Well, it doesn’t have to be 8 hours, but I can guess that layering turnoff on overpopulated realms, and keyring patch, cannot be done on a running server, can they?
Considering that they have announced that it will be activated at 8.00 p.m CET I would be extremely surprised if they need to take down the servers.
The robustness of the new layering/sharding architecture (yes the server is still technically a shard) allows them to upgrade realms without having to take them offline.
All they do is take half the shards offline, upgrade them and migrate all the users in real time to the upgraded ones before bringing down the remaining shards and upgrading them.
Since there isn’t any client side changes (like new maps, models, spell data) to patch they can do it all real time.
It’s very impressive, from a systems point of view.
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Erm, the loading screen tells us that the game will be unavailable tomorrow and Wednesday between 3:00 and 4:00 am. I guess this is when these changes will be installed.
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So what, disconnect several random players to put them in queue?
Hmm, I guess that for less-populated realms, they will just turn to one layer when population drops at night, and then will stay at one layer. But it’s hard to believe that Shazzrah and Golemmag will easily turn to one layer the night before update.
Unless they have been gradually reducing the server cap, and now they only need to flip a switch.
Transfer aborted; instance is full. Position in queue: 3544. Estimated wait time: 120 minutes. For the time, you’ll be stuck like this and not even able to logout.
Except that there is, the keyring
Oh right, this makes sense.
In this case it’s not a rollover patch, which is when they just rolling restart the shard servers.
The keyring isn’t a client side patch because the code is already there.
Same as the battleground maps, honor UI and rewards and all the future raid maps and armour.
They just need to tell the client to start using the feature, and the servers to start spawning the NPCs.
But I can see them not willing to risk item dupes by activating inventory system update in real time
However they could have activated the system in earlier update, and just enabled the slot in real time.
Also they could just turn it off at 8 AM for 8 hours, for NOCHANGES sake 
And old good cache wipe and everyone pulling item and quest texts upon log-in, above server’s maximum bandwidth. Good ol’ times
All they are doing is enabling Honorable Kills and allow boss to spawn, both of these things are ingame at the moment but disabled. Don’t imagine it requires much downtime if any. A quick server reset would suffice I imagine. Might even be able to do it while game is running.
The only thing client side that needs changing i think is the Honor screen, but that won’t appear ( maybe) until next week once Honor rating is calculated.
The layering change which is technically a much bigger update - that will require downtime, which is why its being done tonight in the middle of the night.
It doesn’t to enable boss spawn.
But boss has undefined spawn location due to his spawn coords being in different format (lacking the “layer” parameter") than the world.
I can imagine that they have to hard-merge the layers to avoid situation from stress test server (crash and massive uncontrollable forking of layers)
Here’s quote from blue thread:
So it means that there will be restarts.
Phase 2 patch probably will require restarts too. Hopefully short.
Those restarts are only accompanied by the removal of layers, not the activation of the phase 2 features such as the keyring and honor system. The phase 2 features is said to be enabled at 8.00 p.m. Thursday which would be a terrible time to restart the servers since it would most likely also mean the death of the log in servers.
I demand simulated extended 3-day maintenance with every phase release!
And a three day pause for us to even install the game in the first place 
Remember to replace the CD’s at regular interval - sometimes in the middle of the night.
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You guys don’t have DVD? :Ð
By the way, the real three day pause was if you were on a trial account, and had to download it. You didn’t get the installer link until your account was created, so you were spending your trial game time on installation.
Nope 6 CD’s I still have them - I doubt they’re still useable though.
That was 1.11, I think. The 1.1 installer was on 4 CD’s.
Plus, I don’t remember exactly, but as far as I remember, it would take an hour or two to install one CD. Not 3 days to install 6.
Depends entirely on the speed of your CD-ROM drive and/or hard drive.
Was pretty easy to saturate that ATA-133 bus.
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1.11 yes - and sorry, not 6 only 5, I just looked again, there’s one empty spot in the container-thingy. And it took us 3 days. Some of the later expansions made our PC stop working altogether. Lousy PC, worse connexion
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