It’s a supersized WoW Classic maintenance day, but other other WoW servers are back online already

Today’s maintenance is completely average for players on The War Within and Mists of Pandaria Classic servers, with just a quick hour of downtime scheduled for both. However, the rest of the WoW Classic servers are actually already offline, and heading into the strangest maintenance day I’ve seen in many a year, with a full 24 hours of downtime planned, which started on Monday afternoon.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, January 13:

• The War Within: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)
• Mists of Pandaria Classic: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)
• WoW Classic (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, Anniversary, and Hardcore realms): Offline from 3pm January 12 – 3pm January 13 pacific (6pm – 6pm eastern)

The War Within and Mists of Pandaria Classic are back online. WoW Classic remains offline.

So if you’re playing modern or Mists, there’s nothing to worry about and you should be online and playing soon. But if you’re playing any other Classic realm, it’s an all day maintenance.

We often ask why the long maintenance, but rarely have an answer. This time is different, because Senior Game Producer Tom Ellis posted about the technical challenges the server team is overcoming during this long downtime. Due to how the WoW Classic Anniversary realms were originally set up, they shared a database with other Classic Era realms. But now that Anniversary realms are transitioning to a new version of World of Warcraft with The Burning Crusade, that won’t (entirely) work anymore. The infrastructure wasn’t designed to service two versions of the game on the same database, and a large part of maintenance is copying Anniversary account data onto a new TBC Anniversary database. However, Blizzard has found a way to leave persistent account data — which includes things like your character information, guild affiliation, and items — in its Classic Era database, with just a few changes to make sure code knows to call on the correct data when needed.

Leaving persistent account data on the original database limits potential pain points with this upgrade. Your characters and guilds are all in the same place, and nothing is changing. Only some data has to be moved into a new TBC-specific environment. This is a one-time problem, and once Anniversary realms are set up with this new database, there won’t be another massive maintenance when the servers inevitably upgrade to Wrath of the Lich King further down the line.

But I’m simplifying this significantly, and if you’re interested in the tech behind the scenes you should read Tom’s post (linked above), which discusses the matter in more depth.

If you’re confused by all of the tech babble, don’t worry. The TLDR is that your characters will show up in TBC without any disruption; the change should be seamless for players. And once this maintenance is over, Anniversary servers shouldn’t need more mega maintenances in the future.

In short, everything is fine. Or will be, when the servers come back online.

I’ll keep this post updated with the latest maintenance status, and let you know if servers are back up on time or if maintenance is extended. Stay tuned, and in the meantime if you need something to occupy you, maybe take a look at the Steam Detective Fest sale for a bunch of discounted mysteries. I recommend Return of the Obra Dinn, though be warned that you may still be stuck on its puzzles when the servers come back online.

Hopefully I’ll see you in Azeroth soon.