime, and back then patches weren't publicly tested like they are now. Patch notes were released the day of the patch, and you'd often log on to find problems that you'd never known could exist.
With the PTR and patch notes now though, add-on developers and players can test their systems long before a patch goes live. Extended downtime still happens, but that's just a fact of life. Blizzard has gotten much better at communicating extended downtime, but really you should just expect it every week.
Strangely though, you still see upset players every Tuesday. These are the ones who act surprised that there's downtime at all, and expect a patch to be rolled out with less than 15 minutes of disruption. Raid leaders gnash their teeth as you idly try and run into a zone, getting kicked back for hours becuase the instance servers are down. Anyone remember the boat landing in the Hinterlands during the AQ gate opening?
So why bother?
I'm generally surprised when I see guilds that schedule raiding on Tuesdays. I can understand it if they are in the running for server/world first titles and kills, but this is less than 1% of the playerbase. For us mere mortals, is it really worth the hassle and headache? Sure, a month after a major patch has been out, Tuesdays will probably be fine for raiding - but during the initial push you're just asking for headaches. Instances will be down, addons will be broken, and half your raid will be playing the DC drinking game.
If you're more of a causual type guild, who only raids a few days a week, planning raids on Tuesday is just asking for your schedule to be broken. The same goes for players with limited time who are just looking to burn a few hours doing randomes/dalies/whatever. Tuesdays are likely to be bad days.
So, plan to do something else on Tuesday, and then be happy when things work as they should - instead of being upset when they don't. Also, when Cataclsym comes out, if you could just not log in for a while so I can level to 85 without incident, that would be great.
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