Why Tuesday mornings?
by Mike Schramm 
Jun 26th 2007 at 9:27AM
Maintenance is going on right now on some servers, so now's a good a time as any to ask a question I've never really considered before: why 5 to 7 am PST on a Tuesday morning? Why did Blizzard choose this time to refresh and update the servers every week?The obvious answer is that that's when the least number of players will be bothered, and indeed, that's what the wise and kind Nethaera says. But there's no way that time is always the lowest population every week, and sometimes maintenance, as it will today, runs long anyway. Why not Wednesday morning, or Sunday morning, or Thursday midafternoon, or Saturday evening? Actually, that last one would be a problem. But you're always going to inconvenience someone, so why not move it around a little and give those Tuesday players a break?
Neth says they're "always going to choose to do what needs done for the most benefit of the health of the game and servers." Which is fine by me-- back when I worked in retail shifts, I usually had Tuesday mornings off and couldn't play, but with my 9-5 now, it doesn't bother me anyway (and the recent changes to have restarts rather than downtime help, I'm sure). But are you someone who's been screwed out of gametime every Tuesday? And if you're not, would you mind giving up your playtime one week just so the folks on Tuesday morning wouldn't have to deal with the downtime and the restarts?
Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Odds and ends, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jalann Jun 26th 2007 9:32AM
I can guarantee that Tuesday Morningis the time when the least number of players will be bothered...
the servers are off.
See how that works?
FireStar Jun 26th 2007 9:33AM
Why don't you give up one day a week and go do something athletic! It's summer! I play volleyball 3-4 days a week. I'm at work now ;p.
Jalann Jun 26th 2007 9:33AM
Dang, I can't spell. I need more caffeine.
unchi Jun 26th 2007 9:40AM
I suggest Friday or Saturday evening. So every player can have a life outside of WoW on the weekend. We all know the weekends were invented for alcohol and friends (not through ventrilo).
Tridus Jun 26th 2007 9:41AM
Tuesday morning was originally chosen because it was the time when the least number of players were on.
Now, Tuesday is used because its been Tuesday for so long that people expect it. If Blizzard went and suddenly moved it to Thursday (or god forbid a weekend), people would be up in arms over the unexpected maintenance.
Unexpected downtime will upset people a lot more then routine downtime will.
BillDoor Jun 26th 2007 9:54AM
I work in IT, and we always try to do our outages on Tuesday morning. Why? Well, for one, as suggested, people aren't on as much. Monday they're catching up from the weekend, and tuesday morning they're trying to slack off before starting any really big work for the week. Also, it's good for the IT folks. Monday we can make sure that everything is in order for the downtime, so we don't have any surprises. Tuesday we patch, and monitor the systems. If everything went well, we can relax for a bit, and get to work on next weeks outage. If things DIDN'T go well, we've still got the rest of the week to schedule downtime, so that we don't screw up weekends for both our customers and ourselves.
daniel Jun 26th 2007 9:56AM
all larger hosting businesses has a service window where they perform maintenance when needed so customers will know when to expect it, ours is 03-06 on mondays when hopefully most our customers won't be needing our services. to have that service window floating around during the week is probably not a good idea, blizzard is of course doing their best to maximize uptime just like any other service provider.
Philo Jun 26th 2007 10:07AM
Seriously, it's one morning every week... What matters is not so much the least-impacting moment, but rather that they're consistent with it. Tuesday morning is when you don't play WoW because it's maintenance.
If they instead used a super-scientific method to determine the exact moment where there's fewer people online every week, then did maintenance then, it would be much worse than a regular morning.
It needs to be said... If you can't allow for one MORNING per week of maintenance and let go of the game at that time... You need a life.
infection Jun 26th 2007 10:35AM
yeah, tuesday is the perfect day for getting changes made. the question should be asked.. would you like to give up a friday or saturday for downtime?
at my work, we do the same thing, prep monday and run our test and changes tuesday. we don't want hassle at the end of the week leading into the weekend.
