This is the "shit happens" part of real life.
No matter how much you plan and organise there is always something that can go wrong, and when you are opening up new content to people you kinda want to make sure it works as well as possible from the get go.
The alternative would be to not double check your work, and just piss of the customer base because things dont work the MOMENT they log in. There is no winning with this player base, always something to bitch about.
While I do get irritated at extended downtime, I also have to remember that total downtime has gone down over the last few years.
I don't know how far reaching it has been, but my friends and I (not just local friends) have been getting a severe amount of world server lag quite frequently over the last couple weeks. Had an LFR that wiped because half the raid jumped up to 2000ms world latency. Just two nights ago it was so bad that while leveling my mage, I cast a frostfire bolt that quite literally took almost two minutes to cast. By the time the world server caught up, my elemental had killed the mob I was fighting.
So as long as they fix that lag issue, I'm quite content with not being able to play today.
Not really. The servers hosted at a Data Center should be the same for SWTOR and Rift. The Data Center in San Diego that hosts many of WoW's servers also hosts Rift, SWTOR, Facebook games and much more. The one that is in LA that hosts Myspace, Facebook, Twitter as well likes go down too and they host WoW's servers too. Even Microsoft had a major outage today with their Office365 system.
All in the information is stored in logical databases that are located at Blizzard HQ. The data center does not host any database. The reason for the hold up is not on Blizzard though, it's at the data centers. After they finish their updates than they should have no issue bringing up WoW once again. Most of today's Facebook games went down today too, at the data center I work at.
Because WoW has over 10 million players? It would be nice though if Blizzard didn't maintenance all the servers at the same time, so people who only get a couple days to play a week don't lose out by not being able to play, because server maintenance is on one of those two days. For instance: A to E servers would have maintenance on Monday, F to J would have maintenance on Tuesday, and so forth.
Well there are more servers and players in WoW, so that is why it takes longer, what I don't understand is why they can't do it at a better time.... For us living on the east coast the game comes up at 2 IF nothing goes wrong. The maintenance has been extended to 3 pm PST, which is 6 EST. My raid starts at 7, so any chance I had of getting in to do Sha or LFR to maybe pick up some pieces before the raid, went right out the window. I doubt that it will happen, but if it goes past 7 and I don't get to raid tonight, I will be hella pissed.
To be fair, in Vanilla their idea of "unexpected overage" was like 12 hours. The longest time period the WoW servers have ever been down occurred in Vanilla WoW (nearly 2 days).
Late BC was the high point and it is remained consistent since then. There are months with dips though when 4 tuesdays in a row have maintenance, but there are other months with only rolling restarts. Late BC alternated restarts with maintenance on a biweekly basis IIRC.
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bigger game = more downtime
The servers will be up at the earliest at 5PM here in Montreal. If my estimates would go overtime like this at work I would have been fired from over 2000 jobs in the past 8 years, assuming my CV would have a magical pony as reference to covince other people to take me.
I love downtime just because reading the Blizzard forums is so delightful. So many bitter entitled people demanding things, good laughs.
WoW isn't an industry standard and as such doesn't fit into industry standards.