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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsMaintenance extended by two hours
by Adam Holisky 
Apr 21st 2009 at 1:51PM
Not that this should be a surprise to anyone...But maintenance has been extended until 1:00 p.m. PDT / 4:00 p.m. EDT. There is no indication why the maintenance has been extended, but that's the norm as well.
You can find out what's in the patch over on the Patch 3.1.1 Patch Notes and Bug Fix List, as well as by checking out our updated Guide To Patch 3.1.
We'll update this post with the latest news / server status when we have it.
Filed under: Patches, Realm Status, News items
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 5)
mark maddy Apr 21st 2009 3:18PM
just a curious question here. when they do the patches and maintenance stuff, why dont they open up each world as it is finished? why wait until all realms are done before kicking it off again?
Amaxe Apr 21st 2009 3:32PM
Probably because 11 million players would try to log into the open realm...
Fausts Apr 28th 2009 9:31AM
Obviously you haven't been around very long. There have been times where a few servers have been up while the other servers were still down. The up servers would very quickly jump to high population and suddenly find themselves hosting massive level 1 naked dance parties.
Vas Apr 21st 2009 3:00PM
@smiley
I don't have to work on a supercomputer to know that this NEVER used to happen and now it happens with every patch. I know for a FACT that there are ways to mirror servers and test everything including load simulations to minimize these problems. People do it all the time, except it costs money.
You've never been a plumber before I bet, but I can guess you whine whenever your plumber doesn't maintain something up to acceptable standards just like I am whining now because I have a day off for once and want to play and am instead playing with something else. I don't have to know a job to know excellence and not-so-excellent. I don't know how they make a Big Mac, but when it sucks I will complain, and so will you.
The fact is, there are great IT people out there, and there are some that just don't get it. There are some that take alot of pride in their work and fight hard for improvements and excellence. Then there are people that rushed into the field and don't know what the *&%$ is going on. Before 3.0, they had the latter type. Now its months and months before things work right instead of releasing things that work one at a time.
Whatever.... Apr 21st 2009 3:14PM
@Vas
This "never" used to happen? You haven't been playing the game that long, have you? I could say that this is a cakewalk compared to the first six to eight months that the game went live over four years ago. The downtime would be way more than 6-8 hours. And we'd get weeks of comp time. And we even had to use portals to get from continent to continent because the boats were glitching the game (ah, Capt. Placeholder...how we miss you).
Personally, I love patch days. I love them because I get to come on here to read all of the end of the world posts and how horrible Blizzard is. Rule of thumb that has been brought up a lot already: it's Tuesday. There's a minor patch. You should know by now that there could be issues. For the people with this day off, it does suck for you and there's nothing that can be done about it. But, it's always been maintenance Tuesday and if there's a minor patch going in, expect there to be extensions. There probably won't be a magical day that there is nothing that comes up to cause delays. If there was going to be, it would have happened in previous patches that have come out in the past 4+ years. Relax.
But, they can't make everyone happy. That's obvious.
Like someone said earlier, as a general statement to game ragers, if Blizzard is so horrible and this is the worst thing and you pay them $15 per month and it should be playable 24/7, time to find another way to spend your $15 per month. You won't get a cheaper form of entertainment, except maybe driving to a sketchy part of town and watching homeless fights in some areas....
smiley Apr 21st 2009 3:28PM
point NUL and void
I have a journeman's plumber and electricians liscence as well as a universal freon card.
I used to do general maint before I got into computer and server maint. I like fixing stuff and knowing how stuff works.
as for this "never used to happen" since when? every major patch has long downtimes. Every patch includes class balances, this was just a huge patch, and teh DID test it... many times on the test servers. btu you can't prepare for every occurence on beta, plus not every server is exactly the same just like no two cpus are exactly the same. I could buy a phenom II 3.0 Ghz processor on the same day as you and they arne't going to handle things exactly the same, there's a certain margin of error in the transistors themselves. also as harware get upgraded thigns change, you think the origional servers ar erunning the exact same setup as the newest... hell no, do you think they can beta test every single type of server machine they have each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars or do you think the generalize, use a middle model machine and try to prepare for any adverse outcome?
friedchicken17 Apr 21st 2009 3:03PM
i like pie. peach cobbler with whipped cream
i mean, uh, servers will be up soon enough. go have some pie while you wait.
phaer Apr 21st 2009 3:04PM
anyone else trying to log in only to find that their information is "incorrect"?
Lyku Apr 21st 2009 3:18PM
nazgrel realm is back up, hope everyone elses is too
Matt Apr 21st 2009 3:21PM
All servers up!
danawhitaker Apr 21st 2009 3:33PM
I think this is how I've figured out I'm not "addicted" to WoW. I'm not yelling at my computer in frustration because Blizzard has extra downtime on patch day. Am I looking forward to getting on and doing dailies? Yeah. But I also have stuff to work on for Pogo. And if I didn't, I'd be reading, or doing something else. Blizzard already comped us a day of time for last week's problems. And someone in my guild just messaged me to say servers are back up, so it looks like, if they're correct, they came back up earlier than their last estimate indicated.
