WoW Classic PTR Stress Test -- June 18

Please join us on the WoW Classic PTR at 3:00 p.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. EDT / 11:59 p.m. CEST on Thursday, June 18 for a stress test. In order to prepare for the AQ opening event, we need to test several aspects of how the game service deals with very high capacities.

Test Details

First and foremost, we’d like to see a full realm with a queue of testers waiting to get onto the realm. This will allow us to consider tweaks to the total realm capacity. We’ll open the realm about an hour before the test so that everyone can copy over a character.

Secondly, we’re going to test our technology for managing the number of players in Silithus. Make sure you’ve got a level 60 character (the PTR copy function will be available, as will template characters with rare quality Dungeon gear), and attempt to join your fellow testers in Silithus. Lower-level characters can also log into the realm, but they won’t be allowed into Silithus.

If you don’t make it into Silithus, please keep trying to enter the zone. We’re going to start with a typical zone capacity, and then we’re going to increase the number of player-characters that are allowed in the zone.

What to Expect

For this event, we’re optimizing aspects of the game service that you will potentially see and feel. In order to maximize the number of players in Silithus, we have to make some sacrifices to things like buff and debuff updates, player movement, general server-to-client communication, and spells.

We’ll begin testing the AQ opening event by initiating it automatically. Testers won’t have to do anything to make the event happen. This will go on for one hour.

Some of the performance issues that we’re looking for will result from players running the game on different PC hardware that have different capacities. Your experience and the experience of another player with a much more powerful PC will vary.

There will be lag. Despite the years of big improvements that have been made to hardware, software, and data throughput, we must accept that packing more and more players together in a small space causes an exponential (not linear) load on the game service.

And of course, the game can port players out of the zone entirely, similar to how players were ported out of Silithus in original World of Warcraft. Just like we did in 2006, we consider that preferable to a crash.

Layering

Today, layering is enabled for some very popular realms, and we’ve engineered the AQ opening event to operate as expected on a realm with multiple layers. Nonetheless, our goal with these Silithus optimization efforts is to make the event run the best it can without adding layers to realms, and we do not plan to add more layers to any realms for the event.

Please Join Us!

We look forward to seeing you in Silithus on the WoW Classic PTR at 3:00 p.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. EDT / 11:59 p.m. CEST on Thursday, June 18!

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Hey the community wants answers about Botting ruining their game play- any thoughts on this?

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Woo! Thanks for the post :slight_smile:

Eliminate layers completely please. It’s inexcusable to still having to play with layers in P5. You said they will be gone by P2… which was a lie.

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This is going to awesome! So happy Blizzard is putting some great engineering behind making this happen again! Testing has always been enjoyable on scales like this on Retail and now Classic. Never forget Firelord Nomi and his devastating reign over Dalaran a few years ago during a test on retail to check out the stability of Dalaran and the servers as they were pushed to their limits.

Hope to see everyone there!

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They literally just made a post about bots. Maybe it’s not what you want to hear but they did say something

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They’ll probably end up temporarily adding more layers for Silithus in order to handle this event…

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I know… which is very frustrating as this goes against the “spirit of classic” they like to preach a lot about. But they obviously don’t care and are just lazy to fix a problem they themselves created.

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this might be tough with the PTR Character Copy down

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what do you need a PTR stress test for when you can just turn off layers and look at whitemane on tuesday

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And they also literally used the news outlet “use 1000 words to say nothing” tactic. Simply saying that botting is still against TOS and to keep reporting it. Haha. ha. ha.

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Seems you missed it.

whats the difference between silithus and stormwind when ony buff is going out and everyone is spamming aoes

there isnt one

takes bout a full minute for the server to even let me log out on some nights

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what about ban waves?

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When you’re making changes to how the client fundamentally works while sending, receiving, and using data you don’t do that on a live environment. Since you’re unaware of how this works… it could also be used to improve your performance in stormwind while people are waiting for those, so precious, world buffs.

It’s clear that you don’t see nor understand the importance of this test.

no i understand it, im just saying they could gather the same data by literally looking at the live game

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And I’m saying that you can’t test, or experiment with, a fix while the game is live.

weird, hasnt stopped them from playing trigger finger with layers

And what would you like them to say instead if they have nothing else to say?

That data and experimentation was done during the original stress test. Layering as we see it today is a result of this, with minor tweaks.