World of Warcraft's first The War Within raid has been acting a little funny recently, and Blizzard confirms that background work on the 20-year-old MMO's infrastructure is largely to blame. Thankfully, though, the recovery effort is already underway.
Nerub-ar Palace is an eight-boss raid that launched in September, not long after WoW's The War Within expansion was released. However, it's not quite been the place to be recently, as a recent patch has made certain parts of the MMO laggy as sin. As you can imagine, trying to clear the raid on harder difficulties while your abilities take forever to register isn't the sort of difficulty folk have signed up for. The random disconnects don't help, either.
Now, Blizzard has taken to the forums to provide some insight into what went wrong and what's been done to solve it. Essentially, World of Warcraft's latest patch features some background work to freshen up the MMO's dusty ol' infrastructure to keep it in good condition for the future, but some "side effects" are showing up in less-than-ideal ways.
- World of Warcraft's latest raid race ends in disappointment after 12 days with a final boss so lackluster the team who won was visibly confused to have beaten it
- Blizzard boss says keeping World of Warcraft players happy for 20 years is so hard because the MMO is filled with "different demographics that only have so much time in their day"
"In 11.0.5, our engineers implemented a rebuild of some core parts of WoW’s infrastructure," community manager Kaivax says. "This work is being done now in preparation for the game’s future needs as it grows. Unfortunately, we experienced side effects that have been seen in certain high-performance parts of the game, such as several encounters in Nerub-ar Palace.
"We’ve been working on these issues with urgency, and earlier today, we have deployed hotfixes that we believe will reduce 'desyncs' with certain boss abilities and address sudden disconnects during combat."
Kaivax goes on to say more fixes are on the way, such as improvements to "client responsiveness" during raid encounters, which should hopefully remedy the reported issues.
"We’re continuing to stay focused on any game performance issues that remain, or arise following today’s fixes," he says. "Again, this is a top priority for us."
The lag issue is one of the few fires the latest anniversary-themed patch has thrown up, along with balance issues that are also being fixed at the time of writing. It's not all bad, I suppose – you've also got a $90 mount proving quite popular despite its eye-watering price tag. Except for one unfortunate player who bid a lot of gold on a more expensive version not long before the newer, cheaper one was announced.
