first descendent does not do this… in fact its an example of doing it right… much more complex code, almost no downtime at all.
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I can name a few. Rust, H1Z1, AOE4,
Here’s an interesting thought experiment.
- A player can have 50 characters on an account.
- Each character can wear about 15 items, about 12 of which can possibly be enchanted when you consider every enchantable slot over the entire course of the game, but you could consider them as wearing 30 items since transmog is just another set of items visually displayed in parallel with the set of items mechanically in effect (though we know that at least one transmog item, the cursed pickaxe, activates special scripts while mogged so it’s possible other scripts have to run too)
- Each character can carry about 400 items, when you include the bank.
- There are approximately 160,000 items in the game, per wowhead.
- There are probably like 100 reputations in the game.
- There are in the neighborhood of about 200 talent points per character across all specs.
- There are about 50,000 quests and achievements put together, each of which runs at least one script on your character while active, and a healthy chunk of them (let’s arbitrarily say 5,000) do phases.
- There are in the neighborhood of 100 different server clusters in a dozen server groups, and most of them have to be able to completely talk to each other in seamless real time.
- Warbands mean they’re tracking like 1000 pets and mounts at all times in addition to the literal thousands of item appearances being tracked account-wide for updating.
- They’re doing this on a player base in the low millions.
Do a break down like this on the number of persistent variables and servers that have to constantly speak to each other with no warning or preparation on your other favorite online game (as a lay person, I suspect lobby multiplayer has it super easy here as far as server connections). I’m pretty sure WoW’s going to run far ahead of basically every other online game as far as the amount of work it’s having to do.
You may correctly say that a lot of what’s being patched has nothing to do with these variables, and at a conceptual level, you are probably right. But at a practical level, when you’re optimizing for performance at scale, the weirdest interactions can matter, and part of that is pre-batching out what data gets cached where and how for quick retrieval in play.
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Yep, pretty much this. FFXIV is down sometimes for a whole day when big updates come rolling in, the only people I see getting upset that we’ve had maintenance on the same day every week for the past 20 years are people who sadly (but that’s just life) who’ve got their day off on Tuesday from work and people who are just simply addicts suffering from withdrawal.
I wonder OP, which of those two do you fall under?
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Yep. And FFXIV is, in general, a very well run game, with far fewer bugs than WOW.
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Don’t forget the bailing wire!
Well, we are still on a fossil of a RTS engine that really wasn’t made for an MMORPG anyways. Shoulda switched over to a newer engine designed for that in like maybe Cata or WotLK… instead of waiting till we have 10 expansions worth of impossibly many art asset variables to port over.
I feel like they also usually announce a far longer downtime than they actually need just because Japanese culture is all about being correct and trying not to offend the customer. Blizzard gives optimistic projections that aren’t promises, but people take it as a promise.
Yes, they actually do: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2074920/view/4660753243339585201 
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Worry about the game when players stop crying.
Not really, WOW’s engine has been continually updated. Also, there is a lot more dynamic stuff than FFXIV has. FFXIV’s equivalent to scenarios is much more limited for example. And they still use the same formula for pretty much everything they’ve used since launch. Dungeon and raid bosses aren’t nearly as dynamic.
FFXIV went down 48 hours for the launch of the last expansion. The first few update cycles after were extended by a fair amount.
Nobody cried, nobody whined, people just waited patiently because it’s only a game and it doesn’t really matter at all.
While they’ve cited the engine as a hindrance to certain things like housing in the past, idk if you can rightfully call WoW’s engine a fossil at this point. They’ve done heaps of internal clean-up and rewrites to huge sections of code.
You’re always going to have significant debt issues when you start out with an ill-suited engine (SWTOR’s Hero Engine) vs. waiting to make content until the engine is suited to the purpose (ESO’s Hero Engine) but I wouldn’t be surprised if WoW’s engine is pretty much best-case scenario for all the things it does at this point.
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Oh noe, the #1 MMO of all time has long down-time when Patch happens.
Why do you think all the others have failed? Maybe they needed more maintenance. LOL!
Yes but these are updates to the WC3 engine, as this is what WoW has used for 20 years, many of the bugs and glitches comes from the Frankenstein’s patch work monster of spaghetti code they tacked on to the engine that it isn’t really designed for.
I think SWTOR doesn’t go down during major patches either, they just sort of release them to download and require a version before logging in.
But yeah, many games do have various maintenance periods.
That’s an extremely oversimplified view of WOW’s engine. Yes there is a lot of spaghetti code. All games have spaghetti code except for extremely well developed indie games. WOW’s engine has been dramatically cleaned up in recent years.
Also, ESO does not and never used Hero Engine in the live game. They used it during early development so the artists and content wouldn’t have to wait on the people making the engine. It was just a springboard to jumpstart development until they had their own engine ready.
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Any game that has an RDBMS backend that is getting updated at the rate an MMO does is going to need maintenance.
Even if they had an Oracle backend, the cadillac of RDBMS databases, instead of MySQL, there would still be downtime.
Everquest 2 has been down for years…and it went through some long patches. Very good game…I honestly don’t know why people left…
I played both at launch… EQ2 and Wow launched about the same time. After I played my 30 days of both, I stuck with EQ2 for about 4 months, then ultimately went back to WoW. Something about it just sucked me in. I was partial to EQ2 because of how much I loved EQ1, but EQ2 was just meh.