Frostmourne season 3 was our most successful yet, in both popularity and stability. After season 1 launch crashed due to a faulty gamemaster command and season 2 launch crashed due to unexpectedly reaching our item guid pool allocator limit, we have finally broken the curse as season 3 launched with perfect realm stability, only being restarted three days later for updates. Unfortunately, as experienced in previous launches, the first few minutes were plagued by network lag as we once again exceeded our available bandwidth capacity. We indirectly benefited from previous launch instability due to the delay of players logging back in, reducing the overall peak bandwidth usage. Because of the stability of this launch the spike was higher and lasted longer than ever before until the network was able to catch up.

Our goal for a realm launch is to ensure a smooth and stable experience, but also to give as many players as possible a fair and equal chance at obtaining realm firsts, because of this we do not believe in limiting the initial wave of players. While we have made great improvements in this area by utilizing clever batching and compression to achieve better than original bandwidth usage, we are ultimately limited by the client’s own outdated and inefficient network protocol.

In 2021 we completed the major necessary milestones to support server-side instancing of entire world zones, in which we applied this then-new technology to Dalaran, significantly reducing world processing time by increasing parallelization due to updating Dalaran independently of the rest of Northrend map. While instancing Dalaran was possible at the time because of its unique position and limited script/npc usage we knew further work would be required to instance other world zones, however due to the already significant performance gain we felt continued work was no longer a priority and thus shifted development focus on to other tasks. It was not until just prior to the launch of Frostmourne season 3 we restarted development due to the expected sheer amount of players questing and leveling in the open world causing substantially increased server loads in comparison to our other realms. To support this we had to rework parts of several subsystems that were previously storing data globally which is obviously not ideal as we are looking to increase parallelization.

While we could’ve simply added locking around those datasets for synchronization the latency and sometimes unpredictable nature of locks are not inline with our overall performance goals so the decision was made to do it right and move the required data objects to the map’s local context, ensuring thread safety and no possible lock contention. After the completion of these changes we began by testing the effects of instancing Wintergrasp on Icecrown with very good results as seen in the images below.

As seen, instancing Wintergrasp completely eliminated the server average latency spikes that were occurring from heavy battles due to several hundred players PvPing in a small area. After the successful instanced Wintergrasp test, we also applied instancing to both Sholazar Basin and Zul'Drak, further reducing overall server load.

Another performance issue we faced with Frostmourne Season 3 was auction house search response delays caused by our threading model at the time being unable to scale with the significantly higher item counts due to the cross-faction auction house feature that is new to Season 3. Previously, we had a fixed total of two search threads, one for alliance and one for horde, unfortunately additional threads could not be created due to implementation limitations. While this worked great for years with all our current realms where the auction house is separated, it was not able to keep up with a combined auction house. The time complexity of running up to 8 individual category sorts on a 150,000+ item list grew to the point where the search queue would begin to backlog during peak hours and usage resulting in being either completely unable to search for items or waiting very long periods of time between searches which is obviously very unacceptable. Our answer was to completely rewrite the threading model with scalability in mind, allowing us to now dynamically choose the amount of worker threads needed with no limitations.

Additionally, we also moved the very cpu intensive search process to our realm server, freeing up precious cpu utilization from the worldservers and reducing context switches.

In 2018 the entire arena and battleground queue systems were completely rewritten from the ground up in order to support the then-upcoming crossrealm technology, since then numerous additions have been made in an effort to improve the quality of the matchmaking process, for example with the battleground queue system support was later added for multiple dynamic gear brackets, premades, and crossfaction (mercenary mode). Unfortunately as a result of these further additions being added as an afterthought rather than apart of the originally designed system they were not implemented as well as they should’ve been. When the decision was made to expand support for mercenary mode to horde we realized it would be best to do a major overhaul to the system, removing the technical debt that had been accumulated over the years.

A benefit of the initial rewrite was many dependencies were removed, allowing us to make the system fairly modular, and thus easily testable. Below is an example of how we’re able to use that to our advantage to quickly test many different queue combinations to cover every edge case.

 

The battleground queue system overhaul featuring a refreshed matchmaking process and various other improvements and optimizations was finished in January and has been live since the start of February. We encourage all players, regardless of level or faction, to enable mercenary mode for significantly faster queue times.

