instance-servers
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Instance servers busted, Lord Ahune to blame
In between the weather knocking out my power here in Milwaukee, WI, I managed to sit in the dungeon queues long enough to discover that ... they're broken! Thanks to Lord Ahune, instance servers are overall stressed beyond capacity despite Blizzard's constant upgrades over the years. Vrakthris It looks like overall it is due to the influx of everyone running the Fire Festival encounter, plus arenas, and normal dungeons. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2712201373 Our Realm Technicians are looking into it and making what adjustments they can to improve connectivity and performance. If more information becomes available we'll be certain to pass it along. source We have no ETA on when the situation will be resolved, but the most recent post in the above-linked thread was a mere 5 minutes ago as of this writing, so it continues to be an ongoing issue.
Breakfast Topic: The trouble with instance servers
My server rarely encounters the Door Boss, but many of you have to deal with the above error on a constant basis. The error originated as a fix for high population realms that had issues with instance lag and crashes. Rather than have you frustrated with problems while in the dungeon, Blizzard decided to put a virtual bouncer at the "door" to keep the load down on the instance servers. While I do think that this was a good idea on Blizzard's part, I think that they erred greatly by not putting a queue at the "entrance" so that you can do other things while you wait -- much like the way Battlegrounds are handled.My friend Joe has to deal with the problem with on his realm and therefore made sure to ask his designated Blizzard representative when he attended the Laguna Art Museum benefit dinner. Producer Carlos Guerrero replied that they needed to upgrade the hardware on the affected realms in order to allow more instances to be launched at the same time. Presumably, that is what the extremely extended downtime was for on Tuesday. So my question to you is, did it work? Are you meeting the Door Boss with the same regularity, or are you able to enter instances more frequently now that your realm has been upgraded?
Instance throttling explained
If you do a lot of instances, you're probably familiar with the error message "Additional instances could not be launched. Please, try again later," and the accompanying dance of spamming the instance portal until it lets you in. For me it seems to happen most at the Azjol-Nerub portal, but that's probably just coincidence. Anyway, although I've been seeing this error pretty much since WotLK launched, Wryxian just made a post today in the European forums explaining what it's all about. Basically, it's an attempt to fix instance performance; if too many instances are running at the same time on the instance server, lag and possible crashes result (and I'm sure we've all experienced that), so there's a limit imposed on how many instances can be up at any given time.
Fixing instance server errors
You may have seen this same error what9000 is getting every time he tries to enter an instance: he gets bounced out of the portal and "Additional Instances Can't be Launched" pops up on the screen. Just in case you've never quite heard exactly how the game works, the World of Warcraft is actually a series of servers, and as you travel across it, you contact more than one system of computers. Your realm is one group of servers, but within that group, there are many different computers sending information to and from yours -- when you're in Azeroth, you're talking to one server, when you go out to Outland, you visit another, and in Northrend you're on yet another. And there are even servers that track non-location information: how much money you have, what you're wearing, and so on.Likewise, instances have their own system of servers, which is why you can sometimes be in an instance when the world server "outside" will go down, and if you leave that instance you'll get disconnected. And Instance servers can be overloaded as well. This error message is likely a way for Blizzard to keep from crashing the instance servers -- if too many instances of a dungeon have already been created, new players trying to get in are not allowed.
