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How long is too long for Patch Downtime
Czzarre
Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 3,742
So, back in the day of EQ1 a game was down all day once a week for updates and maintenance, WoW has reduced that to 4ish hours, DAOC was somewhere in between. NO matter how long the patch, it always ended up that when I was truely sick and had to stay home..it was a patch day.
So, with the highly anticipated WAR and AOC as well as the vastly overlooked AION and Spellborne ..how long should the maintanance take? How often should it occur? not talking about the mega content patches, just maintaining the game.
Comments
If it's necessary to every week have a minor downtime for checking for bugs and so on then the regular downtime should not be more than two hours. However major updates can vary from two to 24 hours, but not more than one day. I personally don't believe that keeping a regular downtime every week is truly necessary; Guild Wars doesn't have it and still is to 99.99% bug free.
Few hours a week seems standard i would expect that.
I don't ever remember EQ being down all day for patching, I could be wrong though. It may depend on what you mean by all day, I think I remember a couple times when the servers went down for about 8 hours or so. Six hours was not all that uncommon. But they also would conduct their regular patches starting about 2pm EST when server traffic was lighest and would be back up again by daytime. Once in a while, they would have to do an emergency patch during peak hours, but that was rare.
But to answer your question, if there's a game I love to play, then any amount of downtime is too much. But I'm willing to endure it if it makes the game better and fixes bugs. What I really don't like is when they interrupt gameplay to patch and it ends up making the game worse, which happened frequently.
When The Burning Crusade was released WoW was down for 48 hours.
I think that it doesn't matter how long/short the maintenance is, people will whine about it anyway.
I'm not sure what they do during the maintenance. The servers need to be restarted to clear out the cache, but aside from that I don't know what else they do.
If the maintenance can be limited to 2-4 hours during offpeak time then it's all good. I'm sure that 4 hours isn't going to turn someone away from the game completely. But then it would also depend on how often there are patches that require extended downtime - once a week (possibly even once every two weeks) would be a bit excessive.