The weekly maintenance process is antiquated and it is high time to move on to a faster, more efficient, process of updating your game.
When looking at small indie companies, they push changes to production on the same day as they are ready, there is no waiting for Tuesday maintenance, there is no 30 people long chain of red tape, there is no waiting, and they are extremely successful because of it.
We all understand that Blizzard isn’t an indie company, that they have hundreds of processes and a lot of overhead to deal with, but that is exactly why it is ever more so important for this process to be changed.
We’ve been on a weekly maintenance process for over 15 years and if there is one thing most players agree with is that changes take way too long to happen.
There are so many low risk changes that are taking entirely too long to be pushed to production. From simple number changes on ability coefficients and multipliers, to low risk bug fixes, the numbers of changes that could be done overnight is staggering. There is really no reason not to push these low risk changes to production asap.
Unfair for people who play earlier in the week you might say? Quite literally no one should care about that. The sooner we can reach a state of the game that is more balanced, the better for everyone.
Too disruptive to restart the servers outside of the weekly basis? The negative impact this would have doesn’t match the positive impact being able to apply changes to the game overnight would have.
Lets assume for a moment that 50% of issues would require a server shutdown/restart. At any given time of day there are people in M+ dungeons, in the Raid, and doing other things in the World that would be absolutely disrupted by a random server restart at an unannounced time.
In addition to that, if a boss is nerfed on Friday, then every guild who raids on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday is at an immediate disadvantage to those who raid on the weekends/Mondays. Yes, the RWF is over, but that doesn’t mean that other, smaller realm or community based competitions don’t exist.
With the weekly maintenance, all the issues are able to be addressed and fixed at one time, instead of constantly wondering if X hotfix has gone live yet.
Yes, there are some gamebreaking things that get hotfixed during the week, but the majority of these balance changes need to stick to the weekly reset as they do right now.
To come full circle, having maintenance at a lower-traffic (but still convenient for Blizzard (Aka not 3am PST)) time is still the right move. In a game as big as WoW, planning is everything. Imagine being a 1-night raiding guild and half your raid time gets taken away from a random realm restart that takes a little longer than usual. I guess they just get less gear this week. Sucks.
See what I mean? Not a great result in those cases.
That’s not what I’m asking here. Not random server restarts, scheduled restart that doesn’t wait all the way to Tuesday to happen.
The likelyhood of a restart to take longer for number tweaking should be as low as the likelyhood of the server just going down without a maintenance from a random power outage. This is 2023, not 2008 where servers were fickle and could catch on fire randomly.
Not asking for things that affect multiple systems to be updated outside the weekly maintenance, I’m asking for simple things like increasing or reducing an ability coefficient.
Something that should absolutely be doable considering how they changed their ability system to be able to independently just tweak those numbers without affecting any other systems.
Changes are happening way too slow, that is a fact, and the longer it takes for changes to happen, the less data they will get to make more changes down the road. I have many friends that just tell me they don’t want to play at all this weekend because they refuse to play until the Tuesday maintenance happen because they are sick and tired of having to wait for changes to happen.
How would you do this gradually? Because it requires both client side and server side changes afaik. Can’t have PvP where 1 player deals more damage than the other. How would you handle this gradually mid pull in raid? Or when someone is hopping between shards?
I’m not an expert on this subject, so I’m going to assume that if they could, they would.
If they have any calculations of damage done on the client side, you would have people doing billions of DPS by manipulating data packets sent to the server.
No, all damage calculations, including spell coefficients, increases and reductions, etc. are all done on the server.
Even tooltip damage should use values returned from the server with the exception of flat descriptive like say Rune of Power stating “40%”.
If they aren’t able to make number tweaking without modifying the client, I’d like to have a word with their engineering team because that would be a massive failure of software design.
In fact, it is quite possible for a game to change values on a live server without even restarting the server. WoW is old though so I wouldn’t expect it to be setup for that or it to be easy to change to be setup for that.
One could have the values in database and for the server to fetch those values at a given interval and keep them as variable on a data table set somewhere persistent for the server game code to use for calculations.
Easier said than done obviously, especially on code that is old like WoW and based on their server infrastructure, but that’s why they hire engineers to figure this out.
I think if Blizzard changed how I healed/DPS’d on the fly I would hate it. Image getting nerfed or buffed during an arena match. They nerf my health pool as im dying and a raid boss is swinging his arms for auto attacks. LOL
Which can wait for the Tuesday maintenance to be patched.
Not trying to be insulting to their employees, I’m sure they have very talented people and some of them I would hope knows more than me in terms of software engineering, but the reality is that there are far more talented engineers who works in other industries or outside of California and pretending like Blizzard knows better as a whole than anyone who doesn’t work for them is just shilling for a company that has an history of losing its veteran devs. They aren’t going to have more than a handful of good engineers at most and it’s not hard to believe there can be more qualified people out there.
The video game industry doesn’t exactly attract talent in the IT world, especially in a place like California, with its working conditions, low salary to cost of life ratio and benefits being one of the worst in IT. It’s been abusing people’s passion ever since it became a corporate industry and it’s been even more abused by corporate greed preventing good employees from making a positive impact by blocking them at every turns. I’ve worked long enough in 3A to see too many people just give up on it, so many talents just moving to other industries like e-commerce or banking where they are guaranteed high salary and benefits. It’s disheartening to see how abusive the industry is towards its talent.
Never going to apply to Blizzard because I have higher standards than that and I will also never go live in California.
And I’m not going to speak on this anymore because I’m not interested in being told that I can’t criticize them because I don’t work for them.
As I’ve said before, I’m not asking for just randomly changing values in the middle of the day with no no heads up, I’m asking for scheduled updates that aren’t hard set on Tuesday so we don’t have to wait so long for changes and we can get more frequent updates.
You can criticize them. It just holds no value to make an assumption and then criticize based on that assumption.
A lot of changes already go outside of the maintenance. This gives me the impression that they are already doing what they can outside of the standard window.
We went almost 2 expansions where maintenance only existed for like 2 weeks before and after major patches. (and it was a good way for us to tell when Blizzard planned to release a patch) The rest of the weeks had no maintenance.
Why did this stop?
I think it was BFA (it may have been Legion) where there was like a 6-8 month period where there was no maintenance whatsoever that entire time. Meanwhile, we’ve had maintenance, I believe every week since Shadowlands started.
Just feels weird that they had it at a point where maintenance wasn’t needed except for big patches, but now suddenly it’s needed every week again?
I don’t mind maintenance, mind you, I just find this very weird, personally.