Era servers being effected by SOD maintenance

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Blizzard why are we, in 2024, unable to launch the Era cluster while you guys are preforming Sod maintenance. A large number of us could care less whats happening over on SoD. Please, if your able and willing to listen to SOD feedback, allow for this unneeded downtime to be removed from classic era. Thankks,

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Because, and rightly so, they are trying to ensure that all versions of WoW Classic are on the same client. This is better for overall maintenance, especially with a limited dev team such as they have.

Unfortunately though, it seems they aren’t really doing a good job of staying on top of the bugs this approach introduces to Era. There’s some stuff that really needs to be looked at. I support this approach to client consolidation from a software engineering perspective, but they gotta still actually address the bugs it introduces.

Given how popular all versions of Classic seem to be, they could probably stand to hire a few more folks. Now that they don’t need to shell out for an annual yacht for ol’ Bobby, maybe they can divert a few funds :stuck_out_tongue:

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Find ore was just starting to work too.

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im not sure how you would consider this as ‘better for overall maintenance’ as since this consolidation Era servers have experienced significantly more issues with addons/in game bugs/ and as above mentioned more downtime.

Era servers were functioning fine and honestly were maintenance free until this lazy decision was made.

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If Era never had to change, for any reason, then it woudn’t really matter… and I know, you’re probably thinking “We don’t want any changes in Era so that’s fine!!” However there’s stuff we can’t predict that will need to be changed. Since Classic came out in 2019 there’s been a lot of necessary changes, and not just features that have mixed reactions. There’s been hotfixes to mechancis, bugs, and exploits that nobody really discovered back in the day, or at least weren’t widespread enough to require dev attention.

So by consolidating the clients it means that any fixes that Blizzard needs to do to one client can also be very easily applied to the other client. The alternative is to try to manage several diverging code bases at the same time. This may sound easy if you don’t do any software development work, and if that’s the case you’ll just have to take my word for it. It can be very frustrtating (and time consuming) to have a fix ready and working on one version but then discover that the code base is very different on another verison, or that something else has changed that makes the fix no longer valid. Not to mention just managing the source branches in that case :frowning:

So having a single, data driven client that will function for all versions you want to deploy is a lot better. It ideally lets Blizzard react more quickly to bugs that exist in the game and deploy fixes to all versions simultaenously so you don’t end up with a situation where a game breaking bug exists in Era and SoD, but then is fixed in SoD and takes another month to come to Era.

The downside here is that it requires a bit of dilligence and testing to ensure that the client functions appropriately on all the versions it supports. Because the data driving the runtime functionality is different, it still needs to be tested. Unfortunately it seems as though this process has created bugs in Era which need to be fixed and are taking some time to be addressed. This isn’t good and I think Blizzard needs to step up here. I’m not unsympathetic to the challenges involved here, but at the end of the day they still have a responsibility to the client (ie, us).

Honestly, it would be massively helpful to just have some acknowledgement on those bugs. Like, “Yes, we’ve seen them, we have it logged as a ticket.” and to maybe even communicate their status. Like, just knowing someone looked into it and struggled to find a resolution makes me, personally, feel a lot better about it than radio silence. I know that’s been Blizzard’s jam for a long time but hey, it just sucks to be on the customer end of that policy.

Anyway, it really is a better thing to have a consolidated client here… Blizzard just needs to dedicate some dang resources to the (admittedly few) issues it has created on Era.

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I’m a bootlicker, and will tell players why they’re wrong for having an issue with the company, on the forums the company provided for players to discuss their issues.

I come here to bootlick because it tastes so good and I love being on my knees.

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You should maybe read my entire posts before you make assumptions about my intent. From what you wrote here, it seems as though you only made it through the first paragraph.

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Weird how HC servers are still down after SOD and ERA came back up. Must be new and exciting additions being added!

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because era together with HC players are 3rd rate citizens now? Devs no longer listen to you.

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How much less?

—-

Anyway, I suppose this most likely is to do with them running on the same client, and being served by the same servers.

:woman_shrugging:

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Better for the devs worse for the users.

Having Era / HC on their own client would allow them to become increasingly stable overtime. SoD has brought dozens of bugs, crashes, and many of the issues are unresolved to this day.

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Not so. See my posts above. It’s actually really good for the user too. Those benefits tend to be transparent though. When was the last time you commented, let alone noticed, when a change was smoothly and seamlessly deployed across all three Classic clients?

Blizzard needs to show the appropriate respect for it’s Era players in terms of time allocation for correcting faults introduced by this approach, but they’re 100% on the right course. Things would almost certainly be worse long-term for all involved if Blizzard tried to maintain three separate and diverged streams of Classic WoW.

I mean, I know you’re not going to believe me, but there it is.

