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  1. #81
    Every time I have off work on a Tuesday, there is maintenance and it gets extended. It's a conspiracy against me.

  2. #82
    Remember when this happened every single Tuesday? There was also a chance it wouldn't be up until Wednesday or early Thursday.

    They've gotten better. Hopefully they'll keep getting better.

  3. #83
    Because every single game listed has far less content than Warcraft.

  4. #84
    I'm late - somebody catch me up - who's winning - the apologists or the guys asking questions?

  5. #85
    I'm curious how many tuesdays this will come up.

  6. #86
    Scarab Lord Miralynn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Punisher069 View Post
    I'm curious how many tuesdays this will come up.
    Every Tuesday since the beginning of WoW. And it will come up every Tuesday until they shut down the servers forever. Even if they someday are able to stop doing Tuesday maintenance due to technological advances, every Tuesday some noob will post something about 'Remember when we used to have maintenance on Tuesdays and how much that sucked?'.

    There is no group of people on this Earth of ours who enjoy finding something to bitch about more than WoW players.
    When asked about the role of women in video games, Samus Aran said, "..." - and then she blew up the planet. AGAIN.

  7. #87
    I'm gonna go with since it's on a 8 year old infrastructure and engine and has many many more subs (hence more realms) than any other game.

  8. #88
    Quote Originally Posted by Pascal View Post
    Every time I have off work on a Tuesday, there is maintenance and it gets extended. It's a conspiracy against me.

    Well then it is you that we should be upset with.

  9. #89
    Ill chime in from page 2, so sorry if its been said but...

    Guys, WoW doesnt run 10 million players on a single server farm. Most (> 50%) of those players are from asia and have their own servers. When you consider that the overall number (10 mil) hasnt changed in years (or actually declined) despite opening HUGE markets in other parts of the world, the fact is that WoW has been on a drastic decline in occidental markets over the few past years. NA WoW actually has lower sub numbers then many of those games people are quoting.

    So no, numbers doesnt explain it. My own wild guess is that their infrastructure is starting to be hella old, and its a matter of their technological capabilities being inferior compared to newer hardware/software.
    Last edited by Nikijih; 2012-11-13 at 08:24 PM.

  10. #90
    Quote Originally Posted by Stede View Post
    I'm late - somebody catch me up - who's winning - the apologists or the guys asking questions?
    fanbois always win. they enjoy not getting what they pay for and goddamn it they'll kill you if you don't like it too

    same old same old. most people in here have no fucking clue about any of this and the ones who do realize that it shouldn't take as much downtime as it does. blizzard just isn't very efficient and since their customers will defend them, they feel no sense of urgency that will change it

  11. #91
    Quote Originally Posted by Nikijih View Post
    My own wild guess is that their infrastructure is starting to be hella old, and its a matter of their technological capabilities being inferior compared to newer hardware/software.
    This is my guess too. Not that this kind of downtime happens very often anymore, but when it does, it's very jarring and noticeable.

  12. #92
    Quote Originally Posted by Nikijih View Post
    Ill chime in from page 2, so sorry if its been said but...

    Guys, WoW doesnt run 10 million players on a single server farm. Most (> 50%) of those players are from asia and have their own servers. NA WoW actually has lower sub numbers then many of those games people are quoting. When you consider the fact that the sub number hasnt changed despite opening HUGE markets in other parts of the world, the fact is that WoW has been on a drastic decline in occidental markets over the few past years.

    So no, numbers doesnt explain it. My own wild guess is that their infrastructure is starting to be hella old, and its a matter of their technological capabilities being inferior compared to newer hardware/software.
    Yes, agreed. People seem to think that because they have more players they have more servers (true) but they also then think that more servers means it takes longer to restart stuff (false). They probably have scripts they run to restart servers in a certain order. A realm should only be down for 15 minutes. Rolling restarts shows they have this capability so please stop with the they have more servers than every other MMO combined so their 6 hour downtime makes sense! You sound like an idiot.

  13. #93
    Scarab Lord Miralynn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NightZero88 View Post
    Yes, agreed. People seem to think that because they have more players they have more servers (true) but they also then think that more servers means it takes longer to restart stuff (false). They probably have scripts they run to restart servers in a certain order. A realm should only be down for 15 minutes. Rolling restarts shows they have this capability so please stop with the they have more servers than every other MMO combined so their 6 hour downtime makes sense! You sound like an idiot.
    Hi, lifelong IT professional here. Just getting back into the business, as a matter of fact, after a couple years of working at home.

    There are some operations (full backups spring immediately to mind - incrementals are all well and a good thing, but it's a good idea to get a full offsite backup from time to time even if you have a RAID array with redundant mirroring and constant incremental save-states) that take hours and are best performed when a system is not under massive load. Also, hardware checks and system maintenance. Try running a full scan for bad sectors followed by a defrag on your own system and see how long that process takes, especially if you haven't done it in a while. Now multiply that by having to oversee several hundred machines doing it at once AND having to allot enough time to cope with any errors/problems/failures that crop up.

    Personally, everywhere I've ever worked schedules these things for overnight on a weekend because that's generally the only time there's no one in the office who's going to be dependent on that system during the several hours of downtime required. A 24x7-running MMO that has thousands to millions of users online at any given time at all hours of the day and night doesn't have that luxury. It requires scheduled downtime.

