Originally Posted by
Froppy
Correct me if I'm wrong, but are the US servers going completely offline and not able to log in? I think they might be making a distinction between "unplayable" and "offline". And the EU servers are going Offline while the US servers maintain an unplayable (or maybe even.. playable for some, unplayable for others) therefore they give the EU customers that offline time back when it's a significant amount of time.. say 6+ hours.
If it's not that, then it's probably 100% based on Laws and they are conforming to whichever laws the EU has vs what the US has.
Remember, Blizzard is a *for profit* company, they can't just hand out money to everyone. They probably have an entire system in place for this sort of thing.
Finally, consider this: People say: "Upgrade your Servers!!!" - However, the size of the WoW universe is unlike anything else created when it comes right down to it. Sure it mimics other networks in it's complexity and they can pull ideas, etc... from them, but you gotta also realize they are treading in somewhat new territory (and since the membership base keeps increasing, continously more uncharted territory) it's entirely possible they just simply don't know what the best solution would be. What if they "upgraded" the servers and it failed or was lesser performance for some reason and they had to take down your realm for a few days to fix it, how pissed would you be. Of course there are methods and standards and stop-gaps in place to not allow this, but I don't think it's ever really as easy as buying a new server and putting it in. In part, their success hinges on making that aspect as flawless as possible, and when they break records that they don't necessarily mean to (1 million + concurrent users) it puts an undue stress on the system that they might not have been prepared for.
If they blow all their money trying to keep their servers up to date with the latest and greatest, I'm sure it'd impact the amount of other things they could do.. like armory, patches, content creation, etc.. (not to say any of those perform stellar anyway :-\ ). All I have to say... I'd hate to see Blizzard's payroll per month, it's gotta be astronomical.
Sure they can do things better, most companies can. But they can also do a lot worse.