THERE IS GOING TO BE DOWNTIME. If you do not like that, do not play MMOs. And just be thankful it's not every damn day. I swear City of Heroes used to shut down for a few hours for server restarts every day during the first summer after it was launched, very late at night/early AM when I was still awake because I had nothing better to do. Most days of the week you can play all day long if you want. It's one day. Stop being so whiny about this. It's absolutely ridiculous. It sucks if it coincides with your day off or whatever other lame excuse you come up with it, but if it's that important, start planning your days off to not coincide with server maintenance day.
Bowfinger Apr 21st 2009 5:44PM
Sorry, but you've missed the point entirely. It's not about the fact that there is Tuesday maintenance. It is about all the problems surrounding it.
It is NOT being whiny when one expects a company to give its paying customers accurate and timely information. It is NOT being whiny when one expects products to work properly. That's just good customer service, and we all have a right to demand it from any business.
IT professionals can and regularly do plan their work well in advance, test their changes thoroughly, and provide accurate estimates on how long their activities will take. Blizzard's track record is the pits. They rarely announce longer outages more than a few hours in advance, their releases are routinely horribly buggy, and it seems they rarely meet their initial announced outage window. Especially given that their developers are serving an external customer (as opposed to many corporate IT jobs where your "customers" are internal employees who are captive to your poor service), it is absolutely reasonable to expect the highest levels of professionalism from Blizzard's team. That is sadly not what we actually see, however.
Salty Apr 21st 2009 5:19PM
1. Put up maintenance notice.
2. Block external authentication server access.
3. Conference call for all battlegroup admins.
4. Download patched binaries to local repository.
5. Loop command to send term signal to wow daemons across X servers.
6. Wait for confirmed shutdown of all daemons.
7. Issue batch command to replaced patched binaries on all wow daemons.
8. Verify response codes from patch script.
9. Issue batch command to run diagnostic routine on wow daemons.
10. Verify response codes from diagnostic routines on all servers.
11. Restart servers as necessary.
12. Perform queued hardware maintenance (fans, power supplies, hard drives, memory, etc).
13. Check processes, cluster scheduler, load balancer, fsck, syslogs.
14. Boot master daemon node(s)/VMs and a handful of slave nodes/VMs. Verify failover.
15. Inform QC team to test servers with internal client and checklist.
16. Duel Betty from front office. Damn OP DKs… have to add that to the next changelist…
17. Boot up rest of slave nodes/VMs.
18. Sync states with slave nodes.
19. Final tests with QC team, simulate big load, concurrent users, etc.
20. E-mail QC manager and local admin – servers are go for launch.
21. Await word from other battlegroup admins.
22. Battlegroup 9 patch wrecked a few servers. Re-image and re-patch.
23. QC team discovers a critical flaw that crashes clients with ObjectID 4003985
24. Send QC report to developer team. Await patch code update.
25. Repeat steps 4-21. Damn DKs. Issue extended maintenance notice.
26. Final QC check. Fix minor hiccups. Go live.
27. Go to lunch at 4:00P, read comments from lusers about your incompetency. Season your salad with tears.
Salty Apr 21st 2009 5:23PM
Oh, and a few of them were dumb enough to post on their mains... Nobody screws with the BOFH.
If the Hoof fits... Apr 21st 2009 6:10PM
Patch 3.1.1 started with its usual issues and bugs and a lag which had the servers lagging majorly. In the 30 mins I managed before the server shutdown at least we managed a WG win (thats quite an achievement for us Horde on my server where we are regularly outnumbered 8:1! lol)
Elfshine Apr 21st 2009 10:17PM
Just because I find it funny and no whining intended, there is one server that had to be restarted, and has yet to come back, and you guessed it, it's the one I play on!
For anybody on Skywall who's out there surfing while we wait, a big hello to you!
dawn Apr 21st 2009 11:36PM
I can't believe this but I am absolutely dyin here! I am unpatiently waiting for this game to come back on and biting at the bit!! lol Yea I had a life before now and I have one now. Been out of work for surgery found something to do... Yes I do love this game!!! Come on guys get it back up!!!
Fausts Apr 28th 2009 9:21AM
Always the the same old whining and insane suggestions to Blizz on how to do things. I can understand the need for some of you to vent your desire to get back to playing, but what gets me are those "geniuses" out their who think they're smarter then Blizzard.
Let me ask you one small question: Can you tell me any fully 3d MMORPG service that is doing better job with maintenance then the guys behind WoW?
Seriously. A lot of you think you know better then Blizzard. So how about citing some examples. The truth may be that a better way does not exist. Maintaining the World of Warcraft may be more immense than many of you can even imagine.