Silithus Stress Testing June 18th on Classic PTR

To prepare for the Ahn’qiraj Opening event in Classic WoW, Blizzard announced in a blue post that they are holding a stress test in Silithlus. The opening of AQ is a highly anticipated release for players to relive their experience from Vanilla or participate in the legendary event for the first time.

Blizzard will be testing several things to tune and optimize players’ experience. For more information on what to expect, we’ve included the blue post below.

Please join us on the WoW Classic PTR at 3:00 p.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. EDT / 11:59 p.m. CEST on Thursday, June 18 for a stress test. In order to prepare for the AQ opening event, we need to test several aspects of how the game service deals with very high capacities.

Test Details

First and foremost, we’d like to see a full realm with a queue of testers waiting to get onto the realm. This will allow us to consider tweaks to the total realm capacity. We’ll open the realm about an hour before the test so that everyone can copy over a character.

Secondly, we’re going to test our technology for managing the number of players in Silithus. Make sure you’ve got a level 60 character (the PTR copy function will be available, as will template characters with rare quality Dungeon gear), and attempt to join your fellow testers in Silithus. Lower-level characters can also log into the realm, but they won’t be allowed into Silithus.

If you don’t make it into Silithus, please keep trying to enter the zone. We’re going to start with a typical zone capacity, and then we’re going to increase the number of player-characters that are allowed in the zone.

What to Expect

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 some sacrifices to things like buff and debuff updates, player movement, general server-to-client communication, and spells.

We’ll begin testing the AQ opening event by initiating it automatically. Testers won’t have to do anything to make the event happen. This will go on for one hour.

Some of the performance issues that we’re looking for will result from players running the game on different PC hardware that have different capacities. Your experience and the experience of another player with a much more powerful PC will vary.

There will be lag. Despite the years of big improvements that have been made to hardware, software, and data throughput, we must accept that packing more and more players together in a small space causes an exponential (not linear) load on the game service.

And of course, the game can port players out of the zone entirely, similar to how players were ported out of Silithus in original World of Warcraft. Just like we did in 2006, we consider that preferable to a crash.

Layering

Today, layering is enabled for some very popular realms, and we’ve engineered the AQ opening event to operate as expected on a realm with multiple layers. Nonetheless, our goal with these Silithus optimization efforts is to make the event run the best it can without adding layers to realms, and we do not plan to add more layers to any realms for the event.

Please Join Us!

We look forward to seeing you in Silithus on the WoW Classic PTR at 3:00 p.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. EDT / 11:59 p.m. CEST on Thursday, June 18!

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/wow-classic-ptr-stress-test-june-18/556221