We’re making preparations for the Europe maintenance beginning in just an hour, and along with hardware upgrades we will be implementing some of the performance improvements we’ve been testing. One of these is a fairly large change to the way the game world is run by the servers—expanding the phasing tech used for the Tanaan intro experience to the entire continent of Draenor. This will allow us to run multiple copies of Draenor simultaneously, spreading out server population, while attempting to keep guilds and parties within the same copy.
-Blizzard, Warlords of Draenor Launch Update
A little over 48 hours into the Warlords of Draenor launch Blizzard has upped the ante. To counter the “we didn’t quite think this through” problems associated with too many people congregating at key spots in Draenor… problems that made the company limit server populations, thus making for horrendous queues on the more popular servers (insert my usual “shards are bad, mkay” rant here)… Blizzard is going to apply phasing, used in the intro experience to keep players more spread out, to all of Warlords of Draenor.
We’re not quite getting the zone copies that SOE has had going since 2004 to accommodate players crowding into specific areas of the game, something I mentioned might be handy in my post on Thursday.
Many versions of the Frostfang Sea zone
But we are getting something akin to it.
Blizzard had server down time last night to make this change and upgrade hardware, and so far this morning things are looking… better.
My daughter has some characters on a high population server, and hasn’t been able to get on there because the server queue has consistently been 4K or higher. This morning, no queue. Things seem to be better according to Blizzard. There are still problems, I still see some servers locked, but huge queues do not seem to be as prevalent.
We’re continuing to monitor realms and track any individual issues as they occur. We’re still seeing some issues occurring now that Europe is in their peak playtime, but with greatly reduced frequency compared to before maintenance.
All realms are now set back up to their normal population caps. Queues being experienced now are due to demand beyond what the realms are normally capable of handling, and we’ll be looking into how to reduce them further.
Now, how will this play out through the weekend? Since they have made garrison’s an OCD delight by giving us followers and missions to check up on, queues will cause some of us grievous mental distress if we can’t get in and take care of business.
I’d just sit here and play Hearthstone if this worked
Are you able to get into the game now?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 