In the most recent server downtime announcement over in the World of Warcraft forums, Blizzard employee "Drysc" announced that the company was going to attempt to end most of the much hated downtime that occurs due to server maintenance every tuesday by introducing a new, live-update system;
"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." - Drysc, Blizzard employee, World of Warcraft forums
I'm sure this will come as great news to many who don't work a traditional monday to friday, nine to five schedule. I just hope they don't seriously mess things up in trying to accomplish this one. Those of you who want to check out the topic yourselves should click here to head over to the World of Warcraft official forums.
