I won't go into the technical nature of why we have Tuesday maintenance, I think that's better answered at another time and by someone more qualified than myself, but that didn't seem to be your real question anyhow.

The reason why we take down all realms at the same time is because it's quicker, it doesn't restrict some realms more than others, and it doesn't force players to swamp other realms that are up. If anyone remembers some of the larger issues we had back a couple years ago or so, when a realm or group of realms go down, everyone on those realms would converge on a single realm and more or less grief the entire population of that realm. Not fun for the original players of that realm. It's quicker because the maintenance can take a while, and doing one group of realms at a time would mean some group of realms, or multiple groups, would not be available near or during prime time, and we like to avoid that whenever possible of course.

We have made some great improvements though in our maintenance times, and we're now able to schedule rolling restarts every other week which only require realms to be down for 15 minutes or so. We're continuing to refine the process, and make improvements where possible.

We attempt to schedule for a time when most people are asleep and/or at school or work. For those that have neither, think of Tuesday like a sorbet, cleansing the gaming palette and allowing you to focus on getting some of your day-to-day things done. Water the gourds, wash your stuffed hawk-catching-a-mouse diorama, eat frozen peas, take your Orange GoJo shower... you know, really just spend time on the normal stuff for a while.