This may be a very cynical hot take, but please try and hear me out.
In 2023 live service games can be run without constant downtime if you’re a modern gaming company that cares about the player experience.
How is this achieved do you ask? With server/network redundancy, which allows developers to work on the servers that store the actual game data while players “play” on the mirror image servers.
Now that leads me to the speculative part of this post.
This next part involves math, so click off now if you have a math allergy.
$15/month divided by 31 days is (rounded up) 50 cents per day.
Now, if there are still 3 million people that play WoW then Blizzard made:
$1,451,613 that day in almost pure profit off of ONE IP.
If the game is down pretty much all day you get to fleece your customers out of their subscription money by purposely not implementing modern server and network design.
Now take that $1,451,613 and multiply it by 4 Tuesdays (not counting all the other down days) and you get:
$5,806,451 per month.
Blizzard appears to be stealing away almost $6mil per month in sub fees.
13 Likes
and instead you working and sharing this valuable knowledge to your company , you are here posting
2 Likes
What makes you think I want to work for Blizzard?
3 Likes
i said your company not blizzard
1 Like
The problem with redundancy is when a change is also needed on the back end. Both sets of servers would presumably be hitting the same servers. If not, then they’d still have to take the new databases offline while they are updated with information newly accumulated by the temporary databases.
Oh my good lord it’s a video game that’s down during business hours. Go to work. Take a shower. Going read a book.
11 Likes
The Forums are aflame with rage. 
Makes popping my popcorn easier at least.
4 Likes
Where do you think I am bud
1 Like
LOL.
What you don’t consider here is that this is not “pure profit” at all…the servers are still (preumably) powered on during this maintenance, and this is not any sort of revenue gain; if there was NO downtime, the monthly sub fee is the same as if there are 6/7 days playable. The only way I can conceive of any sort of cost savings (ie gain/profit) here, is if somehow the various internet pipes serving the Blizzard Data Centers are not rate-unlimited. IOW the reduction in traffic to and from the peons (us) saves them…and that’s highly unlikely for a company that size with the data-moving requirements they have.
1 Like
That’s assuming the game engine can handle it. You forget, WoW isn’t on a modern engine. It’s a modified Warcraft 3 engine. There’s probably plenty of issues in game strictly because of the old engine. The only way to resolve it would be a new engine but they’d either have to remake the entire game from scratch or hope the engine is compatible enough to transfer most of the game.
1 Like
Downtime wouldnt even bother me really if the times werent always so massively off. This morning for instance when i read the pose i was like, OMG there actually doing it earlier when it would affect less of the player base, until I tried to log in and they had changed it( like always)
1 Like
Hence the keyword “almost” before “profit”. Obviously, no company that isn’t outright stealing your wallet is making 100% profit. But you knew that and I think everyone that reads this post will know that too. Stop trying to muddy the waters.
1 Like
Sure, ideally, you’d like an upgrade system where you spin up the upgraded servers and just phase characters over to them live as simply as if they were being resharded.
But adapting 20 year old code, databases and client side updates to be able to handle live handoffs between two different versions of the game sounds like a terrifying megaproject.
4 Likes
The servers struggle to sometimes hand off players between instance servers. I can’t imagine if they tried doing live handoffs.
I agree it would be a “terrifying megaproject” for a multi-cent indie company such as Blizzard.
They did just give a few days of free game time. What I took from that was blizz made sure that people who were taking a break still got the trading post tendies and chance to buy what they wanted. that in itself must be huge numbers, not trying to do the math tho
I’m not trying to muddy the waters at all.
Your argument (correct me if I’m wrong) is that Blizzard is not providing the service they should, for our fees.
I would counter and say they are; IT by its very nature requires patching, updates, and fixes. These down-times are part of the service, counter-intuitively, but generally result in a more stable and robust game environment for the up-times. You’re of course free to disagree, but the main essence of the product we pay to access is the up-time of course, but it’s not EXCLUSIVELY that. Thread after thread of entitlement lol…
1 Like