World of Warcraft With Less Maintenance // UPDATE

Ever since World of Warcraft went live a couple of years ago, Blizzard made a stated habit of starving their players once a week, during the annoying and, more than once, disastrous "weekly maintenance" from Tuesday night. And we, like the placid players that we are, endured and waited - perhaps unknowingly - the day that these interruptions would go away completely. Or at least partially. Well, that days is now upon us!

Blizzard have begun testing a "live" maintenance system, in which the necessary operations will be made when there's little activity on a server - and not in the weekly 5 hour break. Or 12... or 24 when things got out of hand. There should be no more maintenance from December 26/27 already, so from tonight on people will be able to play World of Warcraft for even longer periods of time.

The following is the official word received by WoW Vault from the blues:

"Since the game's release, one of our most important service goals has been to reduce the amount of time realms are down for weekly realm maintenance. The various hardware upgrades and retrofits we've done over the past year have put us in a position to begin testing the ability to go longer than a week between maintenance periods.

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. We are anticipating the possibility that we may need to perform rolling restarts off-peak if we find that a realm restart is necessary; however the downtime for each realm would be less than 10 minutes if it was required."

Well, it's still a whole lot better to have a few 10 minute breaks every now and then, instead of 5 hours. It just might suck when those un-scheduled breaks will happen when you least expect them.

UPDATE: Damn, at least in the European version of World of Warcraft, we're still being notified that this Wednesday morning there will be a scheduled maintenance, as usual.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)