Maintenance is nothing new. That regular Tuesday morning downtime is something that's been going on probably since the original launch. I know it's been a weekly staple as long as I've been playing. What's new, or actually what's changed is these "Breaking News" messages and how much later in the day Blizzard has been posting them at log in. I seem to recall whenever I would start playing on Mondays that this prompt was always up. Whether that be 10 in the morning, 4 in the afternoon, etc... But in recent months I haven't even been seeing them at all and often times I don't even log in till late in the evening.
So yes, somewhere unacknowledged in the back of my mind I know that servers will be going down, typically at 5am PST, but when I don't see that message at log in there's this bit of hope that no maintenance is required for that week and I can just keep joyfully playing on my abnormal nocturnal schedule. I can recall a time when some weeks there was no maintenance and even when there was my realm would be back up hours earlier than the standard 11am estimation given. When I rolled a toon on a brand spankin new realm some time in the middle off 3.3 I was delightfully surprised as it seemed to go a month at a time with no maintenance. Maybe I'm remember this one wrong, but that's what I seem to recall.
So, I'm going off target here, mostly I'd just like to see those 'Breaking News' messages nice and early, especially considering this week when Mondays regular maintenance started 2 hours earlier and this rare mid week maintenance just came out of the blue. I mean, I have shit that needs to get done in game! If I know the server is going offline for a few hours I might just hold off on running that guildie through another heroic on my tank or perhaps choosing to do these dailys over those dailys or like tonight, I didn't even get a chance to hop on my banker and I know I got a full mailbox from everything that didn't sell in the last 24 hours.
But mostly all this downtime just grinds my gears because I speculate that all this "maintenance" is really just Blizz's way of saving a few bucks by just turning off the whole infrastructure for several hours. =D Makes sense, imagine if all companies could just turn off a large part of their networks for a 3rd of a day every week. Verizon would probably save a few million every Tuesday morning! I could prob switch to a crappier MMO if I didn't have to deal with paying to transfer characters, or weekly downtime, which from what I hear a lot of other MMOs don't have nearly as many shutdowns or for as long. I'm guessing it's because they're nowhere near the size of WoW, but eh... What was I talking about?
No comments:
Post a Comment