The End of the Weekly Maintenance?

Posted by Stropp on December 22, 2006

An announcement on the World of Warcraft forums lends hope to all of us Antipodeans, Shift-Workers, and other Night Owls who are often deprived of a large chunk of playing time during the week. Unfortunately, the WoW weekly maintenance falls during Tuesday night primetime for us Oceanic players. But this may soon change…

Since the game’s release, one of our most important
service goals has been to reduce the amount of time realms are down for
weekly realm maintenance. The various hardware upgrades and retrofits
we’ve done over the past year have put us in a position to begin
testing the ability to go longer than a week between maintenance
periods.

In the upcoming weeks, we will be testing the effect of a live
maintenance, where regular maintenance tasks are run during off-peak
with realms live. On Tuesday, December 26 there will be no scheduled
downtime for weekly maintenance. We will perform all necessary
maintenance tasks while the realms are live. We are anticipating the
possibility that we may need to perform rolling restarts off-peak if we
find that a realm restart is necessary; however the downtime for each
realm would be less than 10 minutes if it was required.

It’s important to note that this is just a test. There is no certainty that Blizzard will be able to discontinue the weekly maintenance downtime completely. Even if they are not able to reach this goal, it looks very much like they will reduce the downtime significantly. In any case, it’s heartening to see that they have been working towards eliminating this weekly inconvenience.

Many thanks Blizzard.

Popularity: 9% [?]