Blizzard Discusses Recent World Of Warcraft: Classic Silithus Stress Test And Future Plans

Blizzard Discusses Recent World Of Warcraft: Classic Silithus Stress Test And Future Plans
Credit: World of Warcraft via YouTube

As World of Warcraft: Classic continues to grow, there’s been plenty of questions as to where the future of the game lies. While Blizzard gathers opinions on whether the title should remain in Vanilla or if it should move onwards to future expansions.

While the developers decide if they’d like to move onwards to The Burning Crusade or simply stay where they’ve planned to for now, it remains clear that everything that Vanilla once experienced is still on the way.

Recently, we discussed a stress test that Blizzard would be holding. Meant to test the readiness of the Classic servers, this optional test strained against the test servers to see how much was needed before the Opening of Ahn’Qiraj began.

Thankfully, it seems that the test has been a resounding success! While there were powerful issues with lag and spawning – which was to be expected, given that this was meant for testing purposes and not playability – the stress test proved as helpful as Blizzard needed it to be.

Thanking all of the testers, Blizzard discussed the success and drawbacks of the test in a recent official post. Mentioning issues with spawning, flight paths, and more, Blizzard highlighted all the help the community had provided.

“A lot of people asked during the test if performance is going to be that bad in the live game, while some joked that they thought it was ready, and we should ship it,” Blizzard discussed. “We are planning to do better than that, but we won’t be able to eliminate the lag entirely.”

The lag in question was nearly crippling for the test – which, again, was sort of the point of a stress test to begin with. Additionally, testers faced crashes that ended up having enough players give up on the testing that the population dwindled enough to actually complete the event.

Population density was also an extremely severe issue that the developers are going to be working on, using the example of exponential scaling when dozens of players are affected by a single effect. Additionally, the developers are looking at code optimization to help ensure that everything runs just a bit smoother.

One of the more pressing issues that the developers discuss is teleporting players out of Silithus and away from the event. While on the surface this seems like it would bar participation, all it truly does is make Silithus itself a bit harder to reach.

As the event continues, there will be Silithid to kill in the majority of Southern Kalimdor, rather than only Silithus. This means that if you do end up teleported away, you’ll still find plenty of bugs to squish in the Barrens, Tanaris, and a few other deserty locales.

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