How Much Downtime is Too Much?
As per the usual, the servers came down for maintenance yesterday. Since, like most I’m sure, I’m either sleeping or at work when the maintenance goes down, it doesn’t really affect me very much. I did notice, however, that quite a number of players were agitated by the fact that a large number of servers were down for “extended” maintenance. Well after the game is usually back online and running, these servers were still down, and a significant number of players stomped through the forums yelling about how unfair and awful Blizzard was for doing this to them. Being completely honest, I’d wager these were a lot of kids on spring break, and for many Tuesday afternoon over spring break would likely be prime WoW time!
I usually disregard such sentiments, as really, there’s always something else to do if Warcraft servers are down. If you are really THAT angry about the fact that there was extended maintenance (and it’s likely in anticipation of the new patch), you may want to examine your play schedule and re-prioritize your in-game time. That said, they may have a point.
Even tolerable players can get irritated by downtime if it goes on long enough. Even casual rational players staged protests on the Lake Superior shard in Ultima Online after it was down for a few days. What then, is the limit for acceptable downtime? 4 hours? 8 hours? 24 hours?
From those I know that play, 6 hours is about right, and anything beyond 12 is excessive.
What do you think?
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