World of Warcraft: Classic is meant to replicate the Vanilla WoW experience, and that means keeping all of the events that the original game was loaded with. Soon, the Gates of Ahn’qiraj will open once again, and players will have the chance to experience the legendary event all over again.
To make sure that the servers are capable to handle such an event, Blizzard has announced a stress test to take place soon. On June 18th, the PTR servers will be given a stress test to help see where the developers should improve the servers before the real event.
“First and foremost, we’d like to see a full realm with a queue of testers waiting to get onto the realm,” Blizzard said as they described the test. “This will allow us to consider tweaks to the total realm capacity.”
To suit this, Blizzard intends to open the realm about an hour before the test to give everyone ample time to transfer a valid character over. Toons will need to be level 60 to actually interact with anything in Silithus, but players are welcome to use lower-leveled characters if they so choose.
Blizzard intends to test their technology in place for managing the number of players in Silithus itself, where the majority of the event will take place. If players aren’t able to get into the zone at first, they ask that players continue trying due to the changing capacity.
“For this event, we’re optimizing aspects of the game service that you will potentially see and feel. In order to maximize the number of players in Silithus, we have to make sacrifices to things like buff and debuff updates, player movement, general server-to-client communication, and spells.”
Blizzard says the above to warn players that the PTR is not going to be in the same condition as the live realms are, focused entirely on testing and optimization. Testers should not join the stress test expecting to be the first to experience the new event.
Much of the performance issues they intend to look for are likely to result from a player’s hardware capabilities. Additionally, they warn that lag is inevitable, and that while they intend to do what they can to lessen it, there will be no way to remove it entirely.
They also expect an issue from the original 2006 launch of AQ, where players were teleported out of the zone without warning. This, they say, is preferable to a crash, though still something they hope to have fixed.
Perhaps most importantly, Blizzard intends to attempt the stress test without layering so that the event is optimized for the unlayered status of Classic‘s live clients. Given that layering is the source of a great amount of complaints in the player base, it’ll be interesting to see if they’re able to pull such a thing off.