How many server maintenances? (Way less than WoW!)

So I was trying to convince a long-time WoW player to kick his habit and try out Guild Wars, and I could not remember how many outages/"server is down for maintenance" GW had, for North America. I told him it was less than 10 times in the entire 6 years it's been up, and he wanted proof.

Tried to search the wiki, but no such luck, or I entered the wrong search terms. Anyone wanna help me out? Thanks in advance.

Probably the closest you are going to get to a recorded history of reported down time or maintenance is the Login screen announcements. Check the archive wiki page for past events. If you are using Firefox you can just highlight the word "maintenance" and simply count the number. It's not prefect but for your friend it should be good enough.

Actual gw maintenance is quite low - in 4 yrs i can only remember maybe 3 - 5 instances where anet had to shut gw down temp.Any updates/fixes are usually done as live updates - infact last 2 times gw temp closed was when they moved servers i think last yr .
So its uber rare that gw does tempory close .

Ok, so counting the one where "maintenance" was misspelled, and not counting the update to one, I counted 8 server maintenances and outages. Add one more for the one coming this Thursday, and that makes 9. I was right, it WAS less than 10!

Oddly enough, I just got kicked out of the game with a code 167.

edit: nvm, it is listed on the main site. I just didn't notice.

This is not an appropriate venue for confrontational comparisons of Anet and Blizzard.

I would add some items:

First, in some cases of network/server touble, we've had troubles without the game going down completely. I recall two instances of a few servers having like 30000ms lag and similar, which took a week to fix, but the game was still up for the majority of players.

Secons, I'm in an open relationship with game developers and enjoy happy threesomes with Blizzard AND Anet all the time (just not WoW, she's not my type), never mind trysts with Valve, EA (Bioware mostly), Bethesda and many many others. Leads to a happy carefree life, and since I actually pay for my games, the risks of GTV are negligible

Eh, no. ANet had an active playerbase that was expecting expansion packs, so they came out and told us that expansion packs would not be forthcoming because they were starting work on a new game. Furthermore, 4-5 years is a completely legitimate and normal development time scale for an MMO, it's just that you don't normally hear about projects when they start, you hear about them when they're ~2 years from release. We heard about it when it started, because of what I just said concerning the expansions to GW1. GW2 has certainly not been stuck in "development hell" like DNF has (DNF has gone through at least 3 separate engines, which is basically the same as starting from scratch), and even suggesting that further cements my opinion of you as a troll. At best, you simply don't understand how the industry works.

To sum up: this is how long it takes to make a AAA MMO, period. The only reason it seems like it's taking forever is because we knew about it loooong before any other developer announces a new game. These arguments were old two years ago, and now that the game looks like it's really coming together AND WE HAVE PLAYABLE DEMOS it's just asinine to bring them up again.

Comparing any development in GW1 for the past 3 years to development for GW2 is a mistake. One has a team of ~250 people, the other has a team of 4-7. One is making a brand new game that needs to have a strong release, the other produces small expansions to a game that everyone knows is on its last legs to hopefully keep the playerbase content until the new game comes out. The best you can do is scoff and say "they're totally working on GW2". Uh, yeah, they are, we've seen the demos and videos and they're awesome. I feel like I've gone through a time warp and I'm looking at posts from 3 years ago crying "Vaporware!!!!". I don't think those posters were ever mocked hard enough....

No major skill changes after the dervish change, only general skill balances.

Q&A isn't the place to debate about Blizzard vs ArenaNet. OP asked how many times there had been server maintenance. If you are unable to answer the question without inserting an off-topic opinion, please don't post.

The actual down time during each maintenance has been very low too. Maybe an hour for each occurrence.