Warlords of Draenor Launch Updates, Nov 15 Hotfixes

12:00 p.m. PST
Since the launch of Warlords of Draenor we’ve seen a large amount of positive reaction to the new content available in the expansion. Players have been enjoying building and managing their own Garrisons and exploring the new world. With many of the new changes that have been implemented over the past couple of days, we’ve seen a marked improvement in realm performance and stability. Thank you again to everyone for your patience while we have worked around the clock to address these issues.

As we previously posted the realms in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania had rolling restarts to pick up hotfixes to address some gameplay issues. During this time we also further extended the raised maximum realm population in these regions. While the increase in realm population has allowed more players access to the game, we continue to also see realm queues on heavily populated realms.

To address the queues for these realms we are currently working on expanding the instancing tech we deployed earlier which allowed for additional copies of Draenor. We are currently testing these improvements with the goal of deploying this tech more widely. To ensure the best possible in-game experience for players this implementation will require additional oversight and testing. We will be carefully scrutinizing and adjusting these modifications throughout the day to ensure that we don’t introduce additional stability and performance issues.

Hourly updates will resume when we have more information on the progress of these changes to share with you. If you use Twitter, we recommend following @BlizzardCS and @Warcraft for updates as well.

2:00 a.m. PST
At this time, we are monitoring performance in all EU realms following hotfixes that were applied during rolling restarts a few hours ago. These same hotfixes will be deployed to the Americas and Oceania realms during rolling restarts that are set to begin in about an hour.

Please note that other hotfixes have been applied to address gameplay issues you may have encountered. We are working diligently to identify further issues in-game that can be addressed in this fashion.

1:00 a.m. PST
Following rolling restarts that were successfully completed on all EU realms a couple of hours ago, we are now preparing to deploy the same hotfixes to our Americas and Oceania realms, starting in about two hours at 3:00 a.m. PST.

12:00 a.m. PST
At this time, we continue to monitor all realms. Our Quality Assurance and Reliability Engineers are working on further hotfixes to the game, and analysis of increases in maximum number of players per realm that we made earlier is ongoing.

11:00 p.m. PST
Rolling restarts of all of our EU realms have proceeded through the last hour. We are currently bringing up the last group of EU realms that were restarted.

We continue to deploy new hotfixes to the game. These hotfixes are aimed at addressing gameplay issues.

The Americas and Oceania realms will undergo rolling restarts in four hours, at 3:00 a.m. PST.

10:00 p.m. PST
We have begun rolling restarts for all EU realms. We anticipate EU realms to be available again shortly.

We have scheduled all Americas and Oceania realms for rolling restarts at 3:00 a.m. PST. This is to apply hotfixes that require a realm restart.

9:00 p.m. PST
We are currently working hard to address a recent issue that impacted the game service for some EU realms. We are in the process of restarting the affected realms.

We will be initiating scheduled rolling restarts for all EU realms, starting in an hour at 7:00 a.m. CET.

Additionally, we are scheduling all Americas and Oceania realms for rolling restarts at 3:00 a.m. PST.

8:00 p.m. PST
Over the last hour, we've temporarily raised the maximum population cap on the Lightbringer (US) realm.

We're closely monitoring all realms, and Lightbringer (US) in particular, with the intention of continuing to allow in as many players as we can support.

Several hotfixes aimed at improving server and gameplay issues, and specifically addressing Garrison issues, are set to be deployed. These particular hotfixes require rolling restarts to apply, and we are going to start by applying them to the EU realms. We have scheduled rolling restarts for all EU realms to begin in approximately two hours at 7:00 a.m. CET.

7:00 p.m. PST
We continue to monitor performance and population in North America following the increase of maximum realm population that we applied earlier.

Additionally, we’ve developed a number of hotfixes to improve server and gameplay issues, with a focus on Garrison performance. These particular hotfixes require rolling restarts to apply, and we are going to start by applying them to the EU realms. We have scheduled rolling restarts for all EU realms to begin at 7:00 a.m. CET.

6:00 p.m. PST
All realms in North America, Oceania, and Europe have now had their temporary population cap increases applied. We’re continuing to work on developing and applying hotfixes for performance and gameplay issues. A number of these have already been applied and can be found here. We’ll have more updates in approximately an hour.

5:00 p.m. PST
We’ve begun the process of temporarily increasing population caps on European realms. As with the North American and Oceanic realms, we’re rolling out the increase a few realms at a time so we can monitor the results. We also have some additional performance increase hotfixes in production, which we are planning to try out shortly on the North American realm Lightbringer. We will have another update in approximately an hour.

