Indeed. Just actually test your code next time, lol. Encrypt some BS and test whether your servers choke instead of just assuming it won’t kill performance.
They literally have test servers, they just didn’t test the code. It worked for the developer’s unit test and then it was never scale tested at all.
That said, their schedule got moved up 4 months so I can kind of get it. The expansion was in rough shape so they had other priorities in terms of test and it worked on the devs machine so they were happy.
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Nice thanks for sharing all this information it was very informative. I think most people just don’t appreciate all the work that goes behind the scenes in order for us to play a game of this magnitude. FYI I was able to reach dragon isles around 8pm that day and had no issue.
Hopefully people will be a little more patient and understanding on Tuesday when more content gets release and you never know there might be some hiccups
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Thank you for providing this post-mortem.
It’s very interesting as a platform engineer who handles large scale traffic to see this type of transparency from blizzard where we might not have seen it in the past.
I’d love to keep seeing these going forward and even have them posted somewhere in the launcher when they pop up as I am not a forum dweller and just happened to be linked to this article by another engineer I raid with.
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It’s great that you share all this a week later, but what really makes people annoyed is that you can’t relay that you are aware of the issue while it’s happening with some details, on the forums or in the launcher, or in the news in-game, or even have a regular server announce … when it’s happening, while thousands of players cant log in and are posting 100 threads on it per minute…
I never understood this mentality - lets not say anything but work our asses off… that will make them happy right?
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Or Blizzard could just not rush?
Season 3 was rushed, with major last minute nerfs to the content and many guilds missing their CE because the season was cut short, and Season 4 was incredibly short compared to the expected run-time, all so we could get an expansion that had a disastrous launch and continues to be plagued by performance issues.
Everyone lost because Bobby wanted his yacht. Devs/QA had crunch, Engineers had to scramble to put out fires post-launch, Customer-Facing roles having to placate customers, customers irate, and it is this way because they Q4 was targeted for release.
Saying “just be patient” is cringe TBH. You do the developers and engineers a disservice by simply overlooking issues because it diminishes the success of when they do have smooth launch.
What exactly are you imagining here? This game is released in a global market, coordinating a full response on all channels / all languages is not easy, especially if you don’t have all the details yet.
I mean, would you really feel more comfortable seeing them tweet “We are aware of the issue” and that’s it? They’re obviously aware. No shot they don’t get an alert on some channel if some world server is down.
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Absolutely LOVE this transparent, and communicative Blizzard we used to have, back again.
Even when it’s things I disagree with, you guys interacting and talking with the community like this means so so much to us.
Keep up the fantastic work!
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IM against CRZ as it reduces rares and if i want to do Mythic Raids that is locked to the server. Also against Cross Faction I have never played alliance and protest the Idea of playing with Alliance!
I don’t think they’re rushing. They waiting 2 weeks before starting the season and opening up the raid. People already complaining that they’re bored and there’s nothing to do so you gotta release the content.
They could wait another 2 weeks and problems will occur when you release stuff on live servers big difference between testing and releasing content on live servers
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This is an excellent post. Communication during outage events could be greatly improved, but this post-mortem is fantastic. Thank you.
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I Agree with the communication during outages needing improvement it was dead silent.
Hilarious to see people live in denial of this. They think that blizz is somehow dumb placing maintenance when loads of people are playing.
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Content release timing within the expansion is not what we’re talking about. We’re saying the whole expansion launch timing was rushed and these issues could have used another month or two and instead had a January 2023 release. The point that Shadowlands Season 3 and Season 4 were each shorter than average is a good indication. Each one of them could have been a month longer and I think it would have resulted in a much better end product for both those seasons and Dragonflight.
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This was really neat to read. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I’m loving Dragonflight and appreciate the hard work you guys put into it.
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Thank you for this amazingly detailed explanation, and for everyone’s time and effort at Blizzard. We (as players) are always fast to complain, but can be slower to show appreciation and say thanks. So from me, and everyone I play WoW with, THANK YOU! Dragonflight is an amazing expansion so far, and I look forward to the rest of the expansion and beyond.
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Hey stop posting stuff contrary to the narrative that streamers have prioritized access.
Do you actually think they wouldn’t have improved performance if they had four more months to test?
General Discussion sometimes.
For anyone who has followed my post history, I do realize it is ironic that prior to launch I had said I don’t think DF would have substantial issues with its launch, but in my defense they hadn’t implemented certain features on the beta so it is hard to know something is broken when it isn’t even really open for testing, lol.
No one legitimately believed that Blizzard was going to test something new on production, lol.
Thank you for all your hard work!!
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Thank you very much for the explanation and all the hard work that went into solving and fixing the problems. 
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