I get some extended maintenance, but you’ve now assured eastern time zone players they will NOT be playing at all today. If this doesn’t constitute a reason to credit players a day’s playtime, I don’t know what does.
I am an annual subscriber, this does not affect me, but for monthly subs… this is not right.
Edit: Also, no Blizz communication posts in the last 7 hours… Just extensions every few hours…
Blizzard’s been pretty proactive about this sort of thing. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
The extension notice IS the communication. What else do you want, a phone call from Ryan Serverman to give you a personalized explanation?
There are no blizz posts about the extensions, reason for the extensions, etc. A small notice on the launcher that only gets updated with extensions 10 minutes before the expected time it’s supposed to be up is NOT good communication.
I’ll share a small secret about IT: Most updates aren’t worth the effort to read.
“We’re rebooting the system.”
“The system is still rebooting.”
“Still rebooting.”
“We had to reboot it again”.
I spent over two hours doing that a few weeks back, in between about 15 minutes of work.
If it didn’t affect you then why you make the thread it is obvious it did.
Blizzard CS did post a brief explanation on Twitter/X:
Maybe a small blue post like:
“We have run into an issue that requires us to extend maintenance. We are hoping to have things up and running by X:XX. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
It let’s us know that people are doing something, that they hope to have it fixed by __ and that they realize it’s an inconvenience to the player base. It’s called placating and is a great way to change frustration into goodwill.
To be clear, I get it. Updates, dialogue would be very nice.
However the people who’re doing the work aren’t necessarily the ones capable of communicating publically, and in many cases the information that could be communicating is going to be very … niche.
TBH Twitter does not count as communication, because it’s an actively malicious site that a lot of people avoid because it’s dangerous to visit even anonymously. I’m sure as heck not setting up a private browser on a virtual machine and using a VPN just to read a couple posts. I don’t permit traffic to or from Twitter on my network at all, it’s blocked at my router.
Last I checked they have their own forums that they can lock replies on that all players can access. The fact they still use X/Twitter instead speaks volumes about how little they care about their customer base. I work in IT/Programming and if I used external social media as my main communication with clients/customers I would be fired.
The outage effects my ability to play, but 1/365 does not affect me the way that 1/30 does.
I’m glad they posted on X, now why not make that a lateral post to places where more people use… like maybe, I don’t know… these forums.
and Vrak posted here in CS too.
With regard to credit - Maint is factored into the price we already pay and is expected. The game does not have 100% up time and never has.
They HAVE given credit before for really unexpected long down times. That happens after the down time is over and they can assess the impact of it. If the Devs decide to do it, they will then credit everyone game time. It has been a long long time since they did that though.
It usually takes multiple days of down time before that kicks in. We had that in Vanilla and the early days, but it rarely happens anymore. I think the last was WoD release.
It’s also right in the launcher. Everyone has the launcher.
bingo…you got it exactly right
It was updated there after X/Twitter. Their priorities are backwards.
There, is that good enough for you?
Eh, they do use the forums some. Vrak did post in the other Maint thread here on CS. It was more of a conversational post, but also informative. It says what you might expect. HUGE changes, not so easy to deploy on Live.
The odds of compensation for a days maimtence are very slim maintence is factored into the subscription and is covered in the eula.
can’t see when the launcher is updating; a forum post would be the most stable way to announce.