Starting Tuesday, April 11 Blizzard Entertainment will apply a minor patch to World of Warcraft. Check out the official Announcement released today:
Tomorrow’s regularly scheduled maintenance will be extending by an additional two hours beginning at beginning at 3:00 AM PDT Tuesday, April 11. This will allow us to prepare and apply a minor bug fix patch. We anticipate the maintenance to conclude at the normally scheduled time of 11:00 AM PDT. To read more concerning the various methods used to update World of Warcraft, please follow the link below.
To provide better communication with our players, we would like to inform our community about the various methods used to update World of Warcraft. The following are the four major methods of updating the game:
Content patch - The content patch introduces major additions and/or changes to the game, whether in terms of functionality, content, economy, social interaction, or combat. For example, we recently opened up the dungeon Maraudon, as well as adding the priest spell Prayer of Fortitude as part of the same content patch. Content patches require a maintenance period of several hours and are accompanied by a download and patch notes.
Hotfix - A hotfix is a change made to the game deemed critical enough that it cannot be held off until a regular content patch. Hotfixes require only a server-side change with no download and can be implemented with no downtime, or a short restart of the realms. Because there is no download component to a hotfix, there are no downloadable patch notes. Instead, we will announce hotfix information through the forums, the in-game message of the day, and in the Server Alert window on the login screen.
Minor patch - A minor patch is identical to a hotfix, with the exception that a minor patch requires a download and will be accompanied by patch notes.
Localization patch - The game is currently translated into three languages with plans to introduce more. While not often, there are times when we must make changes to text within the game to accommodate the various languages, and this takes the form of a localization patch. Localization patches, when they occur, take place across all language versions of the game and are accompanied by a download and patch notes. Oftentimes, bug fixes will also be included with a localization patch to better utilize the downtime. These bug fixes will be documented in the patch notes as well.
We hope that this information provides more insight to our players regarding the update process, and in the future, we will use this guideline in order to keep our players informed on the World of Warcraft update process.
We will be taking advantage of the extended maintenance window to continue with our plans to increase game performance. Four realms, Doomhammer, Icecrown, Deathwing, and Kel'Thuzad will be migrated to the new World of Warcraft site beginning at 3:00 AM PDT, Tuesday, April 11. The migration could take up to 24 hours to complete. Players with active accounts who had characters on these 4 realms as of 12:01 PM Monday, April 10 will receive a 24 hour time extension. You can read more about our ongoing measures to address capacity-related performance issues:
As most of you are already aware, the realm-migration process was completed yesterday ahead of schedule. We will continue to monitor all realms and take additional measures to address the capacity-related performance issues we’ve been discussing.
One such measure will be to upgrade our authentication platform, which we’ll be eager to provide further details on as more information becomes available. We anticipate that this upgrade will help resolve a majority of the authentication issues that we’ve seen during prime time.
An issue related to yesterday’s realm migration that we also wanted to discuss here has to do with players’ Friend and Ignore lists having been reset. This is the result of an issue associated with the migration process itself that we will not be able to reverse. We sincerely regret that players on the four migrated realms will have to recreate their Friend and Ignore lists, and we will be sure to notify players in advance about this issue for future realm migrations.
Another measure we’re taking to further disperse our population and improve performance on existing realms is the opening of character transfers to new realms at our new World of Warcraft site, which we announced earlier today. We know that a number of players beyond those on the realms listed for Monday’s transfer period are also interested in transferring to new realms. We’ll provide further updates as new transfer opportunities arise, and we’ll continue to keep everyone informed on our ongoing procedures.
First off, we’d like to thank everyone who helped us test our new hardware on the public test realms over the last month. The testing allowed us to move forward ahead of schedule with the improvements outlined at the beginning of March. We were able to bring the new World of Warcraft site live more than a week early, which in turn allowed us to open 12 new realms over the last two weeks.
The next step in our ongoing efforts to increase game performance is to migrate a set of realms to the new site this Thursday, April 6, beginning at 12:01 AM PST. The migration could take up to 24 hours to complete, so we will be crediting players with active accounts who had characters on these realms as of 12:01 PM Monday, April 3. The realms that will be affected are listed below.
The goal with this realm migration is to further balance our player population between multiple World of Warcraft sites. Our estimates about the noticeable impact of this individual procedure are conservative, but it is nevertheless a necessary step that will then allow us to move forward with the subsequent portions of our overall plan.
Following the migration, we plan to next week offer character transfers from existing realms to fresh realms located at the new World of Warcraft site. These transfers will allow additional players on realms that had been experiencing intermittent performance issues to continue their character progress on the new hardware. This will in effect help us further disperse our population and continue improving performance on our most severely affected realms.
We thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter
