Tuesday downtime why is WoWs longer than industry standards

[Temporary Poster]

Then mommy puts me in time-out, which makes me sad.

Aww, how sweet.

[shise]

Why do people have to cry about everything?


Really... even if they take 6 hours down every week, who cares? do you really have to play 24/7? To be honest, they do a quite good job, there are barely any bugs in the game nor any issue, so taking down the servers for a few hours each month is normal.

Down time.... do something else meanwhile and stop making a drama out of it.. I've seen like 15 threads about the same today.. I can't even believe it.

[Alistairr]

Thank you sir, I never would have bothered otherwise.

No problem, I figured there were at least 200 people looking at these comments. Just helping people out, right?

[Xeraxis]

The industry standard? I'm sorry but anyone who has played since the days of UO are aware of what the industry standard is and it usually means you won't be playing much on a Tuesday that also happens to have maintenance. Now you can whine and bitch and moan but until you can launch a successful game with the number of subscribers that WoW has your words carry little to no weight. Especially love the comments from people who state they can fix bugs in a fraction of the time that Blizzard does. Thanks for the laugh.

[dapperedodo]

Well atleast blizzard doesn't let the servers go down when alot of people want go online(swtor I am looking at you)
And yeah it's most of the time a restart anyways and when the servers go down alot of times you can get in hours before the maintenance is intended to end.
On that note WoW is a game running on an engine with lines that got written before some players knew how to walk so yeah sometimes a game like this needs a good maintenance.

[Sigma]

Just taking a stab in the dark here, maybe because they have way more players than all those other games?

gona add to your stab, and take a wild swing in the dark.
Wow is much, much bigger than those other games, and therefore have larger servers that need maintenance

[Silarn]

I am impressed by GW2's update system, which only has longer downtimes (meaning less than an hour) for large updates. I am also impressed by Blizzard's streaming download system, which allows you to play the game when the bare minimum assets have been downloaded.

Now we just need to combine them.

[Morsker]

Blizzard is just bad at technology, and always has been. WoW also has far more disconnect issues than any other game. Blizzard is good at art and game design, and it turns out this is sufficient to make them famous and successful, even though their technology sucks.

[Kashim]

It's a freakin' huge setup they have. There are obviously hooks for not just WoW, but also SC2 and D3. And info can be accessed from outside the game.

Their servers are also not that old. Iirc they upgraded last year to state of the art material that very few if any other games in the world were running with. And I'm not pulling this out of my ass, it was a blue post.

[Awe]

The industry standard? I'm sorry but anyone who has played since the days of UO are aware of what the industry standard is and it usually means you won't be playing much on a Tuesday that also happens to have maintenance. Now you can whine and bitch and moan but until you can launch a successful game with the number of subscribers that WoW has your words carry little to no weight. Especially love the comments from people who state they can fix bugs in a fraction of the time that Blizzard does. Thanks for the laugh.

But WoW's maintenance times ARE a bit long. This is a separate issue from the fact if someone is bitching about it or not. And yes, industry standards are moving ahead. Several years ago long downtime periods were more common. These days they are less. Examples posted by other people are perfectly viable. Technology is progressing and it is possible now to deal with maintenance faster than in older days. EvE Online once had 1 hour downtime every single day. But they reworked the server architecture some time ago and now it is down to 15 minutes per day (the amount of subs for this game is roughly same as in times with 1h downtimes). That being said, WoW runs on a rather old architecture (I guess Blizzard would brag about it if they did some significant technology shifts). The fact how big WoW is probably making it harder for them to just rework stuff now but it does not change the simple fact. In 2012 it could be done much faster, even for WoW's scale. I am not going to moan about dowtimes in WoW since I do not care if they are long or not. Just pointing that automatic reply "WoW is BIG so STFU" is not cool.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 12:54 AM ----------

I am impressed by GW2's update system, which only has longer downtimes (meaning less than an hour) for large updates. I am also impressed by Blizzard's streaming download system, which allows you to play the game when the bare minimum assets have been downloaded.

Now we just need to combine them.

GW1 had streaming download system back in 2006 so it was already combined back then (granted that GW1 was not a full-fledged MMO though).

[Beefhamer]

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.

Unless you have facts to back up that claim it is just an opinion like 99% of this and every other thread about why Blizzard does or does not do something.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 12:43 AM ----------

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

You do not pay for 24/7 access to the servers and you agree to that prior to playing the game and every expansion and patch. We are paying for what we all signed up for.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 12:47 AM ----------

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.

