This January was particularly rocky for the World of Warcraft players in North America. New patch releases aside, the past few weeks brought in more maintenance downtime than normal, which equated to less game time for us.
With that in mind, player Susanowo over at the WoW forums asked Blizzard regarding the reasons for the downtime: Were the servers really having trouble, or were the devs just preparing something big for the near future? Blue-texter Drysc dropped by the thread to elaborate on the bigger downtime in the past few weeks, and the reasons for each:
Yeah a bit, for this month on the 1st we only had rolling restarts. If I had to guess I would say that making sure there were only rolling restarts throughout the holidays (which was important to us, and I'm sure to those playing) delayed some of our plans for regular upkeep, and so now we're playing a little catch up.
Maintenance on the 8th was patch 2.3.2. Patches generally require extended maintenance.
Maintenance on the 15th included hardware replacements (general maintenance), some network changes, and what looks like software installation/upgrades. I don't want to downplay what each of these require by mentioning them so casually, across 200+ realms which are each made up of quite a few actual machines, the process can be complex no matter how mundane it sounds.
Maintenance on the 22nd was patch 2.3.3.
And today the extended maintenance includes what could be described as software updates/upgrades and... heavy duty spring cleaning. Although it's winter.
We imagine Drysc's explanation should at least give you guys an idea of what's been causing the game to go down more often than normal. Keep in touch in case we receive any related updates, or if more server maintenance is announced
