Welcome!

[Wolfenstein]

Hello everyone, we have some exciting news to share today!

First of all, welcome to our brand new forum! It’s been years since we’ve had one and with the constantly growing community we felt this is the right moment for it to make a comeback. While Discord is quite a handy tool for quick updates and chit-chat, it doesn’t really lend itself to proper, elaborate discussions or longer announcements. Intricate conversations, responses to particular questions and topics, and our position towards certain matters tended to get lost among the thousands of messages being posted daily, which proved to be quite frustrating to both us and the players.

With the forum, we want to move most of the official communication there, as well as make it easier for everyone to express their opinions and offer suggestions in a way that lets us properly evaluate them and respond whenever possible or suitable. To be clear, we do not intend to stop using Discord - we simply want to delegate things that don’t really fit there too well to the forum and use both platforms in tandem to get the best of both worlds.

On the TBC front - as mentioned in the previous dev update, we set out to improve the server performance. Over the last month we spent a lot of time measuring performance, trying out various adjustments and debating over the potential solutions. You may have noticed some days when it would get more laggy than usual, or strange bugs would appear - that was just us testing different changes. In the end, we settled for a relatively low-risk, yet quite efficient core solution to the problem with very minimal impact on the gameplay. After some tinkering, we’re happy to finally announce that we’ve finished our work on that system and managed to slice the world update time by more than half. Currently, server performance with 11000 players online should be significantly smoother than it was with 8000 players when we began working on it. Naturally, there’s only so many players you can cram into Outland, Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms before it becomes harder and harder to process everything smoothly so if the community keeps growing the issue will eventually return, but for now we still have some buffer and further (less and more drastic) measures to implement if need be.

Last but not least - with the performance issues finally out of the way, we are now looking into addressing some faction balance concerns. Our plan is to introduce additional perks encouraging players to pick/switch to Alliance. We are currently looking at the following:

• Shorter Hearthstone Cooldown
• Shorter Racial Swap Cooldown
• No Durability Loss
• No Resurrection Sickness
• Caverns of Time teleport option before 2.4
• Increased Reputation Gain
• Increased Honor Gain
• Unlocked all flight paths

Ideally we’d want to add enough perks to make it enticing to choose Alliance for players participating in all kinds of content, from leveling and questing to endgame, offering enough of an advantage to make switching worthwhile but not to the point of making it too oppressive. None of the above mentioned perks are set in stone yet, and we would very much like to hear your feedback on this topic, so please tell us what you think on this very forum!

[Wolfenstein]

You can discuss the content of this news here.