I’m genuinely curious about this. Can someone that might have more insight on how things work explain why maintenance takes so long in WoW? When ever they release a new patch or a new season it’s always an extremely long maintenance usually lasting well into the afternoon.
All of this has already been tested on the PTR so what exactly are they doing for maintenance? And think about entire global expansion releases where we can literally still be logged into the game sitting next to the quest NPC and they flip a switch and the whole expansion is available. So why can they do that for an expansion but have to close down the servers for a patch?
Not mad as I’m normally working during maintenance hours anyways, just very curious why it takes all day long.
They’re probably testing everything on the live servers since the world first race is about the only thing that generates any kind of buzz outside of the game’s existing community.
If something goes wrong, Blizz loses mountains of revenue.
Long time for testing and scaling up servers and such.
Big patches take time to install on the hardware. Idk how many servers Blizz has but it’s probably hundreds.
Lots of checks.
I work as a software engineer that releases stuff to consumers. When we do an update, we shut down the environments (lots of things interacting between the deep backend and the new deployment), promote the code to our production environment, give time for the servers to scale up, monitor the logs for errors / issues, and add some time for padding. Otherwise millions of dollars are lost if there’s a problem.
You’ll see it almost every time new content drops because no matter how much you pre-test things, there’s always extra adjustments needed when things go live. Plus testing needs to be done after these adjustments.
Tell me you don’t work in tech without telling me you don’t work in tech.
There’s a lot that can go wrong with updates. Most system maintenance and updates take a while.
There were times when maintenance used to take around 8 hours on normal and about two days on patch release.
As of now, it’s the best release cycle in known history of WoW
Code deployment takes time and teams have to follow processes and procedures to push code to prod.
Promoting code in lower environments for PTR doesn’t essentially mean that all aspects of deployment will be immediate, or entirely successful in production.
Unless you have been playing since Vanilla, you have no idea what long maintenance is. I remember weeks of being down for hours each day because of issues. I prefer they take their time and do it right before letting us fools back in.
Which then turns into the technician yelling at the server, then he throws something because it refuses to work, then the technician will call the server’s ex and ask them what to do and that technician will tell them the little tricks to keep it running.
Now there is a 4+ GB pre-release download.
What is it for?
I hope that it will not be required in order to log in today.
I’m on slow DSL and used last months cell data to download the 6+GB patch last week.
If i need to use cell data to download this thiing I will use up most of this months cell data.