Extended Weekly Maintenance for US Realms
by Elizabeth Harper 
Jul 25th 2006 at 4:30AM
This week's maintenance has been extended - and will be starting at 3:00 AM PDT and lasting until 11:00 AM PDT. Yes, that means additional downtime for all US realms. There's no news as to why maintenance needed to be extended, but if you're thinking this may be a sign of patch deployment, that's highly unlikely. The test realms have always been taken offline before the patch has been deployed on the live realms, and they're currently still up and running. But as to what's actually happening, no one really knows. Filed under: Realm News, Realm Status
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
uncaringbear Jul 25th 2006 6:22AM
The weekly maintenance outages frustrate me greatly. As someone in a non-American timezone, the scheduling of the outages guarantee that I lose one day of the week that I can play WoW. By the time I get home from work on a Tuesday night, the servers are offline. If I'm lucky, I can jump in and check my WoW mail and auctions with minutes to spare. When they move the outage window forward, like today, I'm completely out of luck. Why does Blizzard have to take each and every server off at the same time? Can't they stagger them? I barely get time to play as it is, and losing 1 night in the week isn't fair for people in our time zone.
elizabeth Jul 25th 2006 6:44AM
I've read CM's commenting along the lines of "there's a bad time for everyone" - and thus Blizzard has simply picked a time and stuck with it.
However, it really would make sense for the specifically Oceanic flagged servers to have maintenance times that were outside of prime time there, such as it were.
PsyClerk Jul 25th 2006 7:19AM
If they staggered server downtime, you would see the servers that stay up get flooded with players from servers that are down. Displaced players usually do little more than grief others. Do you really want to deal with that every week?
I think the bigger story is that this maintenance is extended...again. What exactly is going on with the servers that is requiring so much downtime lately? The past month or so has been filled with restarts, extended maintenance and other downtime.
StreadyC Jul 25th 2006 8:42AM
On an IT level it is easier and faster if you take all the servers down at one time and then bring them up at slower speed to be able to handle people coming back on. I know that the Oceanic servers this doesn’t help, but its better to know the exact day when they are going down then to try to log on and you are unable to and you don’t know why until you find out its for maintenance
Noel Jul 25th 2006 9:47AM
There is an issue with the database keeping all your reputation. As of last night it restarted my character over with AD rep (honored, she was revered). That might be one of the issue.
Coanunn Jul 25th 2006 10:07AM
I'm sorry for those of you in other time zones, but I can't disagree with the idea of "rolling" outages more. The end result would be a flood of players to servers that are currently up, which will lead to more issues on those servers while the dev's are busy fixing known issues on the servers that are down. Not only that but you get the griefing issue discussed above.
As to why we are seeing extended maintenance, I believe they are trying to get the servers running as close to optimum right now as they can expecting a large influx of players with the release of the burning crusade. I think we will see extended maintenance from now till February as they get the servers ready for then fix the issues that come out of the expansion.