    Now, I do agree that they could do a better job of time budgeting (if I went over the estimated time as often as they do, my boss would certainly call me on the carpet for it) and they DEFINITELY could do a better job of notifying the playerbase when they're going to go over the ETA... but the overall notion that scheduled downtime is not necessary is being put forth by people who know nothing about good IT practices.
    When asked about the role of women in video games, Samus Aran said, "..." - and then she blew up the planet. AGAIN.

  14. #94
    Stood in the Fire raintrees's Avatar
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    its always fun to watch the WoW addicts start tweaking the fuck out when they cant play a game for a few hours on one day. seriously just chill out

  15. #95
    Quote Originally Posted by Miralynn View Post
    Hi, lifelong IT professional here. Just getting back into the business, as a matter of fact, after a couple years of working at home.

    There are some operations (full backups spring immediately to mind - incrementals are all well and a good thing, but it's a good idea to get a full offsite backup from time to time even if you have a RAID array with redundant mirroring and constant incremental save-states) that take hours and are best performed when a system is not under massive load. Also, hardware checks and system maintenance. Try running a full scan for bad sectors followed by a defrag on your own system and see how long that process takes, especially if you haven't done it in a while. Now multiply that by having to oversee several hundred machines doing it at once AND having to allot enough time to cope with any errors/problems/failures that crop up.

    Personally, everywhere I've ever worked schedules these things for overnight on a weekend because that's generally the only time there's no one in the office who's going to be dependent on that system during the several hours of downtime required. A 24x7-running MMO that has thousands to millions of users online at any given time at all hours of the day and night doesn't have that luxury. It requires scheduled downtime.

    Now, I do agree that they could do a better job of time budgeting (if I went over the estimated time as often as they do, my boss would certainly call me on the carpet for it) and they DEFINITELY could do a better job of notifying the playerbase when they're going to go over the ETA... but the overall notion that scheduled downtime is not necessary is being put forth by people who know nothing about good IT practices.
    I honestly don't believe they are doing any of this during those downtimes. I'm not sure what they are doing or when they would be doing backups but I really don't think it's during the Tuesday downtime. They likely don't even backup their servers honestly.

  16. #96
    Dreadlord Kegler's Avatar
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    LOL why are people so upset about down time?

  17. #97
    Quote Originally Posted by raintrees View Post
    its always fun to watch the WoW addicts start tweaking the fuck out when they cant play a game for a few hours on one day. seriously just chill out
    Been without it for 2 years now.

    Not even sure I'm gonna come back when my 10 day trial is over.

    Just wondering why blizzard is so far below industry standards with their server maintenance.

    Blizzard maintains one 9 uptime, while most other industry standards strive to maintain 3 9's of uptime.

  18. #98
    Quote Originally Posted by Miralynn View Post
    Hi, lifelong IT professional here. Just getting back into the business, as a matter of fact, after a couple years of working at home.

    There are some operations (full backups spring immediately to mind - incrementals are all well and a good thing, but it's a good idea to get a full offsite backup from time to time even if you have a RAID array with redundant mirroring and constant incremental save-states) that take hours and are best performed when a system is not under massive load. Also, hardware checks and system maintenance. Try running a full scan for bad sectors followed by a defrag on your own system and see how long that process takes, especially if you haven't done it in a while. Now multiply that by having to oversee several hundred machines doing it at once AND having to allot enough time to cope with any errors/problems/failures that crop up.

    Personally, everywhere I've ever worked schedules these things for overnight on a weekend because that's generally the only time there's no one in the office who's going to be dependent on that system during the several hours of downtime required. A 24x7-running MMO that has thousands to millions of users online at any given time at all hours of the day and night doesn't have that luxury. It requires scheduled downtime.

    Now, I do agree that they could do a better job of time budgeting (if I went over the estimated time as often as they do, my boss would certainly call me on the carpet for it) and they DEFINITELY could do a better job of notifying the playerbase when they're going to go over the ETA... but the overall notion that scheduled downtime is not necessary is being put forth by people who know nothing about good IT practices.
    That's assuming they're running a windows based server operation. While linux/UNIX/BSD based operating systems can fragment, it' not as bad compared to when it happens on a windows system. You might see at MOST 5% file fragmentation if using ufs in say Solaris or a BSD based operating system or ext2/ext3 filesystem if in a linux environment. Also, if they are using an SSD type drive (OCZ VeloDrive 1.2TB comes to mind) you typically wouldn't run a defrag since it could shorten the lifespan of the drive, defrag doesn't seem to impact system performance as it would on an actual disk drive (i haven't noticed an impact anyways)

    What I see happening is a backup of all 1477(246 US realm servers, each realm having outland/northrend/eastern kingdoms/kalimdor/pandaria/instance servers and asuming 1 login server) servers and something stalling. But I could very well be wrong. No one knows, not even the ones who say there should be no reason for this much downtime.

  19. #99
    Quote Originally Posted by Chartul View Post
    Also keep in mind the size and depth of the world they have created. It's massive. Oh.. and because they can
    all the zones and world combined in wow its actually pretty small; just saying.

    iirc the downtime is so long because the world, instances, bgs, etc are all layered and not in 1 plane so they have to go through each option at a time

  20. #100
    Doesn't bother me, time for some Halo 4!

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