When you have to complain how a term or phrase is used, you really don’t have an argument.
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I can’t speak to that. But it when I say it doesn’t have the same meaning, it could still be applicable to the process. Or, it’s just a legacy term that everyone recognizes. In the end, the process is the same (and has been for quite a while) no matter how it’s labeled.
Restarts, rolling or not, means the servers will be shut down. That’s also always been true.
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They’ve never done what you seem to be describing - staggering restarts so that some realms go down, while others remain up. All that does is encourage players to flood the realms that remain up.
Also, I’m not sure why you’re hung up on the term ‘rolling restarts’ when the announcement clearly said servers would be offline for an hour.
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They absolutely did do that in the past. Realms were restarted by battlegroup, and while that collection of realms were restarting, all the others were still online. The realms were usually only offline for 10-15 minutes before the next group were restarted, so it was a short enough window that people didn’t flock to the online servers.
I know it was still a thing in TBC, and maybe Wrath, but after that I can’t recall when exactly it changed to just a total shutdown and restart of all realms at the same time.
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Source: 700+ days /played, which usually doesn’t matter more than a grain of salt, but here it does.
Server downtime warnings have been fifteen minutes for at least ten years or more. If not that, at least as far back as CRZ and server merges, because I remember the first time I saw:
[SYSTEM]: Server shutdown in 15:00
[SYSTEM]: Server shutdown in 15:00
[SYSTEM]: Server shutdown in 15:00
[SYSTEM]: Server shutdown in 15:00
…instead of just one notice.
“Rolling Restarts” means your realm will restart. Re-start, as in “reboot,” as in turned off and then back on. That’s it, and that’s all.
“Rolling Restarts” are usually scheduled for an entire hour, but the actual individual server downtime is 15-20 minutes.
I know they flaked on the one hour warning thing, fine. However, 1 hour is not the norm, it’s never been the norm, and anyone showing up casually to play near a restart should expect a 15-minute warning.
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It happened when the realms became connected. They can’t take one down without the others pretty much bugging out.
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To be fair, back at the start of WotLK, realms would be taken down in groups while others stayed online. They changed that fairly soon after WotLK launched due to so many players flooding the realms that were still online and causing them to crash. This was more than 10 years ago though that they changed it to every realm going down at the same time. It has ALWAYS been a 15 minute warning though.
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100’s of low level gearless gnomes flooding Ironforge. Fun times.
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And Orcs in Orgrimmar.
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An excellent response, however …
When I can get past the authentication to the point where I can see the server list, and every single server on the list is listed as offline, I’m pretty sure that it’s not an authentication issue.
While you’re right that I shouldn’t pass judgement without all of the information, you might heed your own advice before putting us “stupid gamers” in our place. (I know that you didn’t say it, and maybe you didn’t mean it, but the inference was clear as day to me).
That happens during maintenance. There are times you can get past the authentication server but the realms aren’t up yet.
No one implied “stupid gamer”, but not everyone has the same level of knowledge or experience in the system. Sometimes if you know the information already it can seem like an insult, but a lot of posts in Customer Support aren’t written for the specific poster. They are written for others who find the thread through Google or other sources.
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My example was just to show that there are many pieces to the WoW pie. All of which have to be up and running to play the game; and that even one part being down can prevent play. It wasn’t meant to be specific to the issues from the other day.
My comment about judgment didn’t have anything to do with intelligence or stupidity. It was specific to only the ins and outs of the game service. There are many people who are far smarter than any of us here, but they may not have any idea how the WoW technologies work. So, my point was simply don’t pass judgments on something that your aren’t privy to, or on someone who knows far more than you on a subject.
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I saw the announcement for it yesterday evening. I saw it at 9pm…it was probably up for awhile before that, because I don’t look at the launcher all the time.
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I don’t think this is the case at this point.
They’ve become pretty routine, and I think it’s because of an issue I noticed in the first week when the servers became noticeably more laggy over the course of the week until maintenance.
I’m all for doing the restarts to address the issue but I’ve been screwed over twice, once in a Mythic +8 run and again right at the end of a Torghast 6.
It’s extremely frustrating to not get the 1 hour warning. Especially when I doubt they’re so unplanned that we couldn’t be given that courtesy.
In this specific situation, no it was not. But yes, sometimes there are unplanned or emergency situations where they can only offer the 15 minute heads up.
In this case, the warning was posted in the Blizzard Desktop App (aka Launcher), and in the in-game client the evening before these restarts happened.
We also try to tweet about incoming maintenance when we have enough of a heads up to do it (when it’s not an emergency):
If folks use Twitter, I’d recommend following our account and turn on notifications to make sure you don’t miss any info shared.