World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

We’re increasing the drop rate of Rank 4 Essences for eligible players as they open more Rustbolt Resistance, Ankoan/Unshackled, Rajani, and Uldum Accord Paragon caches. This change will also be retroactive and will count the Paragon caches that were opened in the past.

We’re aiming to implement this change in the next day or two, we’ll be sure to update the thread when the changes are live.

Is it now 1% up from 0.1%? Need more details…

How exactly retroactive part work? Will I get rewarded with essence on login if I opened some paragon caches weeks/months ago?

The Paragon caches opened in the past will retroactively count towards increasing the Rank 4 Essence drop rate of your future caches. The odds will eventually reach 100%.

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!

Over the last few months, we’ve been accelerating our efforts to deal with certain kinds of cheating that players often call “bots” – the use of automation to play the game in exploitative ways. As you know, bots are often operated by people who exploit the game in order to make money selling in-game resources and leveling services to other players. Botting is explicitly against the Blizzard End User License Agreement, and we take strong actions against those who cheat in World of Warcraft.

We’ve recently seen some WoW Classic players ask “How can we help Blizzard get rid of bots?” and the answer remains the same: please continue to report them. And thank you for doing so.

Right-click reporting a player for cheating is the best way you can participate in our speedily removing bot accounts. Your right-click reports go straight to our team of agents who investigate these issues, and who can then determine if further action is warranted.

Thank you to everyone who has right-click reported potential bots so far; we really appreciate you taking the time to help us make the game nicer and fairer. Please continue to send us your reports as much as possible, and we’ll continue to enforce the rules as swiftly as we can.