Blizzard Looking To Change WoW Maintenance

MMOs are the only type of game online that don't get restarted on a regular basis. An FPS or a cardgame or whatever gets reset every 15 to 60 minutes or so, whereas an MMO stays on day after day.

That's a lot of time to accumulate error/trash/whatever. A lot of time for issues between the realm servers and the mail/item servers to build up some grime. That's what the cleanup is really for in my estimation.

See, you want a game like WoW to be bug free, sure, but weird bugs creep into projects this huge. At release there was a bug with the ships that connect the continents, and it caused seemingly unrelated server lag that would occur on medium to high pop servers. Now, that was a problem that would materialize fairly fast as the boats shuttled people around, and it still took them several weeks (iirc) to track it to the boats and fix it.

So imagine what happens with a bug that builds on itself over time. If you get rid of the weekly server reset, that type of rare bug gets an effectively infinite time to accumulate. It's way harder to put the puzzle pieces together if the problem takes weeks to show up, let alone repro'ing it.

That's why moving to a always-up format is a pretty meaningful accomplishment for an MMO.

Im very interested in what blizzard actually dose when they do "maintenance". I mean its understandable that harddrives and stuff probably die from time to time and need to be replaced. But other than restarting the server or server side software for wow. What are they doing??

heh man I wonder how much $$ in bandwidth they save by having the 6 hours of downtime per week, gotta be impressive

This works pretty well in Guild Wars, servers are almost never down. You just get a message in game saying there is an update, so you logout, it patches, and you log back in. Pretty painless.

This almost never ends well

What will the hardcore addicts do who only get to pay bills and buy more Cheesypoofs and MountainDoods on Tues AM?

awwww... they soo sneaky!!

This is just practice for all the ninja fixing that will take place when TBC launches..

Now, instead of being down once a week it will be down for a week at a time...

i smell trouble