What about a traditional scheduled maintenance period, like every Tuesday at 4 a.m. Eastern time, where things go down for two hours and come back?
TL;DRMaintenance is effectively already a roughly weekly Tuesday early-morning UK slot, not always taken, though Beausejour favours always taking it because it lets them sync client and game-server hotfixes in one go.
We're going towards that now. Basically, right now you can almost consider that every Tuesday we try to do a maintenance. Typically early in the morning UK time is a good time in general, just because that's where the least players are playing typically. But that said, we don't take it every week because we don't always have to do it. And so sometimes it's not very necessary. But I'm an advocate to always take it, so that sometimes we use it to accelerate hotfixes. So in case you haven't noticed, we do hotfixes all the time. So we have these new deployment systems now. And we're able to roll hotfixes way faster. But when we roll a game server hotfix, it's going to take time to... what's the word that Ahmed uses? Percolate. It's going to take a while before it percolates. And so sometimes you can have a game shard that has 10 servers, two of them have the hotfix, the others don't have it. So depending on where you're at in the shard, you have the fix or not. And it takes a while before all the game servers actually run it. Now, obviously, if it's an unstable build, it's going to be much faster, because then the server crashes, and the new instance comes back with the new build. But these maintenance windows give us the opportunity to also synchronize that with a client hotfix when it's necessary. And so we can take everything down, patch the client, patch all the game servers in one go, emit fresh shards if we have to, and then start again. And so that's why typically there's big changes that can come about in maintenance, and we want to use them more.