I know that there’s lots of “wah maintenance extended” posts and “it’s just a game get over it” replies, but I thought something more constructive could be useful if we’re trying to get somewhere with our comments to Blizzard.
I did some napkin math, but my notes are certainly not perfect, so I thought it would be good to check to see if others had good data here - I’m showing 22 maintenance windows since July 16th for roughly 60 hours of downtime. Anyone have a good source to tidy this information up? My goal isn’t to exaggerate or stir people up, I just think that if we want a problem addressed or changed that our best approach is to use actual facts instead of sad unopened vault emotions.
Having a good look at how maintenance windows are changing through time can help us as a community confront that “testing” is spilling out of Beta and PTR into Retail play at an accelerating pace. I think it’s good that Blizzard recognized that the ~13 hr maintenance window was worthy of a game credit. But it would be great to be able to point out that maybe 3x 5hr windows in quick succession is not exactly “better” and have the data to show that trend.
I thin the maintenance hours is one thing, but more importantly when are these maintenances happening. Obviously, if BLZ gets the maintenance done in the midnight, no one cares. But every time BLZ is using daytime do this maintenance, this is a problem. In other word, BLZ is consuming the player’s time to reduce its own cost for worker’s extra hour salary. This is offensive.
This is also the only tech industry I have heard of that does software maintenance during the day. This is midnight job. Not a job for 9AM on a Tuesday.
To be fair on this one, I’m guessing this time is not just work hours for them, but also probably a traditionally low pop time. Midnight is likely not the greatest time to take a video game down. However, it gets a little more difficult when maintenance is 5 hours vs 1.
Midnight when, though? Remember, midnight in North America is peak gaming time in Oceania, who also is still a part of the NA data center rather than their own, separate region.
Do you upset a handful of people during reasonable working hours when the server load is arguably lightest due to Oceania being asleep and most NA players being at school/work, or do you cut an entire region off during their prime raiding time just to appease another?
Obviously the “simple” fix for this is to just make Oceania its own data center with its own maintenance windows, but Blizzard hasn’t done that in 20 years so it’s unlikely to happen now.
Make no mistake. If a worker work at midnight, usually he can get a shift in the next day, and get triple payment for the extra hours. In fact, many workers I know like this kind of jobs. The point is this part of the cost should be paid by BLZ. But now as they use daytime do the maintenance, BLZ is transferring this cost to the players, by consuming their game time. You do understand we paid for the game time right?
Yeah, I get that. And for my measly $15 a month, I get SO MUCH GAME TIME even with maint. It’s crazy. Want me to send you 20 cents for your down time today? Will that make ya feel better?
I want a gaming czar to fully refund everyone the cost of the entire expansion, plus fine this trillion dollar company millions for every minute of game time lost. Or force them to remove the montly fee. I want regulation for an unregulated multi trillion dollar industry that literally laughs at you while they mess with you on purpose.
Because we are paying to beta test rn. they didn’t fix any of the bugs from beta, as you can tell by the bans lol. There are literally still bugs from dragonflight. Like, why do I keep logging on to my characters to have their crafting gear on? Bug that didn’t get fixed in df, in alpha for TWW, nor beta tww and still not in live tww.
This is what happens when you fire thousands of employees and a bunch of other ones leave…you have to hire new talent and get them trained on how to fix all the problems that a 20 year old system has that only the veteran devs knew how to fix…and enough of them are gone that it’s a problem.
Bobby basically cut off the fingers of all the devs and expected them to still design.
While I understand that the comments are going to devolve into infighting (this is a forum after all), I would just highlight my goal here is ultimately not trying to get $0.50 back, but to address root problems. I’m a since-vanilla-launch player, and I understand there have been good times and bad times. Right now I feel like the accelerated pace of DF and TWW, while good in theory, has led to generally buggier and more maintenance intensive times. And it’d be good to gather some feedback there.
I’d love to hear whether this is an intentional choice/consequence - do they know that this content is coming out worse and requiring more hotfixes, but prefer the pace? Is there a world where we slow things down by a week or two and increase the quality substantially? Etc.
Less “ooh but my dollar”, and more just general health and direction of the game. I want the game to succeed, I think we all do. I’m just looking for community information to help guide that.
I’m on vacation. This is what I want to do on my vacation.
I wish you would take your own advice. We cant here to complain about a billion dollar company passing the cost of maintenance on to us. You came here to schill for them. Go be somwhere else.