wow-performance
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Why so empty, Crystalsong?
Some actual new information from tonight's developer Twitter chat with Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street and J. Allen Brack? I'm as surprised as you are. When asked why the resplendent (and glowy) Crystalsong Forest is oddly barren of anything to do beyond sightsee (and, of course, the rare quest), we received some interesting info about game performance: Part of the problem is that it sits beneath Dalaran, which ended up being more of a resource hog than we had anticipated. We didn't want to draw too many more players to that zone. Initially the Crusaders' Coliseum was going to be there, which is why some of the quests send you there. We just worried too much about the performance hit. So what does this mean to the average WoW-player? That you can enjoy the peace and quiet of Crystalsong Forest for a long time to come, because additions to the zone just aren't on Blizzard's agenda. And it's probably for our own good -- we all know what a lagfest Dalaran can be, don't we? Now close your eyes and just imagine combining that with all of the players that come and go from the Crusader's Coliseum. If your thoughts on this imaginary scenario are anything other than "do not want," well, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Naxxramas optimization
Crygil posted an important announcement last night concerning the lag and associated performance issues in Naxxramas. Blizzard has made some recent optimizations to Naxx, and they want to know what all of our experiences are like in the instance this week. As such, they're asking everyone to post feedback in terms of performance in the thread over on the official forums.Now by performance I don't think they mean "My pocket Paladin can't tank." What they're looking for are detailed reports such as "When I was attempting to do the Heigan dance, my entire group lagged behind a good 5 to 10 seconds. We decided to go and raid Hogger after we wiped for six hours in a row." Or "The Ice Block appeared after Frost Breath when my guild was taking down Sapphiron because of the 30 second lag."Matt Rossi wrote a great piece yesterday on the need for designing the fights around latency. Hopefully this will become less of an issue as Blizzard works out their backend mechanics; and it appears this change is a major step forward.
