Another factor that has to be considered for creating single instance outages rather than rolling ones throughout the week is the actual staffload required to do the work. It’s likely that ‘take all servers down’ ‘patch all servers’ ‘restart all servers’ takes pretty close to the same amount of human time as ‘take this server down’ ‘patch this server’ ‘restart this server’. If they do that separately throughout the week for each group of servers, they’ve just massively increased their staff costs to watch over the process.
I am not a WOW player, but a regularly scheduled downtime makes more sense to me than a rolling update. I would be fairly miffed if I turned on the computer at a random time during the week, ready to play, and found there was an update and I couldn’t log on. Scheduling them as they do, folks will not need to be startled by a heads up each Monday night, they’ll get used to it, and find something else to do during the downtime, rather than getting mad about being kicked off halfway through a quest or whatever at X o clock on an Xday. I used to play a MUD, and I would sometimes log on a minute before the “5:00 minutes to one hour shutdown” prompt started going. Now that sucked.
The Octagon’s comments got me thinking. I’m a sysadmin and the regular Tuesday downtime in WoW never surprised me. It just makes sense. We have a regular maintenance window for our servers where our users know that we have the “right” to take them down to do such things as patch the OS or whatnot. Granted, we don’t do this weekly, but we could. Just applying security patches to the OS, rebooting, doing honor calcs, reindexing or doing whatever maintenance they need to do to their databases, and getting a secure clean backup… it’s possible they could use a lot of their time even on a non-patch week.
??? What does QFT mean?
I don’t think anybody was recommending random rolling downtime. I was talking about a regular schedule where these three realms are down Sunday from midnight to 4:00am; the next four are Sunday from 4:00am to 8:00am; and so on through the 187 U.S. realms, thus giving the best of both worlds: a schedule everybody can count on and the ability to still play the game during the scheduled downtime of your favorite realm.
Last time I ran a significant network (about 10 years ago), our users expected 100% uptime. We had a scheduled maintenance window twice a year, and we did it in a couple of hours on Sunday night. Why would you plan for 5 hours of downtime a week (3% downtime)–AND do it during the regular workday instead of the middle of the night?
From experience, that something appears to be “bitch about the downtime on the WoW forums and livejournal community”.
Quoted For Truth (another WoW forums coinage)
Because during the regular workday is the gaming equivalent of the middle of the night. And the middle of the night is the gaming equivalent of rush hour.
Don’t they do the updates from like 4am-10am? That’s not exactly gaming primetime.
Because paying people to do upgrades in the middle of the night is expensive? Especially is the middle of the night isn’t the time of day when your usage is the lowest? It’s a game, not a business application.
As others have pointed out, what’s true for a business application and environment is not necessarily - one might say emphatically not true for a gaming environment. And what has been true for other gaming environments won’t necessarily be true for WoW, because there’s never been a game with a player base this huge before.
The middle of the school and business day IS the best time to do maintenance. On my server, the west coasters and Alaskans might not log on to start playing until after 10pm central, the Aussies even later than that. We have raiding guilds for Aussies that start their regular runs at 11pm server time or later.
I also have to say this about the difference between a business customer and a WoW player. Blizzard really isn’t losing any sleep over whether a bunch of players are getting their panties in a twist over a few hours downtime a week. They’ve reached heights of success with this game that are unimaginable, and they know very well that users have zero recourse if they don’t like the maintenance schedule.