Blizzard streamlines the route to the EU beta

Blizzard has rebuilt the network route to the European beta of World of Warcraft: Forever. Community Manager Kaivax announced that on the European forum on 21 September. The work was done over the previous 24 hours.

What went wrong

In the first couple of days of the beta, testers in this region ran into routing issues, writes Kaivax. Those issues hit the ability to move, to interact with the world and in some cases to stay connected at all. Blizzard put its engineers on the case immediately.

As many Beta testers in this region know, in the first couple of days of the WoW: Forever Beta, we experienced routing issues that impacted testers’ ability to move, interact with the world, and in some cases, to stay connected.

What has been done

“I’m happy to report that, over the last 24 hours, we’ve developed and implemented solutions to streamline routing to the Beta for the EU region”, writes Kaivax. Blizzard believes the fixes cover everything that was within its own control.

Many European testers had been running a VPN to bring their latency down, which is no long-term solution.

What Blizzard cannot fix

Some testers may still see routing issues that lie outside Blizzard’s reach, writes Kaivax. He names three causes: a connection problem at the local internet provider, something upstream of that provider that temporarily sends traffic along a less direct path, and firewall software on the player’s own machine that slows the connection down or blocks it outright.

Blizzard keeps watching the situation closely. Finding and fixing performance issues is a key reason to run a public test like this one, writes Kaivax. Whether the region gets more capacity before the launch, he does not say.

The beta so far

The beta opened on 17 September and runs to 21 October. It had a hard first day everywhere, not only in Europe: Senior Game Producer Tom Ellis described the disconnects, the queues and the slow looting in a long post of his own.