Oceanic maintenance moved away from prime time
by Mike Schramm 
May 21st 2008 at 2:00PM
We've posted about this issue quite a few times, and strangely enough, though Tseric told us way back that things would never change, it just might be fixed. Oceanic players, including Chri who kindly tipped us about this, are reporting that their maintenance has been moved from the usual Tuesday evening prime time (which is early Tuesday morning for us in the US) to early Wednesday morning their time. In other words, they didn't have to suffer their servers going down during playtime this week.Unfortunately, there's no official word on this yet, so we're not sure if it's just this week, or if Blizzard just didn't have to restart this servers this time around, or what it was. But we do know that Oceanic players are cheering loudly that they didn't have to suffer mistimed maintenance this week, so hopefully Blizzard is taking action as promised on this one.
So very good news for Oceanic players, especially since the lag and shutdowns have been a huge problem for them in the past. If this really is a official change, hopefully we'll see Blizzard confirm that they've finally responded to all the player problems down there.
Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Blizzard, Hardware
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Lanth May 21st 2008 2:11PM
Woo! Nicely done by Blizzard.
Now they just have to actually move the servers over here. Though I believe it's not their fault, it's 'cos of the major communications owner over here being evil.
Badger May 21st 2008 2:21PM
Good on Blizz for taking a step in the right direction.
Mostly, though, I just wanted to post to say that's an absolutely *adorable* kangaroo photo.
Green Armadillo May 21st 2008 2:25PM
Didn't Warhammer just announce that they're actually going to locate their Aussie servers in Austrailia, with maintenance done on local time? I'm guessing this may be Blizzard keeping up with the Joneses. Here's hoping that AoC and Warhammer do well enough to get Blizzard off their tail ends. :)
Chiroptera May 21st 2008 5:07PM
Re Blizzards experiences here in Australia
Back in 1998 There were two competing pay to play services, these services were a new service by Telstra, called Wireplay, which was a straight license of technology and branding from BT in the UK to provide dial up access and game client / game server setups. On the other side of the fence was a product called Multiplay, muliplay was a simular service however this was licensing the TEN product from the states, and funded by a loose collection of Australian companies.
The guys from Multiplay negociated with blizzard to bring the battle.net services to Australia to combine with their existing TEN licenses. Blizzard agreed to this and after significant development work involving teams of people, sent out serveral high end servers all pre-configured ready for the battle.net service, these were finally put in the datacenter, and within a week of this happening, Multiplay went broke and the creditors moved in. They rejected blizzards claim on the servers and sort to liquidate them as part of the attempt to collect as much money back to the creditors, which rightly pissed off blizzard, however, blizzard were completely nieve in not checking out the company enough, and not having sufficient contract terms in place so that they could have got their machines back so they are just as much to blame.
Now 1998 is a looong time in tech terms, would be nice to see them look into this again
Aelinas May 21st 2008 2:33PM
"Be careful what you wish for"
I hope this ends up being a good thing for the Aussies, though I worry those realms will still be unplayable during NA maintenance as NA people roll Oceanic alts just to pass the time.
Jim May 21st 2008 2:42PM
This is my concern. Aussie servers are going to be overwhelmed by the unemployed. Here we go, sending them our scoundrels again.
Danielle May 21st 2008 11:25PM
- "as NA people roll Oceanic alts just to pass the time."
let them try, but most will get bored when they see a 30 min to an hour queue login... muahahaha!
for us with mains on oceanic servers: long queues > server down
audioSE May 21st 2008 2:43PM
4, whenever someone brought that up, Aussies insisted that they didn't care, or that it wasn't an issue.
Jay Reed May 21st 2008 4:53PM
[Quote]4, whenever someone brought that up, Aussies insisted that they didn't care, or that it wasn't an issue.[/Quote]
Yes, Back a very long time ago Blizzard did a survey with the Oceanic Players and from that was half the reason they really didn't bother to put a server in our region, but now, many years on, they still think that we have the same opinion on the topic....If only Blizzard were to ask us again....if only....
icer May 21st 2008 3:40PM
there's one mob you don't see in wow a kangaroo
jay May 21st 2008 4:13PM
I'm all for maintenance being in our off peak playing times and I truly hope Blizzard stick to it, but bear in mind, this was only a restart.... and this is Blizzard.
