Engineer’s Workshop: Recreating the Ahn’Qiraj War Effort

“In rare cases, shards will cause your quarry, such as an enemy player or NPC, to disappear when phasing into a new zone”

This really isn’t that rare so I dunno what you’re smoking lol.

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Over 4,000 players worldwide have become Scarab Lords, and that number continues to climb as each server progresses their war efforts.

lol

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That’s nice. When do Paladins finally get fixed to function like they did in Vanilla?

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We started the undertaking of finding a non-layer and shard population solution

Hard decisions had to be made to limit access into the zone by controlling who we allowed in and how many players we could allow in. We decided that we would only allow level 60 characters inside Silithus and would stop allowing eligible characters inside if was full.

And this was one of your big mistakes in the first place. By avoiding these things you created a subpar experience with lots of lag and bad behaviors such as porting out people from the zone when there were too many in it. This meant that guilds could overload a zone and prevent others from staying in it.

If you simply sharded the zone you could have allowed everyone to participate. Yes, sharding has its own problems but that’s better than completely denying people access to the zone.

Over 4,000 players worldwide have become Scarab Lords

Just demonstrating further that Classic is very un-Vanilla. Back in Vanilla you might have had 3 or 4 people per server that achieved that title. Now it’s many times that. Classic is a poor emulation of Vanilla in so many ways.

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Yes lets re-create it server lag and all.

This was outlined in the article, in the section subtitled “BANG A GONG!”.

Pagle was patient zero for the issue described there. Pagle was the first to experience an unexpected server restart during the War, and of course Murphy’s Law for time of day also kicked in, with the issue becoming apparent for our engineers in the middle of the night.

My personal WoW Classic characters are on Pagle, and in true dadserver fashion, I’m already referring to it as the 40-hour war. I’ll soon be telling the story about how we had the 50-hour war uphill both ways, in the snow. In Silithus.

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That’s also nice. Now when will Paladins work like they did in Vanilla?

Too bad for all the unavoidable lag that many players in one spot creates though

An error that they already admitted fault to and fixed as soon as they became aware of it. What do you want them to do?

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Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait.

I thought everyone says Blizzard employees can only play horde. Pagle is like 90% alliance. :thinking: surely the players can’t be wrong about the horde/dev bias?

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That was a neat read. I look forward to experiencing this when my server opens the gates.

How is that an example? It’s one of the most infamous chains in the game, and many people had dreams of trying it, along with the endurance, resources, and foresight to attempt the grind to get the Scepter chain done before the gong was run. It’s literally players using their existing knowledge to do something.

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Too bad they didn’t CHANGE the item’s needed so you couldn’t stop up and get the war effort done in 10 hours too.

BUT they will go and change all the quest items to epic cause got to make sure no one does the quest wrong

After 15 years playing Horde, I switched to Alliance with the release of Classic. It was a difficult transition for my wife and me. While she’s very supportive of me and my efforts to combat faction biases, it came with a lot of difficulties. The culture is very different, and we’re doing our best to adapt.

The most challenging thing has been the Alliance’s negative reaction to the practice of eating the corpses of your fallen enemies to restore your strength before your next battle. I mean, obviously, I don’t really want to eat my previous Horde allies, but surely we can all agree that Murlocs are a tasty treat!

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How possible is it to bring these kinds of optimizations to the Live/Retail servers, particularly for enormous RP Server events?

Exactly. The first time around it was a new thing to all. Now it’s been over-analyzed and over-optimized, it’s a completely different experience.

Blizzard could have at least made an attempt to keep some mystery in the event by changing some of the items and quests a little. Different war supplies, different mobs that have items, and so on.

Yes, Classic is a reimplementation of Vanilla but by making it as exact a copy as possible it becomes much different than the original Vanilla feel. It’s a bad emulation of the original game.

You’re being disingenuous, of course. Back in the day the original dev team admitted to mainly playing horde. I’m sure many of them did play alliance and in the ensuing years many others did too.

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Nothing, I was curious as to the technical reasons for why it happened. On a second re-read and with @Kaivax’s comment, I think it makes sense what happened.

Despite my/our crankiness in the moment in the closing hour(s) of the war, this did turn out to be an unforgettable event for me/us, and I think things turned out okay. Nice to see some context from behind-the-scenes as well.

That guy probably isn’t even level 60. Blizzard doesn’t play their own game anymore.

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“50 undead mage”

Sorry just made me laugh

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Glad to hear it! :slight_smile:

I also had a great time.

I’m somewhat fortunate that my own realm was late to open our gates, so that I actually had a chance to participate. (I was working during the initial gate openings in each region, as you might expect).

My own realm was crowded enough to trigger the teleport code, and I got bit by a bug that caused the teleports to port out random players instead of the last people to enter, so even though I was online and at the gong hours ahead of time, I was ported out just before the gong was actually rung.

We found the source of that bug, and it will be fixed soon, but we can’t go back in time and prevent it, of course. Still, my guild made the best of it, and somebody who was still in Silithus streamed the gate opening to the rest of us so we could watch while we got ready to farm the crystals at other locations in Kalimdor. We had a pretty good time with the mind-control mechanic allowing us to attack people trying to steal our spawn. Of course, we also occasionally killed each other by mistake. :slight_smile:

We were able to return to Silithus after about an hour once the population calmed down, and overall I had a really good time participating in this once-in-a-realm’s-lifetime event. I hope you all did too.

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