After last year's somewhat laggy initial hour of Frostmourne (As described in the devlog from June 1st 2020), we learned a lot and made various changes to help address those issues. As a result, this year was much, much better but it still did not go as well as we would’ve liked. In this devlog I will explain what went wrong in the first few minutes of Frostmourne S2 release and why.

The realm launched at April 15th at 16:00:

There was a huge bandwidth spike initially, similar to what we experienced last year, causing noticeable lag in the first 3-4 minutes. This quickly went down however as soon as players spread out a little bit. The real issue was the main worldserver crashing after about 60 seconds into the launch.

To explain what happened we first have to dive into how items are created and what happens internally.

When an item is created, a new GUID (unique number) is assigned to that item. This number is used to save, load and manipulate this item, both on the server and on the client. These numbers have to be globally unique, having two items with the same GUID would be a large problem.

Items are created on the worldserver, but since players are able to connect to multiple worldservers the generation of new GUIDs has to come from the realmserver, which is the central point all relevant worldservers connect to. When a worldservers first starts up, it requests a pool of unused item GUIDs from the realmserver, new items will be assigned a GUID from this pool. When the pool is almost depleted a new GUID pool is requested. Normally this is a very fast process, within milliseconds. However, during the first minute of Frostmourne, the CPU and bandwidth of the servers were very saturated, causing the request of a new item GUID pool to be delayed, this is the first factor leading to the crash.

The second factor was the obvious MASSIVE influx of fresh character logins. Due to character creation being handled on our realmserver, when a new character is created there are no items yet. All the starting items are being created at the first log-in. Every fresh character starts with about 5-6 items, depending on the class/race. This means thousands of items were being created at the same point in time causing the worldserver to run out of available item GUIDs and thus deliberately crashing itself in order to ensure data integrity.

We did not expect the number of items to be created within a few server ticks to exceed the available item guid pool size.

 - What will we do next year to prevent this from happening?
We will temporarily allocate a significantly larger item GUID pool that is reserved by the worldservers.

 - Why didn’t this happen last year?
After Frostmourne S1 launched we moved all character list functionality to our realmserver as it is much better suited for that data. Prior to those changes when a new character was created the starting items were also created instantly, because of this the item guid usage was much more spread out thus causing us to not exceed the available pool of item GUIDs.

 - Has this ever happened outside of this Frostmourne launch?
Once, on Blackrock we have a ‘pick a spec’ NPC which will instantly set you up with the gear you need to play PvP at level 80, thus creating many items at once. At one time we had someone abuse this NPC to create thousands of items at once, causing the Blackrock worldserver to run out of item GUIDs. As a protective measure we have now throttled the NPC.
 

It’s safe to say Dalaran can be considered the heart of WoTLK, however because of how popular yet small the city is it poses a rather large technical challenge. Due to how the worldserver is threaded the slowest map will always be the limiting factor in determining how fast we can update the world. To no one’s surprise, that slowest map has always been Northrend. Mostly thanks to Dalaran and the many players inside it, Northrend takes roughly on about three times as long to update compared to any other map, slowing down the rest of the world.

Map 530: Full update - took 43ms
Map 1: Full update - took 47ms
Map 0: Full update - took 53ms
Map 571: Full update - took 172ms

Our goal is to provide players with the most stable and responsive gameplay as possible. Over the years we have made thousands of changes aimed specifically at improving stability and performance, however we were always unhappy with how much of an impact Dalaran had. We have various measures in place to help address this, including dynamically adjusting Northrend and Dalaran’s visibility distances based on server load, aggressively kicking idling players, as well as separately phasing upper and lower Dalaran. While we’ve had some success with these changes, we always knew we could do better.

Last year we began experimenting with an idea, what if we could “instance” zones in a map and update them in parallel? Problem was, the server was never even remotely designed for such a task. A significant amount of code and various systems would have to be rewritten to safely support this. We knew in the long run it would be worth it, so we began.

Starting early March we’ve reworked enough to allow us to finally instance Dalaran. Now, upon entering Dalaran players are seamlessly transferred to a new map which allows us to update Dalaran independently of the rest of Northrend, making better use of parallelization and increasing cpu utilization. The difference was incredible, we were able to reduce the world update time by nearly half* compared to just a month prior. Soon we will extend this technology to other busy zones, including Wintergrasp. Also, as an indirect result of the various system reworks required, we were able to improve thread safety across the codebase, improving realm stability.