4:00 p.m. PST
All North American and Oceanic realms have now had their population caps increased. We are continuing to monitor realm stability, and plan to begin testing the increase on European realms soon. In addition, we’re making progress towards correcting an issue that would occasionally cause players to get stuck on flight paths when flying to their Garrison. Our next update will occur in roughly one hour.

3:00 p.m. PST
Our initial tests to increase realm capacity were successful, so we’ve continued to roll out our testing of increased population caps to additional North American and Oceanic realms. We’re also making steady progress to resolve the issues causing instance, world, and Garrison server crashes in Europe. We’ll provide another update approximately one hour from now.

2:10 p.m. PST
After carefully monitoring server performance for the last few hours, we are now testing raising realm capacity above normal population caps. We’re going to temporarily increase the population cap on a few realms in North America, and observe them closely. Our next update will be in approximately an hour.

1:00 p.m. PST
We are continuing to optimize servers and address additional performance issues. Realms appear stable with the increased population caps. We are monitoring server stability as Europe continues through peak play time and populations increase in the Americas. We’ll provide further updates in approximately one hour.

12:00 p.m. PST
As previously posted, both Europe and the Americas/Oceanic realms went into an off-peak maintenance to upgrade realm hardware, and implement a new Draenor-wide instancing tech to improve game performance. Both regions’ maintenances concluded successfully, and so far we’ve seen very positive results, allowing us to dramatically raise the realm population caps for all realms. We’re going to continue optimizing the in-game experience, focus on the new instancing tech, and hotfix gameplay issues as they come up.

We’re currently seeing a very high demand on the game and game services due to the exceptionally large number of people excited to play Warlords of Draenor. We’re focusing on a few specific issues, one of which is a group of realms in Europe that are seeing increased instance, world, and Garrison server crashes. That’s being addressed as an isolated issue and we’re investigating the cause to ensure it doesn’t occur elsewhere.

We’ll be looking into the possibility of Free Character Transfers for our highest population realms, but first we need to get the service to a place where we feel it’s also able to process a potentially large number of transfers while not adversely affecting service stability.

Our next steps are to continue working on the few performance issues we’re tracking in Europe, and continue maintaining and improving the level of service in the Americas and Oceania. We’ll provide another update in an hour.

11:00 a.m. PST
We’re working to mitigate some localized instance and Garrison server crashes in Europe. We’re still seeing what we would expect to see in the Americas/Oceanic region for high queues on very populace realms, and for Europe there are queues across the majority of realms during their peak play time. We’ll provide a more comprehensive update in an hour on where the service currently stands as a whole, and what else we’re working on.

10:00 a.m. PST
We’re continuing to monitor the realms post-maintenance. Realms are being maintained at their raised population caps, and while many realms no longer have queues, we do expect that high population realms will still see a wait to log in. We’ll continue to provide updates throughout the day.

9:00 a.m. PST
We’re continuing to monitor realms and track any individual issues as they occur. We’re still seeing some issues occurring now that Europe is in their peak playtime, but with greatly reduced frequency compared to before maintenance.

All realms are now set back up to their normal population caps. Queues being experienced now are due to demand beyond what the realms are normally capable of handling, and we’ll be looking into how to reduce them further.

8:02 a.m. PST
All Americas and Oceanic realms are live. We are continuing to monitor these realms for reports of any ongoing stability issues.

The EU website and forums issues are being investigated as are reports of "World Server Down" issues and Garrison accessibility.

Thank you for your continued patience and ongoing reports.

7:10 a.m. PST
All Americas and Oceanic realms are now live. We will continue to monitor these realms closely.

Thank you for your continued patience and ongoing reports.

7:00 a.m. PST
We are in the process of marking all Americas and Oceanic realms live and will continue to monitor for reports of any additional stability issues.

All EU realms are live and currently stable. We are continuing to monitor them for any additional reports stability issues.

6:00 a.m. PST
All Americas and Oceanic realms maintenance and internal testing continues as scheduled.

EU realm rolling restarts are in the process of being completed and we will continue to monitor reports for additional recurrences of realm stability issues.

Thank you for your continued patience. Our next update here will be in approximately 1 hour.

5:00 a.m. PST
All Americas and Oceanic realms are in maintenance and continue to progress as scheduled. We are working as quickly as possible to deploy hardware upgrades and code fixes that are intended to improve both access to the game and experience while playing.

Across our EU realms, we're monitoring reports of scattered stability issues and have been performing restarts to pick up hotfixes.

