Weekly maintenance, no more

Blizzard is going to start testing a new method by which regular weekly maintenance is done on live realms during off-peak hours rather than a regular weekly maintenance in which the realms are unavailable.

From the WoW forums:

In the upcoming weeks, we will be testing the effect of a live maintenance, where regular maintenance tasks are run during off-peak with realms live. On Tuesday, December 26 there will be no scheduled downtime for weekly maintenance. We will perform all necessary maintenance tasks while the realms are live.

Good news I suppose, you can now play until 7 a.m. on maintenance days too!

I’m not sure if weekly maintenance is even common in other MMOs, but I think this is a good step. I’m waiting though to see how wonky play will be during those live maintenance hours.

I think EQ2 had a maintenance type thing that happens each morning, but Blizzard to my knowledge is the only one who takes the servers down for as long as they do each week. It’s definitely a change I’m looking forward to. I wonder if a lot of it has to do with the fact that they don’t have to calculate honor anymore like they used to.

Someone start ranting about how much WoW is broken, please. All these changes are starting to slowly building up an urge for me to play it again.

Possibly, but then again you often had those extended ETAs when they had “unexpected difficulties” with weekly maintenance stuff that you start wondering if they will manage something like this.

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EVE does daily maintenance…and since it’s one big server, the time is different for you depending on where you are in the world. So some people get screwed with prime time downtime for an hour every day.

If you play a lock, you’re gonna hate Rogues now.

I mean really, really hate them. Especially if they’re Undead.

Conversely, if you’re any other class, you’re gonna hate warlocks. I mean really, really hate them.

Unless you’re a hunter. They eat locks for breakfast.

For about a month after Burning Crusade is released, there will be the opportunity for daily maintenance, since servers will regularly combust from the number of accounts attempting to log in.

If they’re Beast Mastery, yeah. But BM is so ludicrously overpowered that it eats everything for breakfast, not just Locks.

http://genetics.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/behavior//learning/SkinnerBox.html

To help you hate WoW, check what you’re missing if you aren’t in a raiding guild (link obtained from Lum’s brokentoys blog):

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a11/bshaftoe00/sebspeakerwg2.jpg

I resubscribed for a month. At first I had a good laugh at the fact that my gear was still better than that of 99% of the schmucks I ran into in the battlegrounds. Then that made me a bit depressed. I didn’t last three days.

The end-game is still a worthless timesink, raiding still involves relying on 39 other people (30 of whom are likely to be stoners, retards, or just plain old loot whores), and the PvP is still skill-less shit with too much damage being dished out and way too much crowd control.

Some of my former guild-mates were like “DUDE, COME BACK! WE NEED TANKS!” And then I got in vent and heard a bunch of people talking about farming consumables, shitty drops from bosses, DKP spending strategies, and how all of their gear is going to be obsolete in a fucking month when the expansion comes out.

No thanks.

Much of this is changing in Burning Crusade, fyi.

I play a 'lock, I don’t do PVP (except the odd battleground), and I’m an orcish 'ock so undead rogues have no impact on me.

Thank you, crisis averted.

edit:

The end-game is still a worthless timesink,

I’ve been playing on and off since launch and have yet to make it anywhere near 60.

That is an awsome pic. Some of that stuff is comedy gold.

For at least 3 months, until those with neglected families burn through the new content at a rate only Mountain Dew and shit stained socks can provide.

I noticed that it did get nerfed a bit – Beast Within now only grants a 10% damage boost. The main thing is that the pet and hunter can’t be CC’d. That’s pretty awesome still.

I got my PC fixed so I’m WoWing again. I completed my PvP set in three days instead of the 3-4 weeks of nightly PvP it would have taken me to get from rank 8 to rank 10. I was pleased about that.