World of Warcraft Battle Plan V3
The latest World of Warcraft Battle Plan is now live in the WOW forums. The WOW Battle Plan V3 discusses planned upgrades to the authentication system, current population dispersion strategy, the upcoming character transfer service, weekly maintenance, new dungeon armor sets, paladin and priest talent reviews, weather effects, linked auction houses, and much, much, much MUCH more.
Can you afford to be the last one to know? You can read the details here.
The latest World of Warcraft Battle Plan is now live in the WoW forums. The WoW Battle Plan V3 discusses planned upgrades to the authentication system, current population dispersion strategy, the upcoming character transfer service, weekly maintenance, new dungeon armor sets, paladin and priest talent reviews, weather effects, linked auction houses, and much, much, much MUCH more. Can you afford to be the last gamer to know? You can read the details here.
Dispersing the Population
The World of Warcraft networking, database, and programming teams are working to improve and expand their services. Since January 1, 2006, 22 new realms opened in North America. They also offered a number of different realm-transfer options to help balance populations to improve performance and reduce queues on the most heavily populated realms.
The WoW Team recently brought a new online World of Warcraft site in North America — the 5th one in the region. This opens new realms which approximately 40 each. This also allows migration to existing realms thereby improving loot, auction house, mail, and instance lag and general realm stability for the players who were moved to the new realms and those who remained at the original site.
The WoW Team is preparing to bring up a 6th site before the end of May, and they have plans to build additional sites to handle any increase in population after the release of The Burning Crusade. All future sites will be built using the latest hardware to support new players and perform additional migrations and character transfers as needed.
Going Retro
With the new zones, The Burning Crusade will increase Azeroth’s current land mass by 25 percent. The WoW Team will increase the player caps on all realms by the same percentage to keep Azeroth vibrant and populated. While the new hardware installed on the 5th and 6th sites can handle the increase in concurrency, the hardware on the mature sites cannot. Over the next few months the WoW Team will be retrofitting mature sites with the same hardware used on the new sites.
Upcoming Character-Transfer Service
The WoW Team is currently testing the paid character-transfer feature. Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to any realm they choose. This means player’s will be able to join their friends on other realms without a pre-set mass realm transfer. This will also contribute to a balanced player load from realm to realm which will reduce realm queues and lag.
Individual Realm Performance
The team has identified numerous bottlenecks and addressed them through both software optimizations and upgrades to the realm hardware.
Weekly Maintenance
Realms are scheduled for maintenance each week to find and fix potential issues. During the maintenance period, the WoW team gathers, organizes, and backs up data from the previous week. While critical game issues may be uncovered resulting in extended realm downtime, the WoW Team works as quickly as possible to address the problems and bring the realms back online. They will also provide regular progress updates. Their goal is to cut down the frequency of these maintenance periods. This period of scheduled downtime is also used to apply patches.
Authentication, WorldofWarcraft.com, and the Forums
The steady increase in players has severely impacted the game’s authentication (login) service and website and forum hardware. The hardware handling the game and forum login requests was designed to handle a large number of players. However, recent increase in players exposed system limitations. To cope with the steady increase in players, the WoW Team is in the process of installing the new system which will go live by the end of May in North America. This will address the issues on login to the official forums, the billing system, and login delays during authenticating, handshaking, or connecting steps.
The community website and forums are also receiving hardware and applications improvements. These improvements, combined with hardware upgrades, will allow more consistent updates during periods of extended downtime. There are also also plans to unveil new forums next month for additional communication improvements.
Moving Forward
Resolving World of Warcrafts current performance issues and upgrading to current hardware in preparation for The Burning Crusade is Blizzard’s #1 priority. The WoW team has been working around the clock to respond to the issues as they arise. They also promised to remain focused on taking proactive steps moving toward the release of the expansion to avoid similar issues in the future.