Surprise! Urgent maintenance today
by Adam Holisky 
Dec 22nd 2010 at 12:50AM
If things get extended, we'll let you know about it.
The full statement by Blizzard is as follows:
Blizzard -- MaintenanceWe will be performing urgent maintenance on all realms to resolve a technical issue. Maintenance will begin at 5:00 AM and conclude at approximately 11:00 AM PST.
Thank you for your patience.
Thank you for your patience.
Instead of the normal gnome doing her maintenance thing, I've included a video of some of my favorite music out there: Vince Guaraldi's O Tannenbaum, visualized to A Charlie Brown Christmas, of course.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
RussGreene Dec 22nd 2010 1:03AM
That gnome has been working seriously hard recently; it's good to see him get a break.
Drakkenfyre Dec 22nd 2010 5:43AM
They were referring to the female Gnome, actually. One of the only images I can see repeated over and over, and actually like it, unlike the Deathwing pic which was used 12 times, and for anything at all related to the expansion.
I have kind of missed her with the announcements for the hotfixes.
I am glad we are finally having a regular maintainence. It seems like all we got before were rolling restarts. I would rather have maintainence than a rolling restart. I remember when they started having rolling restarts, and we went a few weeks with them. Then suddenly problems popped up. I would rather have regular maintainence and run problems away, then have nothing but rolling restarts then problems suddenly popping up.
Vaeku Dec 22nd 2010 7:59AM
While I'm glad there's maintenance, this makes me pretty mad. Why didn't they just do normal maintenance yesterday? Seems like the rolling restarts yesterday were pointless now. Not to mention that I was working yesterday and expected maintenance, and I'm off today... and there's maintenance.
And Drakkenfyre... Wasn't there normal maintenance last week? I'm pretty sure there was.
Jorges Dec 22nd 2010 10:43AM
@Vaeku:
"We will be performing urgent maintenance on all realms to resolve a technical issue."
It is urgent because it is necessary. It probably was something unpredictable to begin with, and they decided to do the maintenance. Sometimes this happens, and no amount of planning can avoid an unexpected issue.
Let them do their job I say, It'll benefit us anyway.
Drakkenfyre Dec 23rd 2010 9:29AM
Last week was rolling restarts, I think. Might be wrong.
Wildstaff Dec 22nd 2010 1:04AM
I wonder what the problem could be. Would it be wishful thinking to hope that they found a way to fix tol'barad? Because I consider that extremely urgent
Adam Holisky Dec 22nd 2010 1:06AM
http://i.imgur.com/S8zUf.gif
(Blizz actually fixing TB makers me lol)
VioletArrows Dec 22nd 2010 1:08AM
I keep hearing about this, but I mostly steer clear of anything to do with pvp. What's going on with Tol'Barad?
Wildstaff Dec 22nd 2010 1:24AM
@VioletArrows
http://i.wow.joystiq.com/2010/12/17/the-problems-with-tol-barad-and-how-to-fix-them/
Basically it's heavily favoring the defensive team, the towers are completely useless aside from prolonging an inevitable defeat, and losers get absolutely nothing. In wintergrasp the losing side got 1 mark or badge but when you lose TB you get nothing so there's no incentive for the attackers to play even if they know for a fact that they will lose
Xantenise Dec 22nd 2010 1:26AM
@Violet As far as I know, the only problem is that it's very, VERY hard for attackers to take TB* and it's slanted too heavily in the defenders' favour, making it very hard for it to change hands.
* We need a new acronym, I keep thinking "Thunderbluff" whenever I see "TB".
Pyromelter Dec 22nd 2010 1:26AM
Violet, nothing is wrong with it, except that it's the most horribly unbalanced battleground in the game.
Krz Dec 22nd 2010 1:28AM
More broken than WG originally was? Ohrly
Joseph Smith Dec 22nd 2010 1:32AM
Taking over TB requires claiming all 3 towers. Which means defending only requires holing onto ONE of the towers, therefore the defending team merely has to turtle on one to hold it. Imbalances it heavily in favour of the defenders. If anything a BG like this should be balanced slightly in favour of the attackers to promote ownership changes.
jbodar Dec 22nd 2010 2:12AM
@Xantenise
Can't we just use FB -- Fail Barad? Seriously though, why the hell did they name it that knowing full well that everything becomes an acronym? It's even named in a made-up language!
Hollow Leviathan Dec 22nd 2010 3:18AM
I call it Lol Barad. Honestly it just writes itself.
Wildstaff Dec 22nd 2010 3:31AM
@Hollow
El oh el barad? Yep just rolls off the tongue
Fletcher Dec 22nd 2010 3:56AM
@jbodar: Actually, Tol Barad's existence in WoW dates back to WC2, whereas Thunder Bluff's existence dates back to WC3 ... or possibly even only to TFT, I can't recall. You're right, though, that there are plenty of other islands - Zul'dare, Crestfall, Balor way down south near Stormwind - from WC2 they could have included.
Bluegrass Geek Dec 22nd 2010 7:53AM
*sigh* TB isn't getting fixed until a full patch comes through, probably 4.1, because of how big the changes would be. It's not just something they can hotfix.
theRaptor Dec 22nd 2010 8:04AM
@Bluegrass
Hotfix = fix while servers ARE UP.
Maintenance = not hotfixes.
Blizzard could easily put in some fixes to Lol Barad in a maintenance. Hell they could just make it auto-flip every hour with a quick piece of code. But blizz works in teams and teams only touch what they are responsible for. The world events team isn't going to be touching PVP etc. The PVP guys are busy with the complete rort that is the current PVP season.
P.S. If those with clearly cheated PVP rankings are NOT banned people will be very pissed off. You don't accidentally a 3000+ ranking in the first weeks of a season.
Nopunin10did Dec 22nd 2010 8:14AM
Emergency maintenance isn't done for game balance issues, folks. I'd be very surprised if this had anything to do with Tol Barad.
Emergency maintenance is done for game-breaking issues and server stability. It might not even be something we've seen on the live servers so much as a huge bug Blizz discovered internally that they want to prevent.