That might be a valid point if the “inconvenience” in question wasn’t a regularly scheduled occurrence for literally the entire lifetime of the game. Maintenance times have steadily improved over the years, but there was never any reason to believe it would go away entirely.
People come out in droves to defend things because this community has a tendency to seriously overreact to the most insignificant things. Just look at Classic’s release, the forums were finding a new thing to be absolutely outraged about every single day for the last couple weeks before release, and absolutely none of them actually mattered once the servers went live.
Those retail sites aren’t hosting a world being steadily built upon for a decade and a half, inhabited by millions of players and doing billions of calculations. A modest decrease in server performance isn’t going to cause significant issues for end users of those sites, the same cannot be said of WoW.
I get that maintenance is annoying and it’d be great if we could access the servers 24/7, but I guarantee you that the once-a-week inconvenience for a few hours is significantly preferable to the inconveniences caused by the server getting bogged down as their upkeep is ignored.
Well, I think there is some logic here as well. Even if Blizzard isn’t using the time efficiently (or is but just giving an example), this may be something as simple as training expectation. Training customers can be really important in terms of what is and isn’t expected. If the expectation is they will always do this, then it’s almost beneficial to Blizz to use the same procedures as always regardless. This is all assuming they see some beneficial reason for the down time.
In my world, there is always a question of when or if to run a sale during certain times. If you always run a sale during some dates, customers will always expect something during those times and then will be disappointed if those expectations aren’t met. Even if you offer the same thing each time… So maybe the best approach is no sales and no expectation. In this situation, we don’t expect anymore, and Blizz doesn’t need to offer it… So why change?
Given the complacent responses here, I can understand why they wouldn’t change.
This is actually a really good point. “If nobody complains, then we’ll keep it” and they can simply leverage that time for anything that they want to.
It becomes a perception issue if they get us accustomed to better customer experience and then need it sometimes. This is likely why they leave it there and in this time slot that lines up with their business hours.
And yes, due to the responses on here, you can simply see why they have no need to change it because they don’t even need to defend themselves. Gamers will defend the company for them without any knowledge as to why it’s done that way instead of letting them defend themselves.
First, what you and someone else define as an inconvenience… as I literally just said is relative. The fact you had to put in quotes highlights the very point I was making. Also, who cares if it’s always been like this… As the OP said, it’s strange now in 2020 that that is STILL the case.
I have been playing since BC and they seem to have made very minor improvements to down time. That said, the game also as more issues then it did in the past relative to some experience as well. So while we gained in some areas, we have lost in others.
Disagree. The forums… first off, don’t speak for the entire community. The people that come here to react are looking for a place to vent or communicate their issues. It’s like the people that leave yelp reviews. You have to be pretty motivated to leave a positive review versus a negative one. The forums tend to pool a lot of negative opinions at times.
That said, that is the purpose of the forums.
…
I even said in the very next sentence that it’s a different model. I’m given an example of what we expect for down time in different industries. For the industry I work in, down time of any sort is very detrimental so we work hard to avoid it. If we need to deploy a major update, at the very least, we do it at lowest traffic times early in the morning. Why not do this deployment from 2am to 10am? That’s what’s being asked here in some sense. Why not expect more?
This is the part that is most confusing. The point being made by the OP is… why at all? Do you honestly think this is something unique to just Blizzard? There are plenty of major websites that doing rolling updates. In the end, this is a cost savings process for them. It could be better, but isn’t.
The question to be asked is why they haven’t done it and why as a customer base we aren’t expecting more.
That’s honestly my thought and I don’t blame them for it. I seriously get it and the necessity of it. If we always just expect to have down time, then it simply is what it is. The responses here are echoing just that.
“well they do this every tuesday…” as if that is reason enough for it to continue.
Or could it be that you just don’t understand what goes into trying to update, patch and add onto a 15 year old huge game with so much content and complexity?
Except the op, in a reply to me, cited a reference puting peak downtime between 5am and 10am which is exactly the window given by Blizz as their maintenance window. So they are literally doing exactly what’s being asked for here, why is this still even a discussion?
I’m not making more of this then it is? Why are you? If you want to act like Blizzard is some unique company with totally unique problems that NO other company has, be my guest.
It’s now past 1. How does that fall into the window of 2am to 10am as I suggested?
People play at all hours, across the world. And some people just like to play late. Over the years, I’d be more put out by a 2am-4am PST outage than what we have.
Blizzard has analyzed their server loads, and has long figured out that the times they chose inconvenience the fewest number of people overall.
There is really nothing publicly available to suggest this is the case.
It’s safer to assume that its more convenient for them to do it during these times as they fit into normal working hours… which, is honestly more reasonable and if anything could be argued as a sensible approach.
First off, their codebase had a massive overhaul when they introduced sharding and phasing. It’s hardly 22 years of spaghetti code. The servers don’t even function in the same way any longer. Second, there are plenty of massive retail sites that have far more complicated deployments then WoW and do it seamlessly with no impact on the customer.
Again, if you want to make this more of it then it is, be my guess. It’s a simple example.
You use the words Spaghetti Code like you know what that means, and as if you’ve seen WoW’s source code repository? As Adrot stated, they overhauled the game and the database heavily to support instancing, scaling mobs, stat squishes, timewalking, etc.
Actually it’s not. The discussion thus far has revolved around discussing when they choose to do their maintenance and if any of it can be automated. Who said anything about a window being longer than expected?
It’s not really possible to make the call that you have OP without being there on the backend.
I have by no means worked on the WoW backend but I used to work on the backend of Dream Journey online and between weeks there is a ton of work we needed to get done for the game (whether it be migrating from the 2003 database, deploying the image from test to live and then subsequent testing, checking if deployment has worked on live, reverting back). Sadly there have been days where it hasn’t gone peachy and we’ve had to stay back and do more work and extend maintenance.
There’s a misconception that all of this can be done in advance and given how large WoW is I’m betting they already do this but messing up a test deployment vs live it is always better to be thorough than not.
My point is, those things you mention, are EASILY automated. Most companies are still trying to improve their processes (which is why it’s so easy to do consulting that space), but those are legacy processes at this point.
With CI/CD, automated deployments, automated testing, and the ease of access to resiliency and redundancy… those are solvable in 2020 quite easily.
The world has changed a lot since then and those practices have drastically been improved upon.
