Tuesday morning. It's a magical time for the friends and family of most WoW players, a time where their loved one emerges from their dank cave and actually engages in social contact. The mail gets picked up, clothes get washed, perhaps even pets get fed. No matter what the server, if it's between 3 and 11am (pacific standard time of course) on a Tuesday, you can bet WoW players around the world are doing the mythical something else.

Players have never questioned this natural phenomenon until now, whenposter Dranlu asks "Why do all the realms have to go down at once?". Drysc gives us the best answer he can:

I won't go into the technical nature of "why" we have Tuesday maintenance, I think that's better answered at another time and by someone more qualified than myself, but that didn't seem to be your real question anyhow.

The reason why we take down all realms at the same time is because it's quicker, it doesn't restrict some realms more than others, and it doesn't force players to swamp other realms that are up. If anyone remembers some of the larger issues we had back a couple years ago or so, when a realm or group of realms go down, everyone on those realms would converge on a single realm and more or less grief the entire population of that realm. Not fun for the original players of that realm. It's quicker because the maintenance can take a while, and doing one group of realms at a time would mean some group of realms, or multiple groups, would not be available near or during prime time, and we like to avoid that whenever possible of course.

We have made some great improvements though in our maintenance times, and we're now able to schedule rolling restarts every other week which only require realms to be down for 15 minutes or so. We're continuing to refine the process, and make improvements where possible.

In the end, enjoy the scant time you do get away from reputation grinding and PvP. Go see a loved one (assuming they're awake) or get some homework done. Better yet, watch the sun rise over your monitor as you obsessively refresh the WoW forums.