Warlords Launch Update – Friday 4 p.m., Maintenance Times 15 November

Thank you again to everyone for your patience while we continue to work around the clock to address performance issues.Last night we scheduled maintenance for Europe to implement server changes to help improve realm performance, and scheduled the same for the Americas/Oceanic realms today. With the maintenance in EU we experimented with raising population caps, and we’re continuing to make adjustments up and down to ensure a smoother game experience. Today we’re continuing to hotfix in-game issues, address any login and authentication issues occurring from the high number of players attempting to play, and make any changes and adjustments we can while the game is live. While these changes have made a marked improvement for the in-game experience, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

As most of you are aware, the demand on the game is extremely high right now, leading to increased queue times on many realms. We’re also seeing some login errors as a result. This is compounded by us needing to temporarily lower the population caps on all realms to help assist in realm stability issues due to a number of in-game factors that are putting greater than normal strain on the game servers. For those in-game now we’re seeing fairly stable gameplay, but with some continued issues when phasing into the Garrison. Even with lowered population caps we’re not seeing performance where it needs to be.

We’ve been working toward much larger and longer term service improvements, which we’ll be implementing with off-peak maintenance tonight. A large portion of this extended maintenance will be upgrades to server hardware to help cope with the increased demand we’re seeing. We’re optimistic that hardware upgrades as well as some additional fixes and changes will resolve the in-game issues primarily centered around accessing Garrisons. We’re also continuing to test and implement new performance improvements whenever and wherever possible.

We appreciate your continued patience, and we’ll be providing updates here as work progresses. If you use Twitter, we recommend following @BlizzardCS and @Warcraft for updates as well.

[Update] 1:40 p.m. PSTWe’ve scheduled extended maintenance tomorrow for the Americas/Oceanic at 3:00 a.m. PST, and Europe at 5:00 a.m. CET. Further details on our service progress thus far, as well as what this maintenance will entail, is forthcoming.