World of Warcraft reduces downtime

About three months ago I wrote a blog entry complaining about WoW downtime, which got a heated discussion going whether the weekly five+ hours of maintenance are necessary or not. But this week Blizzard decided that they can live without that maintenance window.

On Tuesday, December 26 there will be no scheduled downtime for weekly maintenance. We will perform all necessary maintenance tasks while the realms are live. We are anticipating the possibility that we may need to perform rolling restarts off-peak if we find that a realm restart is necessary; however the downtime for each realm would be less than 10 minutes if it was required.

Apparently World of Warcraft can run without shutting down 5+ hours per week. Makes you wonder why it took them two years to get this going.