I started playing as soon as the game was live, first, I got a 220 item in the vauit (was expecting a 226, already send a ticket), then I went to the maw to rescue the 20 souls, it was laggy but playable. But the Ardenweld Campaign has been giving me a headche, already tried 3 times but no luck thanks the inmense amount of the lag. Besides that, world content seems working really fine for me.
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This is so upsetting wait months for the release then no one can get anything done? what’s the plan? what are we going to get as players, that you want to pay all this money to play your game? it’s not fair to us that pay to play your game to be expected to play something as bad as this patch drop! What happened to oh we will just boot everyone and have it fixed in an hour? what happened to that Blizzard…
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Was anything he said against the Code of Conduct?
Just making my 4 attemp right now, and the lag seems to be history now 
Thank you big brain good guys at blizzard for fixing it 
Is there any mention yet of fixes for people who lost ranks for crafting legendaries? I can’t make a couple of rank 4 recipes anymore on two different characters.
It is not listed on their public known issues page, so you’d probably benefit from opening a ticket with Customer Support.
As someone who’s developed games for two decades, I can sympathize but at the same time that doesn’t mean all this stuff about it being impossible to test is the full truth. While yes, trying to predict/simulate what hundreds of thousands (or more) of players all at once are trying to do is not easy or possible (I don’t know their server architecture), there are at least things you can do to mitigate possible worst case scenarios based on previous information/experience you’ve encountered.
As WOW is 15 years old, this is a common occurrence with major content updates, so somewhere in the company the tribal knowledge exists from prior lessons that can be shared amongst the rest of the relevant teams. One solution that doesn’t cost money would just simply be to design new content in such a way that players aren’t all forced all at once onto the same servers/shards right at the start. I believe someone mentioned FF14 as an example of learning from this mistake. The designers could have consulted with the technical team about possible ramifications of their intended story/quest design and seen if it raised any potential red flags. They could have then modified the story line in such a way as to ameliorate as much of the possible issues, which always seem to boil down to too many players for the infrastructure to handle. This is a very common way of getting around technical limitations when it comes to game design. In my career we’ve done this numerous times if our servers or graphics engines couldn’t handle what we wanted to do.
Furthermore, as a company with the resources that Blizzard has, investing in a server stress test team is something they could do. Take a page from Netflix with their Chaos Monkey tool (google it). Spend the time before the next major content update to work on tools to simulate stressful loads. While not a trivial task, it is also not impossible given the financial resources and technical talent draw that Blizzard has. You don’t need 300k computers running wow, you just need to develop a headless tool that connects and communicates with the server that could run say scripted actions (like movement, spell casting, etc) and deploy it on a large number of existing servers during a down time to test the effects.
I have a gut hunch that a lot of the blame lies more with the c-suite/executive teams than the actual crew that programmed/designed/drew everything. My guess is that someone towards the top makes a cost/benefit analysis of the situation and it goes something like this: “It would cost X dollars to possibly solve (we’re not even sure if it would actually solve) the problem. This problem only occurs roughly once every major content patch i.e. per year. It persists maybe a max of a week. While people will be vocal and scream in the forums, they won’t actually cancel because of this and will settle down once things return to normal so it’s not worth the investment.” Being part of a public company has its disadvantages. I know from personal experience how the line of “it’s done when it’s done” gets distorted when you go from being smallish to gobbled up by a major public company. You keep the old byline but in reality things get rushed behind the scenes.
rant over, was just bored for the 1 hour downtime this AM. Also this is no slight on the CS team, they have jack s to do with it all and have to put on a brave face every day and deal with people screaming at them demanding answers they don’t have. Those people hopefully get paid well enough to make it worth while.
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I’ve read about other people having this problem on Reddit as well as on these forums and in game, so I’m surprised that it isn’t on the known issues page. I tried to contact support in game but the page was just hanging when I was playing earlier. I’ll try doing it on the website instead.
Made an inquiry and it seems to have been reported already. I think it might be a visual bug since my recipes are intact.
Then you’d know that yes, it’s impossible to fully test and fully predict. Ever try to solve a three body problem? Sounds super simple right, solve an equation that can exactly calculate where three objects will be in space at any given time. Guess what, it’s pretty much 100% unsolvable and will likely always remain unsolvable. We can simulate it out, but that’s only as good and accurate as the model you feed it.
Now picture that three body problem, but instead, you’ve got hundreds of bodies in the mix. That’s what developing is like for large scale games. The best thing you can aim for is to work out all the major bugs and then slowly work on low rate bugs in the <1% occurrence range.
I’ve known mechanics that have been doing their jobs for decades that are completely clueless with modern cars. Time spent in a field != All knowing in said field.
99% of people on PTRs aren’t there to test for actual bugs. They are there to try to get a leg up on everyone before the content goes live, so that they can get a head start on what’s going to make gold or what’s going to get them geared up fastest, secrets, etc etc. That or they are there to get all the content spoilers they can so they can make money off their controversial 30 minute youtube videos, for five minutes of actual content coverage, with clickbait titles.
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Absolutely this^. My guild fully tested the raid. There were even forced wipes (so boss would remain up) to test other class combinations for certain mechanics. But I’m almost positive only a handful of us reported bugs we encountered.
Stress testing just sounds good on paper but is difficult to implement.
Mr expert here with a big mouth. How entitled are you?
You both make excellent points, and quite possibly shoot down my theories regarding the stress testing idea. I would still posit though that given that it’s known that major updates bring a massive influx of players, that you could design your new content in such a way to help with this. Most importantly not having it be that right at the start everyone has to all be in the same place/server location at the same time.
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How about you go talk to your parents about the way they raised you. Incredibly entitled opinion from someone who has zero knowledge on anything it takes to deal with these issues. Spoiled little babies is what all of you are.
Not really sure how it’s spoiled to discuss things in a civil manner in a discussion forum, and furthermore to admit when someone has countered something I put forth. I didn’t make any claims or demands of the situation. Furthermore I wasn’t aggrieved by the issue, I simply went and did something else last night instead and today it’s magically resolved. I realize this is a text based medium so everything comes across as antagonistic and inflammatory. My mistake for attempting to have a discussion on a video game forum. At least the 2 others that replied had constructive things to point out that added to the discussion.
I commented on yours replying to the portion saying the cinematics were unacceptable. Strictly showing as evidence of the pandemic. The rest wasn’t directed at you just a general statement for the spoiled entitled people I was referencing. Took no fault with your statement.
Oh, my bad for misinterpreting your reply.
Yeah, that could go a long way. But then if one route gets bugged, that group might fall behind on rep grinds (a big deal when racing for first kills) due to an RNG group selection. The forum would really light up over that lol
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Good point. Well given that it seems solved as of this morning, they seemed to have figured things out pretty swiftly which is impressive given the scope of the issue.
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