It is not just a simple restart. They clean up files as well. The sheer size of WoW and the amount of data transfers between server and clients is enormous so that takes up time as well. After they bring up the servers they most likely run some tests to make sure what they added didn't screw up some other areas of the game. All of this takes time. This is not your home computer, this is not some simple small business server group. This is a massive undertaking, yet most people do not understand that. It also amazes me that so many people are actually home every Tuesday. Go get a job, do your homework, or get another hobby.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 01:01 AM ----------

Most people are not saying they could do a better job. What most people ARE saying is that in this day and age with the technology out their and looking at one, their rolling restarts (15 minute downtime per realm) and two, other games out there, the maintenance should not take this long every Tuesday. And it really shouldn't. I work in IT but I'm certainly no expert but I do know having scripts to restart servers and doing them in a row is not that challenging. Now yes, they are releasing more raid environments and it is possible they are setting up for 5.1 but things shouldn't take this long anymore except if their is a serious issue.

Don't forget older than shit software on newer hardware does not always work better. Maybe this is some of the reasons why, even with the new servers it still takes 6+ hours.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 01:03 AM ----------

i don't understand why we're aren't compensated for this down time.

i work 6 days a week. the one day that i have off is tuesday, i enjoy playing wow and would like to play wow during the time that i have off, especially on my day off. however nearly every week since mop has been released i lose out on the opportunity to play. i have no demands on my time at the moment, but later in the day that won't be the case and what i want to do is play wow, but i can't.

Because you do not pay for 24/7 access and 100% up time.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 01:08 AM ----------

We were in vanilla. Any time there was unexpected downtime they gave us a free day of gametime. I probably got 2-3 months free during vanilla.

We were only compensated when servers were down for longer than 24 hours. I believe the most free days they gave out was around 10. It used to be on the old payment history page in your account settings. I just went and looked and could not find it there anymore, but no one got 2-3 free months.

[Silarn]

GW1 had streaming download system back in 2006 so it was already combined back then (granted that GW1 was not a full-fledged MMO though).

Yes and no. GW1 requires you to download all unloaded assets for each instance when you first join it. You still have to wait for the entire instance to load. WoW will load the bare minimum assets required to play. There is a short delay on the loading screen for necessary items but it streams data for the unloaded areas as you walk around the zones as well as the higher resolution textures and sound files. Keep in mind WoW does not fragment continents into smaller loading chunks, only private instances and separate continents will bring you to a loading screen.

[bledgor]

I wish I had the money to fly to everyones house that complains about downtime and smack them as hard as I possibly can. It was down for an additional 3.5 hours, get the hell over it. WoW had 10x the subscribers as those games, it has A LOT more content, and thus a lot more code to deal with. Also compared to vanilla, this is amazing. During vanilla servers could be down for days, come up buggy as hell, and various others issues. Be happy the servers are back up as quick as they are, and if maintenance is extended, I don't know, go aside, do some yard/house work, and take a break to do something in r/l that is useful.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

The only reason I'm slightly disgruntled is because it's the only time that you can for sure kill Galleon. It's just more time I have to sit here and stare at the server window waiting for it to come up.

Galleon no longer up after each server restart, was a change that they did last week(people on my server were sitting on his spawn point for 6 hours with no spawn).

[Falarson]

I believe that it has much more to do with the actual tech they used for WoW servers vs other (more modern) games.

Other games use better tech for manteinance procedures because they more up-to date engines and systems.

[Omega10]

"If you think WoW's downtime is bad you never played Everquest back in the day. Long downtimes, bugs, crashes ... WoW is very stable and reliable in comparison."

I played EQ long ago. And this statement is very true.

[Evil Inside]

WoW is down on a tuesday morning 5am-11am generally every couple of weeks and you complain? If anything us aussies have the right to complain because maintenance sometimes cuts into our play time.

[NightZero88]

You know what's really funny about this whole situation? All the people saying, oh, they have the system down for 6 hours to make sure nothing breaks. Well guess what folks, something did break. If you wipe in LFR, when the boss despawns it counts as you killing it. Effectively locking out a ton of players from loot. The hotfix appears to have been released in the neighborhood of 9 hours ago which would be around 8PM server time. This is about 4-5 hours after the realms came back up from their 7 hour downtime. While I give credit to Blizz for fixing this bug quickly, their response at the moment is and I quote "For the small number of players who were ineligible for a chance at loot as a result of this bug before it was fixed, we're currently discussing the best resolution and will provide an update as soon as we can. In the meantime, we thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." I am fairly certain all we will get is, we are sorry but we cannot reset instance locks nor provide you with any loot. Anything more and I will be very surprised which will also outrage the community. So tell me again why we have 8 hour maintenance you pro-blizzard guys.

Link to the Blue post on the patch: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...4017847?page=1