[Updated 9:00AM PDT, October 24]

Since the release of the latest patch, Echoes of Doom, we have gone through a series of optimizations in order to increase overall game performance. We’ve seen steady improvements and a flurry of activity and excitement during the Hallow’s End event and the latest rumblings of zombie attacks. It’s been an exciting time for us as we draw closer to the release of our second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

The impact of latency, inaccessible instances, and general frustrations experienced by the community continue to be closely monitored. Many have asked whether we have any sort of compensation planned for those who have experienced these frustrations; the answer is yes, compensation will be offered.

While we‘re not ready to announce the specifics on compensation plans, we wanted to at least make the community aware that we are continuing to evaluate the current state of the game. We’ll be able to give out more specifics once we feel we have ironed out any continuing issues.

We would like to thank you for your continued patience as we work to make your game experience a great one.


[Updated 7:48PM PDT, October 21]

Following last night’s maintenance, we’ve gained much needed improvements through our tuning process. We’ve seen overall improvements in stability with the realms, but a bug was discovered among the server changes that negatively affected realm performance. We are currently updating the servers with a fix that addresses this bug, and we’ll also be issuing rolling restarts during off peak hours tonight to implement additional improvements. We are very much going through an iterative process to achieve better performance. Thus far, we have seen better results across a wide number of realms, and we hope players will experience much better game play as the process continues.

[Posted 8:00PM PDT, October 20]

It has been nearly a week since we launched the biggest content patch for World of Warcraft. Since releasing Echoes of Doom, players have completed over 300 million achievements (we double checked), respecced talents countless times, and the mohawk is now the most popular haircut in Azeroth (if not the most popular, then certainly the most striking). Players are revisiting old dungeons, forming raids on city leaders, and can be found roaming the far corners of almost every zone in World of Warcraft.

We are truly excited about the new patch, and we hope players share our enthusiasm. But with this success, we’ve also seen issues with realm performance that are negatively impacting players’ experiences. Specifically, the large number of new features in Echoes of Doom, combined with the many returning and new players who are playing World of Warcraft, is resulting in issues such as latency and difficulty entering instances, to name a few.

Since the patch was released, we have continued to make improvements to the game and optimize our systems to address the issues that players are seeing. We’ll be implementing further optimizations with this week’s scheduled maintenance, and we hope those changes will go a long way toward addressing many of the issues that players are experiencing. The focus for our team is to review and implement improvements on a daily basis, and this process will continue for the foreseeable future.

Our goal is to allow players to get back to enjoying the great content in Echoes of Doom, and we will provide another update after players have had a chance to participate in the realms following the weekly maintenance. We greatly appreciate your patience, and we’ll see you in Azeroth, Outland, and soon in Northrend.

[ Post edited by Nethaera ]