US and EU Maintenance Saturday
Another round of maintenance is coming, this time with some hardware upgrades that should allow significantly more players to play at once. This will be done by phasing all of Draenor like the Tanaan Jungle intro zone.
- US Maintenance - Starts on Saturday, November 15, at 03:00 AM PST and lasts until 9:00 AM PST.
- EU Maintenance - Starts on Saturday, November 15, at 04:00 AM GMT and lasts until 10:00 AM GMT.
- We obviously expected an increase in logins, and prepared for well above what we were expecting. The actual amount is far above even that. (CM_Lore)
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Update 7:07 p.m. PST
We’re making preparations for the Europe maintenance beginning in just an hour, and along with hardware upgrades we will be implementing some of the performance improvements we’ve been testing. One of these is a fairly large change to the way the game world is run by the servers—expanding the phasing tech used for the Tanaan intro experience to the entire continent of Draenor. This will allow us to run multiple copies of Draenor simultaneously, spreading out server population, while attempting to keep guilds and parties within the same copy. We’re currently running tests of this tech on a few North American realms, and have found we’re able to raise realm capacity by a significant amount. We’ll continue to provide updates as we progress through the Europe maintenance, and prepare to apply the same changes on the Americas and Oceanic realms.
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Update 6:00 p.m. PST
We’re continuing to work on improving realm and login stability, reducing Character Not Found errors, and hotfixing in-game issues. We’re making progress ahead of maintenance on a couple performance improvements, and we’re in the process of testing those improvements now on a few realms. Maintenance is beginning for our Europe realms in just a couple hours, and we’ll continue providing regular updates here throughout the night.
Thank you again to everyone for your patience while we continue to work around the clock to address performance issues.
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Last night we scheduled maintenance for Europe to implement server changes to help improve realm performance, and scheduled the same for the Americas/Oceanic realms today. With the maintenance in EU we experimented with raising population caps, and we’re continuing to make adjustments up and down to ensure a smoother game experience. Today we’re continuing to hotfix in-game issues, address any login and authentication issues occurring from the high number of players attempting to play, and make any changes and adjustments we can while the game is live. While these changes have made a marked improvement for the in-game experience, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.
As most of you are aware, the demand on the game is extremely high right now, leading to increased queue times on many realms. We’re also seeing some login errors as a result. This is compounded by us needing to temporarily lower the population caps on all realms to help assist in realm stability issues due to a number of in-game factors that are putting greater than normal strain on the game servers. For those in-game now we’re seeing fairly stable gameplay, but with some continued issues when phasing into the Garrison. Even with lowered population caps we’re not seeing performance where it needs to be.
We've been working toward much larger and longer term service improvements, which we’ll be implementing with off-peak maintenance tonight. A large portion of this extended maintenance will be upgrades to server hardware to help cope with the increased demand we’re seeing. We’re optimistic that hardware upgrades as well as some additional fixes and changes will resolve the in-game issues primarily centered around accessing Garrisons. We’re also continuing to test and implement new performance improvements whenever and wherever possible.
We appreciate your continued patience, and we’ll be providing updates here as work progresses. If you use Twitter, we recommend following @BlizzardCS and @Warcraft for updates as well.
Service Status and Communication
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
I get that this has been a rocky launch and the servers are stressed, you need to take them down for a few hours to resolve some issues. That's fine, we all would rather the game be running all weekend at 100%.
I just wish you would communicate with your fans/customers better than the robotic way you do now.
We can only communicate about what we know to be true. We're doing what we can to communicate as quickly as we can on key issues with everyone, but there's a lot being done on this end that can't be communicated or communicated right away. As you can see by the hotfixes (Rygarius has been posting), we've been sharing those out as quickly as possible. Both Zaryhm and Bashiok (among others on the team) spent time getting more information on things out last night as well. We have people from multiple departments working around the clock to monitor issues and work on fixes including the CS team here on the forums and on Twitter. This is not anything new for us though. It's what we strive to do with every patch and expansion.
It may seem robotic to you, but we want to also make sure that when we are communicating that we're as precise as possible in what we say and don't want to come across glib to those who may not understand how seriously we take resolving these issues with everyone.
We're working and trying to communicate that work to you as we can, but our primary focus is resolving issues as quickly as possible. We are right with you in that we both want you to play and enjoy Draenor and we also want to be able to play and enjoy Draenor. These things are not mutually exclusive. We're on the same side here.
You should always add two hours to your estimate. Then it looks better when you finish early.
We've had that occur many times. Rarely do people come to the forums to talk about it... because they're playing at that point.
Unknown on the population numbers yet being bumped up. Believe it or not, sometimes we do end up waiting to the last minute in the hope we don't have to extend maintenance, but try to inform people right away.
Honest question here - are you given the discretion to answer questions by yourself (or anyone else on the team) or do you guys kind of post by committee to make sure the posting is crafted properly, without giving too much information out, or worse, implying information you absolutely aren't saying. Again, an honest, no sarcasm question into the mind of a CM and how you guys communicate.
It depends on the situation. Delicate high level information gets a lot of oversight to make sure it's correct and appropriate to go out. Other things can be more off the cuff and we're trusted to know where that line is.
World of Warcraft Addon - Broker Garrison
Today we are looking at another helpful addon, Broker Garrison. This addon requires a DataBroker display like Bazooka. It tracks garrison related things across all of your characters, making it easier to know when to check on alts:
- Track the status of missions, building and upgrade processes, work orders, garrison resource and apexis crystals, and more.
- Allows you to hide and mute Blizzard's notifications and replace them with custom toasts. You will have more control of the toasts with Toaster.
- Invasion support is on the todo list.
World of Warcraft Addon - Breeze
Another garrison releated addon worth mentioning is Breeze. The animations that play after a mission are fun a few times, but the novelty will eventually wear off and you will want to click through them faster. This addon gets rid of the small animation that plays before you can collect your loot. Unfortunately it doesn't completely bypass having to click through mission results yet!
Patch 6.0.3 Hotfixes - November 14
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Garrisons, Followers, and Outposts
- Mine: Mining carts should now be easier to spot and should contain more than 1 piece of ore.
- Rangari Jonaa and Limbflayer should now spawn in for characters that have selected the Sparring Arena for their outpost in Gorgrond.
- Followers
- Artificer Romuul: Resolved an issue where characters were not receiving the quest.
Classes
- Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
- Balance
- Resolved an issue where the balance cycle may incorrectly force the Druid to stand up.
- Balance
Quests
- Defense of Karabor: Resolved an issue where characters may not receive completion credit for the quest.
- I See Dead People: Resolved an issue where Bryan Finn may become unresponsive.
- Kaelynara Sunchaser: Resolved an issue where characters were unable to return to their bodies in Spirit Form if they die inside the Jorune Mines.
- Leave Nothing Behind!: Kur'ak the Binder now spawns more frequently.
- Mulverick's Plight: Increased the drop rate for Mulverick's Axe.
- Save Wolf Home: Gronnstalker Korhol, Beastmaster Trokar, and Giantslayer Zhakta should now spawn more frequently. Additionally, resolved an issue where characters may be unable to complete profession quests while this quest is active.
- The Defense of Karabor: Resolved an issue where completing this quest may cause characters to be unable to progress if they're also on the quest for The Righteous March.
Creatures
- Echo of Murmur now spawns more frequently.
- Made a pass on a number of rare creatures to allow multiple players to receive credit for personal loot if they helped defeat them.
- Reduced the density of Squirrels in Nagrand and critters and Icespine Hatchlings in Frostfire Ridge.
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