Like we have all been conjecturing for decades and its still this super secret. What gives. What are they hiding?
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The hamsters are “sleeping” and being replaced by new ones. That’s the “maintenence” work Blizzard does.
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I don’t know, but let’s get a Nightborne in here to use their racial to find out their secrets.
I think it’s time for a behind the scenes look for sure, would be a great way to show subscribers the work that is done every Tuesday and patch days. Would actually make a good Netflix documentary.
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Software development bug fixes, new features, etc. are developed separately and tested individually, like horrific visions, so most testing very likely done on the PTR nowadays and certain things done in-house, possibly like Player Housing right now until there is a PTR for it. They are merged together into a new version and integration tests are performed (Like, does this Nightfall scenario code work with the present code), the same goes for any changes into the servers and databases.
When there’s a bug, a developer will have to reproduce it which can take a while to find the exact way to cause it because it’s not always simple and then that is ironed out and the client is updated and deployed. I’m sure there’s a bit more for a game of this size but that’s what I gathered from minimal search.
The secret files.
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If they gave a detailed breakdown of everything they do in maintenance windows it would change nothing.
just roll with it and stop whining about maintenance.
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I still don’t understand how… like… isn’t the PTR “what’s next?”
So imagine the PTR (as a file) is on some server in your bedroom. You stick in a jump drive, and bring it over to the Real-Realm-Server in your living room. You copy the PTR to the Real … and that’s it?
That’s that part I don’t understand.
There should be a WORKING VERSION of the new client … somewhere. I assume that’s the PTR, or rather, IT SHOULD BE THE PTR.
So once the PTR is working properly, you simply… make it the live-client version.
It seems they get the PTR working properly, and then some doofus says “it’s ok… I’ll just add these other 177 things.” Which now breaks stuff and we have a longer maintenance.
How could there be a working PTR “over there”, you install it on the live servers “over here” … and now suddenly it doesn’t work???
As the OP said: this question has been asked for YEARS. And I’ve never once heard a good explanation for it.
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If they did that, people who know what’s up would figure out they are actually incompetent and just making everything up on the fly and communicate that to the player base.
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A boring CI/CD pipeline I suspect.
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Not true.
We’d have two hours of our life spent watching people in an office drink coffee that we wanted back.
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More importantly lol why do you even need to know?
We get it. You pay a sub, this doesn’t make you a shareholder 
They unshackle the interns and let them walk around for an hour each week.
an old retired millwright that worked in the paper industry told me they usually just dipped carrots in liquid and played cards the rest of the time.
they probably launch some scripts and twiddle their thumbs unless/until something goes wrong.
Most if it is just boring hardware maintenance that nobody would be interested in. Big datacenters have a lot of moving parts. Lots of fans that need replaced when they go bad. Lots of hard drives that need replaced/reimaged when they go bad. Lots of AC/cooling equipment that needs maintenance. Filters need changed (low dust environment). Etc etc etc.
These are not Windows PC’s, they’re servers. WOW itself runs on Oracle. It may or may not be Linux, but it’s some sort of Unix base. It isn’t just people rebooting things. Software work is done by stopping the WOW services on the machines and running scripts provided by the DBA’s for various changes/updates to the SQL databases. Get any SQL errors when it’s being applied? That’s one reason unexpected downtime happens, have to work with the DBA’s to trace what happened and then provide new scripts to correctly do what they were trying to do. Not everything can be anticipated.
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I don’t know that they would be hiding anything, but to do a BTS look at something like that could expose a vulnerability to hackers maybe? I don’t know.
It would be interesting none-the-less.
The servers are ancient
Probably gotta go manually restart them with hand cranks which is why it takes so long
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They’re hiding the sausage making behind WoW.
You don’t want to know.
Despite continual improvements over time, improvements in how the game is run, how it’s deployed, how its scaled, how we get our downloads, everything, it’s a FABULOUSLY complex system.
And there’s lots of them.
Considering how borderline impossible it is to distribute a simple Python program out in the world, the idea that WoW is orders of magnitude more complex doesn’t surprise me.
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Blizzard Tuesday maintenance procedure.
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Short Answer: Yes
Long Answer: PTR is its own server, its own little world. Taking that and applying that to live servers isnt as easy as copy and paste, and many issues/unknowns kick in when trying to implement the same thing now across multiple different servers. Sadly its more than flipping a switch and presto, they all work.
Take 100 stacks of identical stones and make 10 towers of 10. Same process applies to each tower, but during the stacking some towers may tip over, some may not stack straight, some may wobble more than others. What works for one may not work for all, and going through and correcting and fixing each tower takes some time to get exact.
PTR is also not as full as live servers are, less people are testing and even less look at older content during PTR testing. Numerous times they have said updates break older festures which then require more corrections to fix.
Full data intergration is alot of work and prep to ensure it runs smoothly, and alot of things you are just hoping works nocely together.