What breaks my heart on Tuesdays..
These past few weeks have been hectic on my WoW schedule, with 3.3.5 out three weeks ago, for North American Servers that is, and then Ruby Sanctum’s somewhat controversial opening.
What makes new content even more crazy for the players, like myself, who strive to experience it all? Server maintenance coinciding with the reset of raid lockout periods. One could make the point that server maintenance would be bad for someone‘s schedule no matter what day it is on, but I am here to contend that regular maintenance should not be conducted on the same day that raid lockouts reset.
Why is this? Well, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who races through a ton of content on Tuesdays, while the getting is still good for finding fresh members to group up with. This results in a hectic raiding schedule for Tuesdays: Log on, find out what’s the weekly. See if Alliance has Wintergrasp. Create a 25 man VoA group. Finish 25m, and create a 10m unique class/role group. Create and complete weekly. THEN, if my guild has it set, a 10-man ICC run.
Sure, I could space out these runs, but then the potential for finding good, fresh groups becomes a lot worse. And still attempting to fit all this in on days when server maintenance runs late (2 hour delay, another hour delay, then 2 more hours, etc.), such as it did last week, is pretty much impossible. My (and others’) raid schedule gets screwed.
And then there’s days of extended maintenance, such as back on the 30th, when 74 of the N.A. servers were down for an entire 24-hour period. Raiders who wanted to get in their content early-on in the raid lockout period were instead forced to shift their schedules back a day.
So why can’t Blizzard move maintenance to a day such as Sunday or Monday, when most people are saved to those raids we’re trying to get into on Tuesdays?
I don’t have an extreme memory of things throughout World of Warcraft’s 5-year lifespan like my fellow Lore Hound, iTZKooPA. Though, from farming dozens of the Vanilla and BC raids in WoW, I have learned that resets were not always the same as they are today. Some raids had only a few ample days before the reset, and you could attempt them again, or re-farm them for that coveted axe or helm you’re after.
However, Blizzard has boasted (and Lore Hound has covered) that their philosophy for game theory and development is doing just that, developing. Blizzard has adapted to this “one week” lockout period for a singular raid, for every raid.
As for today, server maintenance got extended by only one hour to noon PST. Not as bad as last week, at least! I’m still hoping Blizzard gains the senses to move maintenance day to another day in the week. I’m all for losing a day of WoW to have clean-running servers, but just wish it didn’t have to coincide on reset day.
What do you think, readers? Is any day a bad day for realm maintenance? Or would you, like me, prefer it at a different point of the week?
I think I have a almost as good question: Why does US servers have their maintenance about one day before the European ones? It’s not much, but US progress guilds always gets a day head-start on new content.
July 13th, 2010 at 7:30 pmQuote
I honestly don’t really see what the big deal is. I mean, okay. So the maintenance is scheduled for lockout reset days. Whether that is intentional or not, I don’t know. But it’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything. It’s like I always say: it’s only a game. Not everything will go right the way you want it to, all the time. Just take what you get, roll with the proverbial punches, and move on. The content will still be there when the server goes back up. I promise.
July 13th, 2010 at 10:22 pmQuote
I’m with Luan on this one.
Oh, and resetting a raid takes more Time than resetting a 5 man instance. So there’s a big reason right there.
July 14th, 2010 at 6:27 amQuote
Hmm, this is a good question. I was always under the impression that reseting raids was one of the jobs on the matinance to do list. This is a really good question if it is not.
July 14th, 2010 at 8:49 amQuote
The way I see it is that it’s better to have the raid lockout resetting at the same time as the maintenance. That way, theres no lost raid time. Imagine if the reaid reset was tuesday, and the maintenance was on friday. 2 chunks of time lost.
I’m in the EU, so our maintenance is on a wednesday morning, the same time as the raid reset. Which means very very few people miss out on raiding, but I have yet to hear of anyone raiding in the mornings. So, we lose no raiding time at all.
July 14th, 2010 at 10:32 amQuote
Well, part of your problem, as you see it is that your guild holds ICC runs on Tuesdays. Seriously, you’re trying to PuG up fresh runs of VoA and the Raid weekly, -then- do an ICC run (I assume with your guild)
July 15th, 2010 at 8:27 pmThe two raiding guilds I have characters for Raid on Wednesday and Saturday, respectively. PuG for VoA and Raid weekly when possible, either fresh on Tuesday, or even Sunday/Monday for thsoe who missed out on the week.
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