I’ve worked for software companies with as few as 40 employees serving hundreds of thousands of customers. There’s always somebody who is willing, or simply doesn’t care, about coming in, in the middle of the night or on an off day for patches or maintenance.
I was one of those people. It was an easy-as-fark way to earn “hero points” at the office. People treat you like a savior, but it’s just nothing.
For a company as big as Blizzard… there are plenty willing to come in at weird times.
Looks to me like they’ve simply baked in a LOT of time to test what ever they change AND to coincide with the time that the most populated time zone gets off of work… and has time to play WoW.
See? There IS a wee plan to the timing.
(For my money, and my previous role as “Off-Hour-Liza”… I’d want to hit this at midnight the night before… totally personal choice though.)
I bet you hate wearing a mask and claim it’s against your civil liberties and throw a fit, give the manager a hard time because he’s trying to keep people from getting sick and just doing his job.
You don’t give a care though and continue to berate him with your cell phone out so you can ‘expose’ him, when really everyone around you is thinking how much of a silly person you are and wonder how you tie your own shoes in the morning let alone get groceries.
You wind up tazed in the back of a police car, crying and flipping out telling everyone you’re going to sue them, and you will probably win because some other Karen is video taping the whole thing out of context to share it in a court of law and shame the officer for doing their job because you’re a lunatic…
I do think the devs take their jobs seriously as do other employees for Blizz but they don’t make the work schedules , management does .
Does it suck not being able to play right now on my day off ? Yes it does but I also understand that the world and the world of warcraft don’t revolve around me and I can find things to do until it is up.
The only people that might be stupid are those that act like people at a gaming company should be made to have a work schedule that caters to them .
Considering the offices are in the Pacific time zone and they require staff to make sure the updates dont go haywire its a bit easier and more logical to do so with mostly their entire crew on hand. Its a bit much to ask hundreds of employees to show up at 2am, when it would be much more feasible and less completely opposite their normal working hours, being 6am is only an hour or two earlier than the usual office hours (for most staff).
The number of people defending Blizzard on this topic is seriously staggering. It’s an 8-hour maintenance that extends into PEAK hours on literally the biggest day of the expansion, aside from launch. I cannot recall a single time in WoW’s history where such a thing occurred on this particular content step in an expansion’s lifetime. Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of people have been diligently preparing to do this content today, and are no longer able to because of how far into the day the maintenance was extended?
I’m not saying they need to be condemned for this decision, but if you can’t acknowledge it as seriously odd, confusing, and poorly-timed, then you aren’t being honest with yourself, or considerate of the time and energy invested into taking advantage of this day in particular.
My schedule was completely thrown out as a result of this unusually long and late maintenance, am I going to cry about it and demand reparations? No, lol, but I am capable of recognizing that this was objectively a gaffe on Blizzard’s part, and it’s one that seriously inconvenienced tens of thousands of players, or even outright prevented them from following anything close to their planned schedules for the day, possibly extending into the rest of the week for many, myself included.
People have every right to be upset when last minute changes seriously disrupt or outright prevent their progress and adherence to carefully-planned schedules on such an important day, for those who invest a lot into the game. Had we been given a few day’s notice that this would be the case, then it hardly would have been a big deal - a minor inconvenience at most.
I can’t figure out why people are so loathsome of those who take this game the least bit seriously and expect Blizzard to be consistent and transparent with these kinds of choices. It’s not asking a lot, and it isn’t remotely unreasonable to express discontent towards these kinds of things.
If anyone thinks for a second that Blizzard can’t financially justify shortening and/or changing the start/end of this maintenance, then your dissonance is clearly too severe to warrant your participation in the conversation.
Where did I say it sucked? Point that out, please. Thought I said it was fun times? Man guess even the nerd rage was vastly more entertaining then as well. Oh well.
The problem is that it’s raid release day. 5pm is when alot people get off work. Having so many people hammer the server is gonna end badly. Queues and crashes v
There have been extended maintenance times for major content patches (including the introductory raid tier) for years. Well into ‘peak’ hours. I also doubt that ‘hundreds of thousands’ have been diligently preparing as extensively as you think. Those who have played the game for any length of time anticipate and plan for downtime and disruptions on a major patch day.
You also assume you know enough about the process behind the scenes to make the bold claim that Blizzard can’t financially justify shortening or changing the maintenance time. Perhaps you do, but I don’t think so. How can you claim to know that Blizzard could shorten maintenance by throwing money at the process?
I’ll see myself out of this conversation going forward, since according to your post, my dissonance is clearly too severe to warrant any further participation.