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A lot of changes have been smoothly implemented, even 1.15 (which did have lots of bugs) also had smoothly implemented changes (see removal of decay). However, just because a change was smoothly implemented it does not mean it was good for the game or the players.

Now that it has been some time since 1.14 and 1.15 pvp changes - it is becoming increasingly clear that the pvp changes perhaps created more issues with ranking than the previous system, while harming the amount of good WSG games almost instantly. It can be proposed that these unnecessary changes harmed the overall vanilla experience.

The point of having a seperate client would not be for devs to push changes into two places. It would be for one place to rarely get changes and only bugs / stability fixes, which should be very rare on a version that has been battle tested for so many years. And become increasingly less frequent overtime, thus making the Era / HC client increasingly reliable.

In contrasts, by having all the clients together we are constantly relying on tests to catch potential issues created in Era / HC by SoD changes - and not a single release has managed to cause zero bugs in Era / HC.

We both agree that these are complex systems and making changes can have unintended impacts, I agree that if Era was to be further developed a single-client-model makes more sense. But I stand firmly in the camp that Era should not be getting new features and with that stance is makes much more sense to isolate it from SoD.

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I didn’t say that change, or any change was good for the players. I’m talking about the changes themselves being smoothly deployed. I don’t see you making a lot of posts saying, “Hey Blizzard, that was a really great patch day, everything went smoothly and no issues on my end.” You’re also assuming that Era will never need an update, which is pretty flawed.

If you don’t want to accept the overall benefits that this type of deployment system brings to both developers and players that’s fine. By all means, keep complaining about the relatively minimal amount of extended downtime you have to experience to support it.

I’m done talking to you about this :slight_smile:

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I am not assuming this, I am saying that the updates to Era / HC should only be bug / stability issues found in the current system - which should be relatively small if there are no new features added.

I am simply replying to the thread, I personally am not impacted by Tuesday downtimes as I usually don’t login during the day anyhow.

My views on the current setup have much less to do with downtime but with actual bugs, instabilities, and broken addons that are created in Era.

For quite a bit now my mains on Era (on the bigglesworth server but whitemane cluster) are unable to whisper people who are in an instance while I am not, or vice versa. This is extremely annoying and an issue that was introduced due to new development (likely some SoD changes led to this).

Also by having all the clients linked together it makes it easier for future releases to harm Era. It would be near trivial to push SoD changes to Era with the current setup. Whereas separate clients would require weeks of dev work to merge them together. Basically the separation would add a layer of protection to Era from business decisions that happen at blizzard that are outside the control of the dev team.

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If only WOW Classic was actually Vanilla WOW as it was when it was live :confused:

So much has been tweaked and changed, its nothing like it was. And then to have these Hardcore and SoM versions, its becoming a joke. There is no need to have anything “new” on these classic realms. They are supposed to be a museum of what it was like when live and THAT’S IT.

This is why I want the devs to stop asking for feedback. Just follow your original ideas and don’t change things based on a small percentage of the community.

Think about it. Less than .001% of the playerbase actively visits the forums. Yet all the feedback the devs listen to is from the forums. Does that make any sense?

It’s like having the country run by a small group of gypsies. People who do not represent the masses or what they think.

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So basically like most countries in real life. Minus the Gypsy part.

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wow, im super glad the era cluster experienced additional SOD maintenance downtime on April 2nd 2024. We got to log back in and discover:

  1. the ongoing well known x-realm whisper bug was not addressed what so ever
  2. Twin Emporers and Cthun in aq40 are not killable due to a brand new bug effective this maintenance
  3. our equip slot macros are all broken as someone decided the era cluster needed a reformatting on equipslot #s

Honestly, if your a blizzard employee or if your the lead dev for Sod (the guy who failed the Heroes of the storm Dota rip off), you need to really look at the situation here. you need to stop relishing only in the positive feedback your receiving from sod boot licking fan boys and understand you are doing a terrible job. The Heroes of the storm dev should be fired, its just blatant ignorance at this point to think hes even a competent human being.

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Blizzard needs to show the appropriate respect for it’s Era players in terms of time allocation for correcting faults introduced by this approach

Well given that Blizzard is not respecting Era, can’t you see why people who play that version would rather they go down the “wrong” path of separate clients? The merged client target is a big one.

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Era should have been its own separate thing (from the beginning) because A - It is and B. the game is not supposed to change, ever, and its getting changed all the time.

Technically Era no longer exists. We’re playing the SoM-HC-Era-SoD hybrid that is 1.15.2blah blah with all the new things turned off so it emulates 60 WoW. Its a bad joke that will never, ever be rectified because “vanilla players” are a minority that just pay $15 a month each and not a penny more.

There’s an official day coming up somewhere down the line where Era will be Era in name only if we didnt already cross that bridge with the idiotic chronoboon and every other change since.

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