Why the Early Shut-down?

#0 - July 19, 2010, 11:19 p.m.

According to the post from Scralzort on the Service Status Forum, tonight's regular maintenance will be carried out 4 hours earlier than usual.

" We will be performing scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, July 20th. Maintenance will begin at 01:00 AM PDT and conclude at approximately 7:00 AM PDT. During this time, all realms and many web services will be unavailable.

Thank you for your patience.
Scralzort
Blizzard Entertainment "

This makes it a shutdown for Oceanic Realms at 5:00pm, a time when a majority of players on these realms will just be getting online for a few hours playtime. Not tonight it seems.
For a considerable period, the shut-down has been at 5:00am PDT (10:00pm Oceanic Server) which is reasonable, or at the earliest 3:00am PDT, so why the change for tonight?

And yes, I also note that some realms will be down for a 24hour extended maintenance, we've had ours already and the extended maintenance has previously not effected the normal scheduled maintenance times on other realms.

Bashiok

#1 - July 19, 2010, 11:30 p.m.

We're changing the normal time to align with a scheduled maintenance our ISP will be performing on the network our game servers use. The idea being that if we were to have our maintenance at the normal 5am time, the game wouldn't be playable anyway due to the ISP network maintenance, so we're trying overlap them instead of dragging out the entire downtime unnecessarily.

We apologize for the inconvenience, we realize it isn't ideal for all players, and we try to minimize downtime and impact wherever and whenever possible.

Bashiok

#7 - July 19, 2010, 11:39 p.m.

Q u o t e:

I had to read this 3 times to fully comprehend it. Thought a blue was trollin me for a second.

I'm not doing so great today. :) Edited for clarity.