As for “relatives”, I don’t doubt for a minute that Blizzard are better than most, if not all that came before them (and probably many that will come after).

But it is a matter of relative.. Exxon was relatively nothing to the current Gulf issues.

Still.. they had one thread in the downtime forums for this.

One line of text would have sorted 10′s of thousands of people.

I guess I’m also a believer in “Just because it could be worse, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak up”

On Blizzard’s behalf, though, they’re nowhere near as bad as 989 Studios (and later Sony) was on EverQuest. EQ was notorious for shutting servers down for scheduled maintenance (on Tuesday) and then leaving the servers down for several DAYS without actually telling anyone. On the Prexus server, we had a maintenance “day” that ended up lasting for nearly two weeks before the servers came back up and people were able to play again.

There were no forums.

There was no news page at the login screen.

Nothing to indicate when the servers would be coming back up on the website, even after days of being down.

And this sort of thing wasn’t a one-time-only deal, either.

I’ve worked in IT long enough (22 years is long enough I think) as a sysadmin and tester to know that things don’t always come up when they should.

I can live with that.

I’m just angry that Blizz didn’t spend 5 minutes saying:

“Oh damn, something isn’t quite right, it will be right ASAP, but how about you grab dinner, snuggle your partner, do the ironing, watch repeats of Top Gear… Anything, but sit in front of your PC.

We will let you know when we think things will be online and current estimates are 2-3 hours”

I logged onto Argent Dawn to finish the DK starting zone slightly bitter that 90% of the servers were up… just not the Oceanic ones and the rest of Bloodlust.

Almost every single person in my raid was logged into our website patiently waiting to see if we could salvage our raid night (Who’s Online… love that feature).

And to make matters worse, when someone else I don’t know, also clearly an oceanic players, complained that our peak play time was once again effected by downtime unfairly nobody but me was sympathetic. The responses were “Stop QQing” “You’re making too much of it” “I don’t think it’s that bad”

It is that bad. Barthilas came back up with about 20 left on our raid block. That’s approximately 20 players sitting at their computers staring at a Realm Status icon.

Pity you lost all that time, you coulda done other… stuff… instead. >_<

-Mike Boozer, http://somebodyhadtosayit.com