The technical features of Blizzard games never cease to amaze.
Recently, players participating in the beta testing of the new World of Warcraft Midnight expansion began complaining about major technical issues. The game lagged heavily, could freeze for a while, there were delays in issuing quests, and characters sometimes disappeared.
Blizzard Entertainment tried restarting the server, but the problem soon returned:
....we restarted the server several times and made several changes. And while performance looked a little better for a while, it eventually dropped again. The difficulty is that it wasn't one problem, but a combination of factors causing server performance degradation and increased memory consumption on world servers. We fixed a few issues, then found a few more, and so on.
The developers of World of Warcraft Midnight continued to search for the root cause and, apparently, smarter fish are to blame — improved NPC behavior could, at times, cause a very, very heavy load on the servers:
We're still working on a solution, but we seem to have found a new problem. FISH! We've made a lot of improvements to NPC behavior, making their reactions to players and the environment more natural, rather than just "wandering" NPCs around the map. And in many places this works great, but in Midnight we have a lot of coastline, which means there are a lot of wild creatures like fish there. And that would probably be fine, but as soon as a certain number of players get close enough to the fish, this advanced NPC behavior kicks in for them, and... well... something smells fishy.
World of Warcraft
Ролевая игра
23 Nov 2004 г.
Источники:
Сайт Blizzaard
