Red Head Rage: Maintenance Tuesday

I've got a confession to make. IRL I am a red head! As is want of my kin I have a fiery temper. However I have more or less tamed that beast since the age of eight (before which having terrible tantrums is about the only reliable memory my mum has of me). So now I'm an apathetic, laid back individual common to my generation. The only thing that really manages to get me riled is my son somehow, perhaps because he is like me in temperament as a child.

In terms of WoW there is little that annoys me as I commented in my last post. I roll with the game changes seeing them as part of the ebb and flow of an actively developed and dynamic game. However relatively recently there was one night when I remember being livid, absolutely livid at Blizzard. It was a Saturday night, I had had a busy and tiring day with the usual weekend activities being a parent and home owner. I came to log into WoW and came up to see the realm selection screen and there were no realms available. I hit escape to in back to the login screen to see that all realms were down for an unscheduled maintenance. This wasn't just a quick restart to fix a couple of problem but was basically a Tuesday maintenance brought forward.

The problem for me? Tuesday maintenance for me, given the magics of time zone differences falls from 6 pm Tuesday evenings for me. Now this has always been the case, but I've generally accepted that I pay the same subscription fees (well plus exchange rate fees because I am not paying in Aussie dollars) for less potential play time - these day I tend to have something else on a Tuesday evening. But this Saturday pushed my red head rage button and my wife and Twitter had to put up with a raging behemoth. Now days I like to think I maintain control of my logic at such times but I'm sure I was not quite coherent. So instead you shall receive the distilled wisdom of said rage a couple of months on.

Blizzard has been asked by the oceanic player base when we get locally hosted servers and have always responded to pay there aren't any current plans to do so. Now I can understand we don't have the numbers to justify that - it couldn't be self supporting.

Performing a dry run
However I think that having servers set up for alternative regions could be used to their advantage when it comes to maintenance. If maintenance for oceanic realms was performed at the equivalent time but in our time zone it would be performed about 15 to 20 hours before the main US realms. This would give them a chance to ensure that the upgrades and changes could go more smoothly for the majority of their player base by working with a smaller subset first. I'm sure the vast majority of oceanic players would be happy to deal with a bit more instability for the opportunity to play in prime time 7 nights a week.

Daytime support
The other advantage of this change is that the guinea pig maintenance would be performed during the day US time where potentially there are more resources, developers etc available to assist if something did in wrong. Now I work in the computing industry and I understand that there are issues that will only show up with the greater numbers of users, but it should hopefully pick up other issues earlier.

The Drawbacks?
The one major drawback of such a setup is what happens when some servers are down but not all of them that you get those whose home realms are down for maintenance will roll new toons on the servers that are available. Gnomeaggedon saw the worst case of this happening where the players came griefing on another realm. However, given the regular nature of maintenance I doubt griefing will be an issue. The problem will be the increased population potentially filling server and creating lag. Tuesday morning are specifically chosen because they are the low usage point - it is the reason we have cheap Tuesdays for video rentals, the movies and pizza. So the inflation of the population will be relatively minor.

Infrastructure changes
There will need to be some infrastructure changes to support this. Primarily the battlegroups will need to be region dependent so no more mixing US and oceanic realms as is the case currently - which will stop all the confusion of people saying "Good morning" to me in LFD when I'm playing in the evenings! I can see the mixing is a form of load balancing by distributing the high use times across multiple time zones.

Looking at it in the light of improved maintenance and a happier player base I think it will outweigh the negatives and is a change worth making!

01/04 - is that January or April??
Lastly while I'm talking maintenance please Blizzard give one of your developers half a day to implement time zone support into the login messages so I don't have to do work out when you are actually talking about - having to remember the time differences as well as summer time changes and having to deal with a backwards date format. Computers are good at those sort of conversions - can't we make use of them?



So what do you think? Is there some big gaping flaw in my logic or something that I'm missing?


Note: that image is not me - its a screen capture from a video from http://www.xprezz.dk