This is an open plea to WOW community managers and/or any official responsible for public facing language of the game.
It is time for honest maintenance schedules.
Week after week a notice for scheduled maintenance with specific times is posted - sometimes many days in advance. And then, week after week, the maintenance is extended without explicit communication to the community.
Beyond the user agreement, you are also in social contact with your players. Telling us one thing and consistently giving us something different is frustrating. Managing expectations is coms and customer service 101. Please adopt a different model for communicating with your player base regarding maintenance schedules. Under promise and over deliver is a simple method to improve this experience.
382 Likes
Would you feel better if they said it’ll be down all day then have it up much sooner? As a 35 year software developer there’s no crystal ball on how well upgrades/fixes will take. Even in the best environments with a staging server things don’t go as planned.
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Something I’ve learned in life. Things change.
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It’s time for players to learn to see patterns.
If there’s been extended maint. every week this expansion, then keep expecting it.
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You mean unexpected times are not allowed? If you want to play with a more broken game, you’re welcome too, but unexpected times that causes extended times are usually due to something not working right when doing the maintenance.
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@Syrvanos. I was about to post the exact same thing. I add that Blizzard has been amking and servicing live service games for decades. The fact that they continue to flat out lie about their scheduled maintenance is appalling. This company makes millions of dollars MONTHLY. Most companies un the US dont make that annually and they have much higher standards of service. Tell your lazy programmers to get off their butts and get to work, be efficient and honest about the maintenance.
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Oh, I’m sure Blizzard always knows when servers will come up, foresee every issue that occurs during maintenance and just tease us by extending the maintenance sometimes. Obligatory /s.
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20 years lol.
20 years of maintenance being like this. And still people have pikachu faces every single Tuesday.
lol
/popcorn
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The truth in IT is that when they say “1 hour” or 2 or whatever, that is what they honestly expect it to be. But then when they are doing the work, issues can happen. The patches arent applying correctly or throwing an error that did not happen on internal test servers. It happens in all forms of IT and outside of IT as well. Can fix that muffler in 20 minutes! Get in there and take it apart and find another issue that needs to be addressed first before that.
That’s just life. Everything is an estimate and not a guarentee. Just like when the servers or whatever are up early. Sometimes it goes better and sometimes its worse.
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Something I have learned in life is that people become complicit and compliant, companies know this and take advantage of them…
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I’ve always added 1-2 hours to our maintenance schedule at work.
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I’ve said before, just give us an update on the issues seen in maintenance, a blue post or something.
no one like to be kept in the dark. apart from mushrooms, yummy.
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I mean this sincerely: yes. Because there are some who have to schedule their time to play this game. Hoping/planning for something and not getting it creates disappointment among other negative experiences. Getting something sooner than expected, is more likely to be a positive experience.
It comes down to accurate communication. If the maintenance is that unpredictable, I’d argue not to provide an end time at all.
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They have test servers to test their patches on. Another excuse.
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I honestly miss the 8h long, 3am - 11am maintenances of old since they were long BUT very consistent.
I could totally plan around those.
The constant delays are worse than set times.
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Those people should never schedule their time to play on a Tuesday.
It’s pretty simple and basic. Never schedule to play on a maintenance day for any online game.
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I completely agree. A simple acknowledgement goes a long way in coms.
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I live by Scotty’s rule myself, all my quotes and time estimates I provide to clients and management are doubled. (But then again I usually do everything in one third of the time my co-workers take to do the same items)
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doesnt matter. They test things and some issues dont pop up until they try on live. Youve never taken on project and it took longer than expected
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How do you think I got the nickname of Miracle Worker!
1 Like