Chances are, the only time we will get off peak maintenance is when we only have rolling restarts instead of 7 hours of downtime. Until I see something official in the form of a blue post I wont hold my breath.
But here's hoping.
Rydolomo May 21st 2008 5:31PM
I'm an Australian on a US server and have considered character transfers for a long time.
One thing I often get when logging to a lowbie alt is long login times. This never happens on the US server and is a factor in my consideration.
This means that there are not enough Oceanic servers.
Remember, it's not just aussies, there are New Zealand and Asian players too who play in roughly the same time zone.
Rydo.
Thundarius May 21st 2008 6:58PM
I say to you today, my Oceanic friends, even though we face the server difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Emerald Dream
We Oceanics have a dream that one day we will rise up and live out the true meaning of "lag free".
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and orc, and elf, and tauren, and dwarf, and forsaken, and draenei, and troll, but not gnome) are created equal.
We have a dream that my our children will one day not be judged by their physical location but by the content of their WoW character.
I have a dream that one day Alterac Valley shall be lag free and equal, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked bottlenecks will be made straight.
Let lag free ring from the curvaceous slopes and plains of Thunder Bluff!
Let lag free ring from the wintery snowcapped hills of Ironforge!
Let lag free ring from every hut and zeplin of Orgrimmar!
Let lag free ring from the trees of Darnassus!
Let lag free ring from the depths of Undercity!
Let lag free ring from the wreakage of the Exodar!
Let lag free ring from the spires of Silvermoon!
Let lag free ring from every tower and square of Stormwind.
But not only that; let lag free ring from the stone gateway of Outland! From every realm, let lag free ring.
And when this happens, when we allow lag free to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every farm, from every zone and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Blizzard's children, Humans and Orcs, Tauren and Elves, Dwarves and Troll, Draenei and Forsaken, (remember, not Gnomes) will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the Orc leader Thrall, "We chose this path. We chose it right up until it was too late to turn back. And having made that choice, we can, with the knowledge that we have of the end of that dark and shameful road, choose not to take it."
Lag Free!!
Tunza May 21st 2008 8:07PM
Nice idea from Blizz - years of requests from Australian players are partially answered.
However, first time the Blizz lads stated that the Oceanic servers would get rolling restarts during off peak Blizz failed. Oceanic servers still had their restarts at the same time as the US servers despite the notification of split times. Hopefully this is an oversight or error and not an ongoing failure.
One quick suggestion for showing everyone what Oceanic players go through - change all of the maintenance (including all US servers) to Oceanic offpeak and see how the US players respond. ;)
Tyy May 21st 2008 10:16PM
I vote for at least one server in Asia as well...there is a large English speaking player base in Asia and we have to deal with horrible latency. E.g. for me in China the game is only playable in the morning or late evenings.
And "no", I can't read Chinese to play on the Chinese version of WoW. I tried it, works for grinding, but questing is awful.
Not sure, what the impact on gold farmers would be, but as of late I am under the impression that Blizzard has enough measures in place to keep this under control.
Fraufrau May 22nd 2008 12:11PM
I checked every link of that post and NO WHERE did I find evidence that Blizzard were moving MAINTENANCE. They moved the server restart but I found nothing and have read nothing that says MAINTENANCE will be moved.
Server restarts are one thing but server maintenance where they take them down for a period of time will not be moved so basically its worthless. We can't schedule a raiding roster around the probability that the servers will only be restarted and not brought down for maintenance.
Its bullshit and a band aid measure to try and appease and placate Oceanic based players now that AoC and WAR are knocking on the door with OCEANIC BASED servers obviously offering superior connection performance and maintenance schedules. This is obviously evidence that Blizzard does care about the revenue they receive from oceanic subscribers but evidence they don't care enough to provide us with the same quality service they give to people in the USA, Europe and China.