Another reason is that they want to give themself a safety margin. In the first year, we had so many updates gone wrong, with servers being down for days. You could be sure that almost any of the first 20 patches would introduce some huge bug that needed to be hotfixed or messed with the wow gold servers so badly that they were offline at least 24 hours. I think they still remember that and have a "better safe than sorry" mentality about it.
Actually, I have some knowledge about it as well, as my dad and my father in-law both are extreme computer nerds and have both worked with computers over 10 years of their lives each, and my dad personally was trained by essentially one of the biggest nerds of computers ever (He could literally tell you exactly what was wrong with your computer in less than a minute.) so yeah, I'm fairly knowledgeable as well.
Every Tuesday, we have the maintenance, but on this gold rogue lockpicking Tuesday, October 14, 2008, we have the extended maintenance. As expected Blizzard is taking the realms down for a very long extended maintenance on Tuesday for patch 3.0.2. With this patch will come the new talents, barbershops, Stormwind Harbor and many other things to help prepare for the launch of WotLK come November 13th.
1. Yes, servers need to be backed up, which only takes a couple minutes (at most) on each one, so let's say that takes 1 hour.
2. That's complicated, but they've mastered it by now to where it takes almost no time at all. 15 minutes max.
3. They already have this information in multiple different parts of the game, as I said, PTR's and WotLK servers already have this information that has very few bugs, definately no major ones. Let's still say it takes 30 minutes though.
4. Yep, easiest part, therefore takes less than 30 minutes.
5. Testing was already done on PTR's and WotLK servers, but wow gold guide re-checking to make sure it's good is another thing, which is what they do, which takes less than an hour.
6. They usually do that in between the tests of server stability along with making sure there's no guide alliance bugs making the server crash. Say 45 minutes.
So, therefore that's 4 hours. Say even with tons of things messing buy wow gold up, an additional 2 hours is needed to hotfix everything, which is 1/2 the time it took them to put the information in... That's 6 hours total store, on a MAJOR patch. They take 8 hours on very very minor patches as well provide for some reason, or even for nothing at all. You can't tell me that they require an 8 hour shut down for "Oh, we noticed a mob walking in the ground incorrectly, maintenance time."
