That’s why I used the word “some”.
Just having the banner saying “its not you, its us” stops players from thinking there is something wrong with their local client. You aren’t going to be able to please everyone, but this one is pretty easy.
The maintenance notice is up, now, btw. We did it everyone!
HAHAHAHA you have too much faith in humanity there pal. Grow up. People want what they paid for and if you don’t tell them when something goes wrong they will call in mass. Its not like they have 7 other games that are working and require real support and they don’t need their support reps being clogged up with oh its an issue and we are dealing with it. Its standard business practice to ensure the company can function. A banner takes all of 5 seconds and takes 700 support tickets and cuts them down to 30 so they can focus on all the WORKING aspects of their business.
We generally post maintenance information in the Battle.net Desktop App. As far as I can tell the Breaking News was posted yesterday for both Classic Era and Burning Crusade Classic. Do not see that banner?
The original banner you posted was listed under the TBC PTR. Then AFTER the maintenance started today, you updated it to show under the TBC portion of the client.
Ah, thanks, Iamhidden. Not sure how that happened. 
The banner on the launcher was definitely not there at 10AM EDT.
It has now been updated to show it down until 10AM PDT instead of 9 for those that haven’t noticed.
Indeed. Looks like things are going a little long so they wanted to update the messaging to reflect that. Hopefully, it won’t take the full extra hour.
No one saw that banner this morning. There was nothing posted on TBC about being down, at all, anywhere, until it was already down for an hour.
Approaching 4 hours into our 1 hour unscheduled maintenance
It was scheduled yesterday for today.
The realms may actually be up during maintenance but access to them may not be. Don’t rely on that page for when realms can be accessed.
Yes it has. 9am PDT originally. Unfortunately, the ESTIMATE was incorrect so they have had to adjust it.
And part of what you agreed to when you made the account was that there is no guaranteed up-time. Since down time is already considered as part of how much we pay, no, there is not likely to be any compensation for maintenance. If they do consider it, it won’t be until after maintenance is done and only if the maintenance exceeds 24 hours.
Updates on what? The servers are down for maintenance. I’m sure people will be posting that servers are up when they come up.
The information is posted on the Launcher, in the banner.
It is also usually posted on the BlizzardCS Twitter in advance. Notice was placed on July 25th that Classic and BC would be having Maint yesterday the 26th. Originally time was 7-8am PDT.
I don’t see one for the Maint today though. - at least not one ahead of time.
They updated the CS twitter to note that this current Maint has been extended. Launcher was updated to match.
You pay for access to the servers during the month. Not per hour. Maint is factored into our Sub cost which has stayed the same for $17 years despite inflation.
Realm status is automated. It shows a server being online or offline. They are often UP while being worked on. What it does not show is the Authentication server - which is down during Maint so you can’t log in. This is how the Server Status page has always worked and it has always caused confusion. Just because the server is technically up, does snot mean you can get to it. This is why it is important to check the launcher and the CS Twitter.
Hopefully that info helps you in the future.
Realm Status only shows if the realm is up, not if you can log into it or not. It can go up and down multiple times during maintenance.
That indicates that something that was expected to take a set amount of time is taken longer than expected.
It is part of the EULA that the game may not be available all the time. Compensation usually only happens when the game is unplayable for over 24 hours.
Any other information about the maintenance would be posted after it completes if it’s going to be publicly available.
The Classic Era launcher had a banner fortelling the Wednesday maintenance yesterday. For whatever reason the tbc launcher apparently didn’t. One guess for why its so long is that it may involve deletion of all the unclaimed Classic Era/TBC clones.
I disagree with this. How were we supposed to know it was scheduled? It was not on the TBC launcher at 8:30AM EDT or 10AM EDT. It was added well into the downtime.
It was supposed to be in the launcher but it looks like it ended up in the PTR launcher instead of Live. Mistakes happen. Doesn’t mean that they didn’t schedule it yesterday for today though.
Yes mistakes happen, but because of the mistake it was unscheduled for everyone in TBC.
If a doctor schedules me for an appointment and doesn’t tell me then charges me for a missed appointment, I’m not just going to be like, well mistakes happen. I sure wouldn’t stay with him if his tone was, ‘well you should have known since it was scheduled.’
Just saying that correcting people on whether or not it was scheduled seems like a moot point, since to the entirety of the TBC population that schedule was not shared.
Unfortunately, the page can be problematic and it doesn’t always update as things change. We’re hoping to find better solutions for that, but I don’t have any information there.
It depends. We try to provide an ETA when the folks who manage maintenance can do so, but we don’t often have that so the current maintenance is often just extended each hour until it is done. If we receive an estimate that says “it’s going to take X amount of time”, we definitely use that.
We will continue to update the Breaking News on the Desktop App.
I believe the issue here is that the tweet is for yesterday, not today. I don’t believe a Tweet went out originally for today, which is unusual. We’ve already provided the feedback on that.
We understand the frustration around the lack of notification, we try not to allow that to happen.
They scheduled yesterday for yesterday.
Gave no time frame for today or even stated there would be one today at all.
I’m not going to scour every launcher and twitter page and forum post every day to find out there’s going to be maintenance on an off day.
Didnt actually notify players in any reasonable way until 20 minutes into said maintenance and gave an arbitrary timeframe which it would appear for the second time was wrong.
Imagine if i sent “updates” on my status to my boss in this manner.
“oh my b started 20 mins ago was supposed to be yesterday”
“yea we underestimated this thing gonna be 200% longer than we said”
takes 200% longer
crickets
Jobs still not done.
Maybe not in the realm of possibility, but… how cool would it be to follow that last part of, “We understand the frustration around the lack of notification, we try not to allow that to happen”, WITH…So for those in the threads who shared their concerns we will be emailing WOTLK BETA keys!!! ENJOY!!! woohoo
laughs That would be amazing. CS doesn’t have any involvement with betas, but who knows, on the cosmic scale, perhaps you gained a luck point and have a better chance for an invite. 