The game is bigger basicly.
So very true.
Maint used to be 12 hours every Tuesday, sometimes longer, and often other days of the week too. That was Vanilla through Wrath though.
Eventually that got a lot better and most Maint days were restarts, or an hour, if there was no major patch or issue. Most normal Maint is still short and still on TuesâŠ
BUT
We have a major expansion release that has the usual assortment of bugs, adjustments in skills, adjustments in systems, etc. It takes time to do that across all the Regional datacenters/databases/servers then get them tested for stability, and rebooted for play. It is not as fast as doing Windows Update and rebooting your computer 
There is no situation in which a game is going to release bug free, or with systems that are perfectly tuned. Once the player base gets their hands on it in the hundreds of thousands - or millions, things show up they donât expect. You can depend on this kind of down time near any major patch or update probably forever.
And yes, the game is bigger - with a massive amount of very very old code.
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Am I rose tinted goggles here or is this not accurate. I played when I was younger so memory may not serve me, but I do not remember every Tuesday coming with a 12 hour maintenance from vanilla â wotlk?
Itâs very accurate. It wasnât necessarily every Tuesday (especially as we expanded into BC and Wrath), but it was more often than not. Tuesday morning/afternoon (from a U.S. perspective) was never a day for all-day sessions of this game back then.
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True, though most maintenance periods during the week are often to pick up various hotfixes and updates that need it. Some take effect while the realms are live but some require a restart.
This expansion had a fundamental change with Warbands, and updates to hardware to address some issues with the Auction House as one of our Game Producers mentioned this week. Not to mention trying to get the character undelete option available so folks can recover lost characters, which seems to be a fairly complex issue.
I can say we definitely donât like to do more than the one maintenance per week and would avoid it if we could.
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This is very cool insight tbh. Appreciate it.
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Is that fix part of todayâs maintenance?
#dfmb
What happens during maintenance isnât generally something that Customer Support has any knowledge of, at least that could be shared. Any announcements on what is part of maintenance is usually posted in Hotfix blogs and Content Updates blogs found under âNEWSâ, and other posts often made by Community in General Discussion.
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Gotcha. Your earlier comment seemed to imply that the AH fix and Character Restore might be in this Hotfix Patch. Or at least that what I inferred from the comment. Alas, I now see from the patch notes that this is not the case. I hope they fix this soon. As the days and weeks slip past, more and more characters will begin to fall out of the restoration windows (90 days for levels 10-29; 120 days for levels 30-49). Will Blizzard be temporarily removing that restoration window? It would seem rather unfair to permanently lose a character that was deleted by a system error, no?