"World of Warcraft servers taken down for maintenance and client patch 3.1.0 rollout. Outage clocked at more than 16 hours. National productivity increases by 10%."
It seems as though Blizzard's methodology for maintaining their World of Warcraft servers is to take them offline early Tuesday morning (often around 1:00am or 2:00am Pacific time) and to keep them offline until between 9:00am and 11:00am. During the client patch 3.1.0 rollout they took the servers offline at 1:00am and, at the time of this writing, don't have them back online yet. Instead there is a message on the client login screen indicating that "there were problems found in testing" and "we'll try to have the realms back online in the next two-to-three hours."
This means that under normal conditions the WoW service is offline nearly ~5% of the time (~40 hours per month, or nearly two days out of every 30). Yeah, OK, it's a game. It doesn't need 5x9 uptime. Still, whoever is responsible for this architecture and maintenance plan should be mighty embarrassed. Adding to the embarrassment should be the inability to easily roll back to prior patch versions on client and server if problems are found, and the fact that they don't evidently have a strong test bed to test the patches on prior to the live rollout (otherwise what possible excuse can there be for "unexpected problems" that occurred after patching the servers but not yet making the changes available to the public).
Super lame. Lame lame lame.
Also lame is that I have not yet cleared Deadmines, and my ability to be a meat shield ("tank" in local parlance) has got the epithet "iodit nub!" thrown at me by some 14-year-old. Yep, the community building aspects of WoW are mind boggling.
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