Tuesday 7/22 Downtime - Done on Purpose to Boost Hearthstone Traffic?

[Radish Spirit]

I generally don't buy into conspiracy theories, but someone suggested this in my raid last night and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

It's the first downtime of this magnitude on a non-patch day that I can recall in recent memory. And it just happens to coincide with a massive marketing campaign for Hearthstone. What better way to get millions of eyes on HS yesterday than to keep WoW offline for a few extra hours?

I know I saw at least 12 people on my Bnet friends list "trying out" Hearthstone for the first time. Extrapolating that effect over the entire population, Hearhstone probably saw a massive spike in traffic - hundreds of thousands of new players at least giving it a shot.

For Blizzard, a cheap (free) and massively effective marketing tactic. The only minor cost is a few pissed off players, and that's something they're used to putting up with anyway.

[TheTaurenOrc]

brb getting my tin foil

[Darsithis]

There were obvious issues all night. My partner couldn't get back into the game due to issues with his server while I could play. Other people had login errors. No, I think something big happened and it's just a coincidence. Since Hearthstone is free it doesn't really pay to force people offline in WoW to play a free game anyway and there would be no guarantee they'd play it anyway. Besides, people can play more than one game. It's not like they have to shut down World of Warcraft whenever someone wants to play something different.

[Deleted]

For Blizzard, a cheap (free) and massively effective marketing tactic. The only minor cost is a few pissed off players, and that's something they're used to putting up with anyway.

Soooo how do you explain the fact that the EU servers weren't down for more than maybe an hour (if at all, at 5 AM) then?

[Raiju]

Guess what guys, hearthstone had issues all night. Most of my friends playing it were getting constant dc's. I wouldn't be surprised if diablo/sc2 felt similar.

Naxx opened just before 19:00 UK time, and I was experiencing issues on it till about 23:30. There's no conspiracy to play HS involved. The game was barely playable the few times you got in with games vs npcs that should be sub 10 minutes (often sub 5) taking nearly an hour.

[Lochton]

That is a little too much tin foil for me.

The obviously announced further complications. As well, this wasn't the same for Europe. And if a company slows down a product maintenance for announcing a different product, demands to be some special people on the leadership. I have seen many with this weird conspiracy, I find it a little too out there to even be able to believe. That is the same as a mechanic not fixing your breaks to announce that they now are able to let you clean your windows before they continue.

[SidFwuff]

For Blizzard, a cheap (free) and massively effective marketing tactic. The only minor cost is a few pissed off players, and that's something they're used to putting up with anyway.

Or it's just efficiency- if you're going to have technicians and engineers on the clock working on Hearthstone servers, you might as well add on a few more and do a needed upgrade to the Warcraft servers at the same time instead of scheduling two separate jobs on alternate weeks.

For example, while the teams are waiting for diagnostics that are running on the Hearthstone servers to complete, they can start on the Warcraft servers instead of having paid 'down time'.

It's even more cost effective and efficient when they have the same paid 'down time' the following week waiting for diagnostics to finish running on the Warcraft servers.

That's a simplistic example- the server farms are probably in multiple, separate locations but they all go through the same game client. There's some overlap, and some testing and monitoring that would surely be redundant if they scheduled them separately.

[Deleted]

HS lagged really badly yesterday. Game was freezing unresponsive for 15-30 seconds each move. It was horrific to play but i got through the first wing and completed class challenges. Heroic mode kicked my ass, as expected as im not HS pro.

[Lochton]

EU was down? Didn't notice. So much for your conspiracy theories....

Was hardly down on EU. Some servers was down longer, that is it.

[Selah]

This is ridiculous. Extended maintenance happens almost every other week, it's really quite a normal thing. There's no reason to break out tin foil hats for something that happens regularly.

[Kazuchika]

I generally don't buy into conspiracy theories, but someone suggested this in my raid last night and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes

Yup. You're completely right. You saw right through Blizzard's elaborate ruse of pre-expansion hardware upgrades and got right to the heart of the matter.

Just kidding you're absolutely clueless.

[zenkai]

Hearthstone was pretty unplayable during the downtime

[Deleted]

It boosted my traffic to other games/hobbies, and I don't see why everyone is losing their shit over it. "I PAY $15 TO BE LOGGED INTO WOW EVERY WAKING MOMENT OF MY LIFE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE" is all I saw on the front page of the WoW General forums on Tuesday, as if it's 100% unacceptable for maintenance to ever occur and god forbid complications during new hardware installation.

[Farabee]

They were probably upgrading server hardware/software systems to smooth the transition to 6.0/WoD.

[chaud]

That or hardware upgrades...

.@HordeBalloon @BlizzardCS We're apparently upgrading realm hardware. I'm not well knowledged on service goings on these days.

— Bashiok (@Bashiok) July 22, 2014

[Deja Thoris]

Yeah screw the logical explanation (hardware upgrades), lets go all JFK on the topic.

[Sierra85]

blizzard are damned if they do (upgrade hardware for player benefit)
blizzard are damned if they dont (CONSPIRACY)