We continue to deploy hotfixes for specific gameplay issues through the night. These are often fixes for quests that are not working correctly or not completing, as well as unexpected behavior of various game elements.

Thank you for your continued patience. Our next update here will be in 1 hour, unless there is an urgent need.

3:00 a.m. PST
All Americas and Oceanic realms are now in maintenance. We are working as quickly as possible to deploy hardware upgrades and code fixes that are intended to improve both access to the game and experience while playing.

Across our EU realms, we're monitoring reports of scattered stability issues. We've seen further "world server down" issues, and are working to correct that.

We continue to deploy hotfixes for specific gameplay issues through the night. These are often fixes for quests that are not working correctly or not completing, as well as unexpected behavior of various game elements.

Thank you for your continued patience. Our next update here will be in 2-3 hours, unless there is an urgent need.

2:00 a.m. PST
Our EU realms have been up with maintenance completed, and players logged in and playing, for over an hour. We've gotten reports of some 'world server down' issues during that time, and we're looking into the situation.

We will begin maintenance on our Americas and Oceanic realms in one hour, at 3:00 a.m. PST.

Garrisons, Followers, and Outposts

• Lunar Fall Inn/Frostwall Tavern: Improved the rewards for completing Budd's Gambit, Go Fetch, Ogre Ancestry, and Sky Dancers.
• Stables Level 2: Resolved an issue where characters were not remaining mounted while interacting with herb nodes.
• Trading Post Level 2: Multiple items for Auctioning for Parts should no longer be dropping at the same time.

Quests

• A Collection of Coils: Increased the drop rates for Coil of Sturdy Rope.
• A Feast of Shadows: Increased the spawn rate for Face-Stealers.
• Bonus Objective: The Howling Crag: Increased the number and rate of Rylak Egg spawns.
• Core of Iron: Core of Iron should now only be found on Heroic difficulty Grimrail Depot.
• Icespine Stinger: Increased the number of Icespine Stinger spawns.
• In Need Of A Hero: Completion credit for the quest is no longer shared amongst party members. This was causing other party members to be placed into an incorrect phase.
• Legacy of the Apexis: Increased the drop rates for Apexis Core.
• Ogre Diplomacy: Increased the spawn rate for Ango'rosh ogres.
• Strike While the Iron Is Hot: Resolved a situation where the Activate Primal Device button doesn't go away after completing the quest.
• The Battle of Thunder Pass: Players joining a party that have already completed the quest should now be able to complete the quest and should no longer get stuck in an incorrect phase.
• The Eldest: Players joining a party that have already completed the quest should now be able to complete the quest and should no longer get stuck in an incorrect phase.
• The Master Siegesmith: Master Siegesmith Uratok now scales his health based on the number of players engaging him.
• The Traitor's True Name: Resolved an issue that could cause players to be unable to complete the quest.
• Wanted: Maa'run's Hoof should no longer incorrectly reward the exact same rings as Engorged Goren.

Creatures and NPCs

• Increased the spawn rates for creatures in the Shivering Trench area in Frostfire Ridge.
• Felwrought Annihilator is now immune to the Warlock's Enslave Demon ability.
• Mandragora now spawns more frequently and can be tapped by multiple players.
• Mor the Dominator can now be tapped by multiple players.
• Xanatos the Defiler will never be a slave and is now immune to the Warlock's Enslave Demon ability.
• Resolved an issue where Thaelin Darkanvil may not be visible as a quest giver to players that have rescued him.
• Resolved an issue where Warriors using Charge against some Grimfrost Lavaslingers could become stuck in the world geometry.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Dungeons
  
  • Increased the frequency of loot awards for Normal difficulty Auchindoun, Bloodmaul Slag Mines, Iron Docks, and Skyreach.
  • Heroic Dungeons should correctly have a daily lockout once more.
  • Auchindoun: Players should now be able to take a Soul Transporter to get back to Teron'gor if the entire party died after defeating him.

PvP

• Coliseum Champion's Spoils and Gleaming Ashmaul Strongbox should no longer incorrectly have a chance to contain Epic quality PvP weapons.
• Bonus Objective: Kill Warspear Priests no longer awards a Gleaming Ashmaul Strongbox.

Professions

• Characters with over 600 skill should no longer continue to find catch-up items for the respective profession.

Items

• Excavated Highmaul Thingamabob, Fungus-Infected Hydra Lung, Pulsating Brain of No'losh, and Thornmother Eye can now trigger its effect from non-healing spells as well.
• Resolved an issue causing the Mists of Pandaria Legendary Cloaks and Metagems to remain effective for level 100 characters.