Global Play and Patch Day
Ever since we launched Global Play with StarCraft II patch 2.0.4, players around the world have connected to different regions and played in new ways. We’ve also seen a few players raise concerns about what Global Play means when we’re patching the game. With Patch 2.0.8 deploying very soon, we think this is a good time to talk about situations you might find yourself in when one of the game environments is unavailable due to maintenance.
Down Today, Up Tomorrow
Nowadays, when an environment is down for maintenance, it’s possible to select a different region to play on—a region that’s not undergoing maintenance at the time. We perform maintenance for a variety of reasons, but the most common reason for a region to be down for maintenance is that we’re deploying a new patch.
A typical maintenance lasts for around eight hours and looks something like this:
Monday, 10:00 p.m. CEST: Southeast Asia + Australia + New Zealand
Tuesday, 2:00 p.m. CEST: North America + Latin America
Wednesday, 3:00 a.m. CEST: Europe + Russia
Wednesday, 9:00 p.m. CEST: Korea + Taiwan
Patch releases can be complex, so we prefer to stagger their deployment times across several days. We expect to usually deploy no more than one or two regions per day, and usually choose to do so during off-peak hours. Occasionally, when we have a small patch, we’ll release it in all regions on the same day. For example, patches 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 were released in every region within a few hours.
Think Globally
With the Global Play feature, players now have the ability to switch regions during maintenance windows. It’s entirely possible for different regions to be on different versions of the game on patch days, and this can lead to some confusion.
We’ve built the game so that it should install the new patch for you when you launch the game, based on the region you last connected to. When you try to connect to a region that is running a newer version of the game than what you are in, you will be asked whether you want to patch so that you can play on that region.
If you agree, the game will restart and install the new version. However, you will now be unable to play on any region that has not yet updated to the latest patch. If you try to do this, you’ll receive an error.
One final thing to note is that it is only possible for these scenarios to occur while the maintenance cycle is unfolding. Otherwise, when the maintenance cycle ends and all regions have completed their updates, you should no longer encounter any version mismatches when using Global Play for any region.
We’re working on ways to provide you with more clarity on what’s going on during maintenance, especially with regard to which regions players can and can’t play on, but we hope that this information has been helpful to clarify why you sometimes run into the messages shown above. Please stay tuned.
But Wait, There’s More
Our Customer Support department is here to help you on patch day. If you need help, please check out:
Also, feel free to brush up on the finer points of Global Play with our Global Play FAQ.