Merus Jun 26th 2007 10:14AM
The flipside, of course, is that Tuesday mornings for the Americans is Tuesday evenings (usually about 10pm) for Oceania.
Of course, it's not just WoW that has downtime - Tuesday night's half-price tickets at the cinemas, so problem solved.
Kahja Jun 26th 2007 10:50AM
Tuesday morning 5 - 7 am... you should be in bed or getting ready for work.
Otherwise... Start looking for a job and contribute to something in real life.
Nubsause Jun 26th 2007 10:59AM
@ 11
/agree
emilise Jun 26th 2007 11:00AM
That is worse on EU-realms : since your maintenances are on Tuesday, ours are on Wednesday morning. Yes, the very day children don't have school ! (well, at least in France)
Why Wednesday and not another day ? This has been asked so many times already.... but no answer, and no change! ^^
Pingmeister Jun 26th 2007 11:00AM
Actually, what always gets me is that when they announce something like a 3 am or 5 am downtime that someone is WORKING on the servers at that time.
I wonder if that crew of folks works EVERY day at those hours or if they just come in early (late) on those downtime days.
Mad Cow Jun 26th 2007 11:17AM
@pingwhatever
Datacenters are 24x7 operations. As a System Administrator ... you do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. 4 hours of work at 2am on Tuesday could mean a half day on Friday.
We also make our changes on Tuesday mornings, usually once a month. If all goes well, I get Friday off once a month and a full day of WoW. If all goes to hell in a hand basket ... I get a choice between free food or a bottle of Advil (Extra Strength) and a fifth of Cuervo.
@ everyone mocking people who play Tuesday mornings ... If you work the night shift, contributing to society, you might find Tuesday mornings to be the equivalent of Tuesday afternoon for people who work 8-5.
Joe Jun 26th 2007 12:04PM
"@ everyone mocking people who play Tuesday mornings ... If you work the night shift, contributing to society, you might find Tuesday mornings to be the equivalent of Tuesday afternoon for people who work 8-5."
What? Someone out there isn't just like me?!? I can't take this!
MartinC Jun 26th 2007 2:11PM
Tuesdays are somewhat of a "standard" for the industry. All new DVDs are released on Tuesday. All new patches from Microsoft and other large vendors are released on Tuesday. So it makes sense that Blizzard followed the same existing "standard" and releases their patches on Tuesday.
Rob Jun 26th 2007 6:31PM
I found that the downtime was pretty bad on tuesdays, and has a significant effect, mostly on AH stuff. There are alot of people playing during the day on weekdays; my job runs 11-7pm. Usually i play for a few hours in the morning, and an hour or so at night. So, not having tuesdays is not much fun. And recently it hasn't been 3-5am or whatever, it's been more likely until 1pm CST (since bizzard is on PST). So when that happens tuesdays are pretty much shot for me. Plus, as an added bonus, all the stuff i posted on mondays in AH don't sell, b/c no one is on. I found fridays nights and saturday nights pretty much dead, supporting the theory that 90% of WoWers have a life. Sunday nights adn Monday nights tend to be pretty busy though, and Monday mornings tend to be busy as well. This is basically based on the number of people who camp out in front of the bank/ah in IF or Stormwind.
Dont Let's Start Jun 26th 2007 5:50PM
Downtime is really quite pathetic in my opinion. Blizzard are raking in over 100 million a month in subscription fees, yet they can't keep the game up more than 164 out of the 168 hours of the week? That's only 97.6% uptime even in the best case scenario! Many, many IT operations on much, much smaller budgets manage to blow that out of the water. Frankly, if I was on the blizzard programming team, I'd be ashamed.
And as an Aussie, it makes matters even worse that the game is so poorly programmed they can't even bring our realms down in the morning, and instead have to bring them down during peak time just because that's when the other realms go down.
Blizzard are lucky their content team is good, because they're technical team sucks.
ewan.miller Jun 27th 2007 1:54AM
Yes, Please don't make it any worse for oceanic players!