We’re in maybe the 6th or 7th week of this patch and maintenance has been extended over half of the weeks so far - and again today. Let’s not even discuss actual patch days where servers aren’t typically available until late afternoon.
Are there any other live service games that have downtime every single week? Do those games often have to extend their downtime?
As someone relatively new to WoW it’s always been shocking to me that this is just the accepted behavior. Or maybe there’s a technical limitation specific to wow that I don’t understand.
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They have multiple geolocations to patch and schedule changes around. So patch everything, while developers are available for emergency hot fixes if something doesn’t execute , or roll back everything. There’s also going to be whole backups run / validated prior to beginning patching
We are also heading into a new expansion, so its very likely they are starting to push out major back ground updates to prepare for that to help smooth out 9.3.x and 10.x launches. Not to mention 9.2.7 has a bunch of new things they are experimenting with, so that can also mean a little more tuning/changes on the patch cycle
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Everquest does the first Wednesday of the month for 6 hours, so it kind of evens out that way. Sometimes it takes less, sometimes it’s 8 hours. When TLP’s are being sorted out all the servers usually go down, especially if it’s an expansion launch day and something ends up messed up on the release.
I prefer the way WoW does it, honestly. I don’t mind an hour or two early in the morning and then going about my day. I assume the extensions have to do with DF things and that is to be expected. They usually come up before their projected time so it is what it is.
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Maintenance is always longer in the pre-expansion period.
It’s a catch 22. They get complaints if they apply patches and fixes, or they get complaints if they don’t.
It works out to 99+% server uptime on average. Yet people still complain. 
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I think every game I play has a weekly maintenance window on Tue or Weds usually coinciding with the weekly reset. Granted I don’t notice it much on the 2 I play that are based out of Asia as I’m sleeping when they patch but every other game it’s early morning my time.
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Most MMOs I play don’t have lengthy downtime unless there’s a content patch, so WoW’s recent trend of being down for hours on most reset days is rather bizarre. I really don’t know what to make of it … I could understand if they were doing hardware upgrades or something, but should be a one time thing not a weekly occurrence. They aren’t adding any new content and balance changes are done via hotfix, so idk what the fel is going on at Blizzard these days.
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A 4 hour outage in the morning, is to me, excessive. 7 am their time is not early morning in the rest of the US. I worked in the power industry and we were down around 1 am when it was cooler in the South Texas heat (for people who would loose power) and did our best to reroute power on top of that. We also worked a hard and fast as we could. No outage was planned for 4 hours unless it was a parts delivery issue. For some reason, I do not see that being the case here.
And yes, on top of this, during the past week, there were server downtime issues on top of this excessively long planned outage.
So for me, the bottom line is that they can just get out of bed early and actually work early morning hours once a week.
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im sure it’d be technically possible to have it be seamlessly “hot-updated” while its live but they don’t wanna bother with that. sounds complicated and costly.
more realistically it could totally be a short reset everytime. maybe someday.
*then again ive been thinking that since ~2006 and it’s still not happening so… maybe not heh
You never do hardware upgrades all at once when you have this many servers. It’s not like a software patch that can be applied simultaneously. If they did it all at once they’d be offline for days.
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I love reset day.Just to see how many complaints there are. As well as how many people have no idea about how software works.
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Plan around Tuesday, some maintenance days it’s only a restart. Others, it’s half a day or longer. On patch days, it has taken till 5:00 PM.
You agreed to this in the TOS, so you have also stated this is acceptable behavior.
Plan around Tuesday…
I think the biggest barriers to this are the backups and suchlike, honestly. With a game as large as WoW is, the overhead for patching and backing up are probably daunting enough on their own, add in needing to keep track of and serve content to players, especially if those players are moving from instance to instance, and you’re all but begging for there to be a slew of CS complaints from players who suddenly don’t have an upgrade or a rare mount that dropped after they were snapshotted but before the roll out, or characters getting stuck between maps, or reputations or currency values getting corrupted…
True. Not like this is a multi-billion dollar company or anything.
FF14 has weekly downtime, and downtime for major patches/updates.
Hell, Steam, has weekly downtime. Every Tuesday evening usually when my friend group is getting together to do something for fun we’ll get rolling disconnects from Steam due to Steam maintenance.
Welcome to Computers.
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Every MMO I’ve played that gets any significant updates on a regular basis has longer regular updates. Games chiefly on maintenance mode like Champs Online have low downtime comparable to WoW between patches but they’re also terrible in every way and driven entirely by their cash shops.
WoW is usually the fastest of my subscription games to be done with patch. Longer maintenance atm is almost certainly getting things ready for Dragonflight early to reduce the mess that expansion launches were near the start of this game – and it is still faster on average than SWTOR.
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Yes, I also play The Division 2 and they have weekly maintenance windows as well.
Yes like almost all of them
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zero downtime deployment is a concept that exists. probably not profitable/worth/applicable at this scale idk.
i figure they wanna go with a more cost-sensitive solution with less potential troubles even if they could do it. ppl are already conditioned to have the downtime anyways.
i kinda like memeing during downtime and slowly sipping on my coffee anyways. im used to it. would be neat if it was a steady window instead of variable time tho.
It’s a lot slower than both versions of Runescape. Typically servers will go offline then immediately back on within 5 minutes or so of an update.
I have not ever seriously played Runescape, and I know it’s a good deal more involved than it used to be, but… I’m hesitating at the comparison between a game that used to run in your browser at a time when word processors couldn’t run in browsers and a paid subscription executable