I just wish they had some sort of a test system so they would actually know how long it was going to take for them to do the maintenance. 2pm (est) becomes 3, becomes 4… now it’s 5.
Been doing this for 20 years, make billions of dollars, but still have no clue how long it will take to deploy a patch. Maybe they could start a gofundme, or change the color of that brontosaurus mount to red and sell 2 million more of them to get enough money so they can do a trial run before going live.
okay then. The new price is $20 with a $5 discount for maintenance compensation.
Companies spend over $1mm a year on a saleforce license and rarely get compensated for outages and maintenance (which happens i used to get kicked out of it).
And youre complaining about compensation for fkn $15 dollars a month.
Running updates on a live server is completely different than running them on test servers that absolutely NO ONE plays. Takes no more than 2 brain cells to understand this.
im presuming that its a traceback perhaps. Youre tinkering with 20yo code where a single misstep can cause dupes, fatal errors, item deletion etc
You understand that you are paying for access to a game that currently you are unable to access for a period of time that routinely extends passed their scheduled windows, right? I mean at some point you either are a shill, or you expect some type of reimbursement back to the customer. It would be like renting a car and having to pay for 7 days of the rental, but one of those days it’ll be in the shop for 1 hour (but could be 5 hours… 8 hours, maybe longer?). You, as the consumer, would definitely argue that you shouldn’t be paying for 7 full rental days then right? Or do you just constantly bend over at your own expense?
Yes, I do, and to be honest, I don’t give a f**k what you think.
Blizzard shouldn’t have to make special arrangements so addicts can play a computer game during normal working hours.
They don’t charge by the hour, they charge by the month. Access for the month includes the possibility of outages and the certainty of planned maintenance.
20 year unbroken subscription and you would think at least a t-shirt or something, nope just another useless mount.
At least this isn’t a thread about mage tower skins!!!
I just hope they didn’t break anything too severe.
Except you agree to the end user licensing agreement -
Limited Warranty. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT ALLOWED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE PLATFORM, ACCOUNTS, AND THE GAME(S) ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,”
And:
“YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT BLIZZARD IS NOT REQUIRED TO REFUND AMOUNTS YOU PAY TO BLIZZARD FOR USE OF THE PLATFORM, OR FOR DIGITAL PURCHASES MADE THROUGH THE PLATFORM, FOR ANY REASON, EXCEPT AS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW.”
Cry more or unsub over downtime during a Tuesday during typical ‘work hours’
Literally every massive database SAAS has downtime. Things like Hubspot and Salesforce usually have the devs do maintenance on the weekend which for weekend warriors can be a hassle and a salesforce license is 1000x more costly
Normal working hours for whom? And it’s a business my guy. It doesnt really matter how you feel about that. Blizzard is selling a product up front, and then a service that follows it. It absolutely owes up front expectations to its consumers (regardless if you feel that they are all sweaty neck beards playing when they should be working or employed- this is irrelevant).
If basic maintenance is this hard, I’m sure replacing every addon with ‘in-game features’ will go flawlessly
I appreciate you going out of your way to provide the actual text in the EULA.
It takes a few more brain cells to know that there are freeware tools, like Selenium, that can simulate THOUSANDS of attached users. That is a web based tool, but I guarantee you there are tools for this sort of things. Those would probably cost money, though, and where would Blizzard get THAT!
that has literally nothing to do with the time it takes to do an extended maintenance and also Selenium is for web based and wow uses custom binaries. You tried to sound like you knew what you’re talking about at least.
WoW likely runs synthetic loads but that is not the issue.
Any schema changes IE patch days follow a protocol:
Its a process split into chunks that each take time and it adds up to 4-12 hours.
If you READ my post you will see I brought up Selenium being a web test kit. And that they would need a different tool. But it would cost some money. They might even need to develop it in house.
Also, this whole process doesn’t take a variable amount of time, like 4-12. At least, it doesn’t HAVE to. Even with WoW it usually takes an hour, or LESS, if they just deploy minor fixes.
If you have the proper procedure, a deployment of a patch can take a set amount of time. You just need to spend the money and have the political will at the corporation to make the people do it. IF they had a procedure. I bet they kind of don’t. Probably just a check-list they go through.
I have worked at fortune 500 companies, one of which did massive AWS deployments and did them over very short periods with little downtime. They had massive GO/NOGO meeting to assess risk and make sure everything was in place.
The difference there is, that they were a company that HAD to minimize their process, and HAD to be right about it, because those servers were taking orders and every second the servers were down for a deployment cost them money. It was WORTH it.
Blizzard takes so long for maintenance because they know that people are paying $15/month no matter how long the servers are down. They know people will whine and complain, but then play the game.
Before I even engage in this. Do you have SRE or backend dev experience on larger software or services? If so, id love to see your github.
If not, I’m literally just going to say that for actually deployment, implementing a patch onto live its way more than closing a .exe and rebooting it.
I literally said that WoW likely has a test kit employed through bot load testing. That has nothing to do with what happens on patch day thats part of the final stages of the development not deployment.
If you work in an industry that is misunderstood by outsiders, im sure you can appreciate that what youre doing is the same exact thing for SREs, database engineers or release engineers.
There isnt anything new dropping??
I know right? Imagine $15 a month that works out to $.50 a day that works out to two cents an hour. I really hate that they get away with charging us $.16 every time they have an eight hour maintenance.