Rolling restarts extend; multiple US servers down

by Zach Yonzon Mar 27th 2008 at 6:20AM

Bornakk posted on the forums about rolling restarts for all realms to affect an issue that was preventing the proper display of realm names in the Battlegrounds. Instead of realm names, players from other servers would have their names displayed with cryptic tags such as US1B-BG, which -- aside from being unintelligible -- prevented identification of premade groups. The issue had reportedly been present in the PTR builds but seems not to have been addressed completely when Patch 2.4 went live.

Although the rolling restarts were estimated to affect each realm for approximately 15 minutes and take a total of around 2 hours for the entire process, some realms -- roughly half of all US servers -- continue to experience further issues, necessitating more downtime. As of this writing, Bornakk reports that Blizzard estimates that all realms will be available for play at 4:30am PDT. Interestingly, it seems that the issue is not Battlegroup-related as some Battlegroups have both up and down servers.

Tags: Battlegrounds, Bornakk, Downtime, Maintenance, Patch-2.4, Realm-names, Realms, Rolling-restarts

Filed under: Bugs, Realm Status, Blizzard, Forums

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

fLUx Mar 27th 2008 6:39AM

EU realms also have this problem, guess we will have some more downtime soon too.

To be honest, I think the whole roll out of 2.4 could have gone a lot smoother, first a lot of EU realms were down from 3am -> 3pm (not sure how US roll outs went), then the bugs which disconnect you then coming out of instances and summons, and now this, which will involve even more downtime.

Not the best patch so far for smoothness......IoQ rocks though! ;)

Vidi Mar 27th 2008 6:43AM

personally I think the patch has gone fairly smoothly in the US. Sure theres been some hotfixes but after playing MMO's for 11 years, I ve seen SOOOO much worse. And as someone who ran an EmuServer for another game, I can tell you code that works perfectly on your test server, goes wonky when you take it live. It was a mystery to me why this happened but it happened over and over. based on that I may be a little more forgiving about it than others so you might count that as a bias.

fLUx Mar 27th 2008 7:50AM

Oh yeh totally agree its not gone as bad as it could have gone, and blizzard have so many great developers working on this as we speak to get things perfect, but still things like this article, its hardly hard to miss if blizzard test out the new patches on a scaled down version of the live servers (with a pvp group of realms, etc), as I expect they do.

Personally I still think we should get "compensated" for downtime, the least they can do if a server is down for 15 hours over the course of 2 days, plus another 3x 8-odd hour normal maintenance sessions a month, that brings us to 39 hours total downtime, is give us even 1 day free game time, maybe 2. Its not like it costs them anything.

Oh and yeah, I actually like this system where you can't see peoples servers, I know for me, if we are loosing in a BG, people play worse. If we are REALLY loosing, people just turn to farming honor - badly, because everyone is running around like mad men. Same goes for premades, if you see a premade it really dampens the spirits of people because for the most part, half your team won't be listening to who ever is "in charge", so we have no chance.

Vidi Mar 27th 2008 6:41AM

Honestly I thought this may have been one of the unannounced "features" of 2.4. After all, if you dont know its a premade you may just fight it out.

We had an EOTS tonight where all the Allies were there but only 5 Hordies. One of the hordies claimed it must be a premade due to the fact they were all there so quickly. We fought them anyway and after a hard fight we won. I dont think it was an actual premade but I thought at the time that this change might not be such a bad thing after all. Hehe.

guess it was a bug...shame

zedwards Mar 27th 2008 7:23AM

I actually kinda like this PVP feature. It makes less worrying about an OP premade (we have one in our BG that people freak about) and it makes for a guaranteed loss. But also that completely changes our tactics to know who we are fighting.

Dalymar Mar 27th 2008 8:45AM

Arrgh, why?
There are, like, 3 EU realms offline and guess what, mine is one of them. :(
I knew I should've rolled on a PvP server, they have less problems, it would seem

Milktub Mar 27th 2008 9:08AM

"prevented identification of premade groups"

Care to explain why this matters?

Heenmor Mar 27th 2008 9:38AM

Yea, lets say you multi-queue like alot of players do now a days. Your WSG queue pops, so you join. Then you see that you are fighting a premade and as soon as your second queue pops, you get the heck out of WSG with the hopes that what ever the second queue is has a better chance at winning. Well, if 5 people in that WSG do the same thing, you just left the rest of the horde playing 10v5 and a game that your side had a chance in just became an easy 3-cap before the teams ever balanced out. Now if you cant see what server they are from, you would most likely not leave.

quickshiv Mar 27th 2008 9:42AM

Every one I have talked to thought it was a feature and liked it. They should just remove the server name.

Tech Mar 27th 2008 10:43AM

I thought this was a feature of 2.4

In my opinion it is a good idea, it will help get rid of the "oh no its a premade, lets give up now" mentality.

Illyria Mar 27th 2008 11:26AM

Most people on our server thought it had to do with us reaching phase 2. This was quite the let down when I found out what it was for. [also didn't help the fact that my server, windrunner, was still down when I went to bed at 2. Also the fact that I was in the middle of a Heroic MrT and we managed to kill the third boss. During the small time we were back up before getting the 15 warning again, we were ported back to the beginning of the instance. With only trash respawned.]