![]() Things within Silithus became so laggy and contentious that the group I was in was essentially forced out to a nearby, lower-level zone to "participate" in the event. Mechanically, however, what you see is a number of boss enemies spawn around Silithus, and players are incentivized to kill them not to avoid any sort of fail state, but rather because these high-level NPCs have increased chances to drop epic-quality items. Narratively, the gong-ringing triggers the War of The Shifting Sands, in which the ancient bug army sealed away within Ahn'Qiraj finally pours forth and players must battle them back for the fate of the world. A number of unlucky players - at least a handful from my own guild - found themselves unable to even enter the zone surrounding Ahn'Qiraj, Silthus, as Blizzard developers put a 1,500-player limit in an effort to prevent the servers from crashing entirely.ĭespite witnessing a twice-in-a-lifetime video game event, in some ways it felt anti-climactic. ![]() Those who died in the intra-player struggle for control over the gong, found themselves unable to resurrect and were essentially stuck watching things unfold from a muted, ghostly perspective. At least I was there when the gong was rung. Fifteen years later, we were ready to recreate one of the most epic moments in WoW history for WoW Classic by focusing on server optimization to combat lag and eliminate server crashes."Īnd my experience was relatively positive compared to others'. "While we did manage to stabilize servers during the event, and learned quite a few lessons, we saw opportunities to do better. The turnout was beyond the development team’s wildest imaginings and, simply put, we were not prepared," the company wrote in a post-mortem breakdown two weeks after the first gate openings in Classic. "When the War of the Shifting Sands took place the first (and only) time in 2006, thousands of players from each realm flew or hoofed it over to Silithus to partake in or witness the chaos. It's something that Blizzard publicly acknowledged and tried to mitigate by stress-testing the event beforehand. Nearly a decade and a half later, the biggest question on the minds of players wasn't so much what's going to happen once the gates open, but whether the servers would hold up in the moments leading up to it. "There was horrendous lag, hour-long queues to get onto servers, servers constantly losing peoples' locations upon death and porting them to the default graveyards in Stonetalon and Westfall, and boats doing all sorts of crazy things." We're talking things breaking," wrote Alex Ziebart in his recounting of the Ahn'Qiraj event for Engadget. "We're not just talking server crashes (though that certainly did happen). It was an unprecedented event that, infamously, led to an unprecedented amount of technical issues when servers began opening gates back in 2006.
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