A number of inquiries have come in about the lag issues on some of the servers, so we want to take some time to provide more in-depth information for you. Some of you might be surprised to learn that the lag you’re experiencing is an expected and necessary part of the open beta test. Contrary to what some of you might believe, the open beta test is intended as a massive stress test, and not just a free demo of the game prior to launch.
Having hundreds of thousands of testers playing the game at this time lets us analyze how well our server infrastructure -- made up of the best, most up-to-date hardware available -- can handle extremely large server populations. In fact, the open beta test is allowing us to simulate having an even greater number of testers spread across even more servers than we currently have up. In terms of concurrency, we’re already seeing servers with twice as much population as we had during the closed beta test, and our total overall concurrency, across all servers, is already rivaling that of the most popular MMORPGs currently available. Keep in mind, also, that this population is distributed across a relatively small number of servers -- again, for the exact purpose of stress testing them.
In general, lag issues are caused when thousands of players congregate in one or two zones on a server. When this happens, the normal communication that comes from the server -- which includes information about every NPC, monster, player, item, etc. in the area -- increases to the point where the flow of data can get backed up.
For those of you who are concerned about server stability and possible loss of character-related information, take heart knowing that the lag you experience when this backup happens is not at all related to stability; it’s more of an issue with how quickly the data is handled. That is, with an excess of communication from the servers, the data remains stable, it just has to wait its turn in line to be processed. Running a massive open beta test like this allows us to steadily optimize how the data is processed.
With half a million people having signed up and been accepted into the open beta test, we have the unique opportunity of being able to fine tune our code prior to release in a way that most other MMORPGs have not. These code optimizations are done server side and do not require players to patch. As more and more testers finish their beta-client installations and start logging on, we’ll be able to do even more analysis and optimization prior to release. While this process brings about a challenge for those of you facing lag issues, it ultimately helps us maintain our schedule of analyzing and optimizing our code for all of our servers, including the ones that have yet to be brought online.
We are looking forward to having hundreds of thousands of players enter the world of Azeroth on November 23, and we‘re grateful that you all have the interest and the patience to help us do this last, sometimes challenging, bit of testing. Your assistance with this will truly help us ensure that World of Warcraft will run as smoothly as possible at launch.