*In late February we made several unrelated system configuration improvements that reduced overall latency as well.

The performancelogs now look like this:

Map 530: Full update - took 40ms
Map 0: Full update - took 41ms
Map 1: Full update - took 44ms
Map 571 InstancedZoneId 4395: Full update - took 45ms
Map 571: Full update - took 70ms

As you can see, updating Dalaran still takes longer than Outland, Azeroth and Kalimdor, but it is now done in a seperate thread, limiting its impact.

A few days ago we adjusted the way battlegrounds are bracketed at level 80. Previously we had two brackets, the 'low gear' and' high gear' brackets as we call them. However, we noticed there was still a major imbalance even within these brackets. Players with absolute starter gear, were playing with or against players with decent but not end-game gear, full season 6 PvP gear for example. Obviously this is not ideal and we wanted to do something about that.

We reworked the matching system to have more 'gear brackets'. It will now dynamically scale depending on queue times and thus the amount of players in-game. But we also added safeguards to make sure players from Frostmourne will (under acceptable queue time circumstances) never meet players with gear not available yet on the realm. That means Frostmourne players will now meet more players from other realms, especially when better gear is involved. But the matches on all realms will be much more balanced overall.

As always, we are keeping a close eye on the new matchmaking system and are constantly finetuning the system. We want to see everyone having a fighting chance in battlegrounds, no matter how good or bad your character is geared.

Ever since we started work on Frostmourne, we had the idea of creating an automated system which progresses the realm through the patches. In the past we just had a separate 'database' with info about vendors, opened raids, loot tables for any specific WoTLK patch. This way of having separate databases works. But it is a huge headache to manage and having to keep every single one of those databases updated.

While patch 3.0 was running on Frostmourne, we started to think this idea through. We wanted to merge all the databases and gate the vendors, instances, gear, etc. behind swappable 'events'. This was huge task but if successful it would mean we would only have one single database for all patches. Thus, we started the tedious task of marking down every difference between patches. And after many hours of we had our first database ready, with only the 3.0 event. After extended testing we put this database live on Frostmourne and nobody even noticed a thing, which is exactly what we wanted. After that we would start working on 3.1, 3.2, and of course 3.3. As of recently this new database is now also active on Lordaeron and Icecrown, but the 3.3 event is started instead.

Now we have all the patches combined, we can look back and be happy about this new system we created. As a side-effect this would also allow us to hot swap between patches on the fly, without even restarting the realm. We noticed this caused quite some confusion when we went from patch 3.0 to 3.1 and more recently from 3.1 to 3.2.

Not everything went as smooth as we wished, we made a couple of mistakes during the first cycle of Frostmourne. The good thing however is that these will not happen anymore during future realm cycles, we will list a couple of them below:

- During patch 3.0 the midsummer event started on Frostmourne, the drops from this event were way beyond the 3.0 tier. So we had to quickly reverted the drops to the previous state, which caused it to drop level 70 items instead. We also had to lock the already dropped items, players were allowed to keep them in their inventory but would not be able to use them until 3.2.

- Near the end of 3.1, suddenly vendors disappeared and all instances opened up. This was caused by 3.1 event prematurely ending, it was a mistake on our part as we had typo'd the date for it to end. We also had an instance blacklist instead of a whitelist per patch, which meant when no patch was active everything would be open. This is no longer the case.

- At the start of 3.2 we had a couple of issues with epic gems. The loot tables for certain items were wrongly set to 3.3 only, causing epic gems to not drop from certain bags and prospecting actions. We corrected this as soon as we noticed.

We are very confident in this system and it will make future Frostmourne cycles smoother, easier to handle and less bug prone.

Recently we fixed a Report which stated that level 70 Arena should be available in the WoTLK expansion. After confirming this we thought to ourselves: Why not open up the arena for all twink brackets? And so we did.

We have opened Rated Arena for the following levels:
19 - 29 - 39 - 49 - 59 - 60 - 69 - 70 - 79

There will not be any end-season rewards for these brackets. 
Leveling up will also wipe your Arena points and Arena teams.

In addition, we will be looking into implementing our first Beta for twinking on Blackrock. The idea is currently the following:

• Players will be able to downgrade themselves to level 19 after deleting all their gear and items.
• Level cap will be 19
• Starter gear will be mostly common items with maybe one or two uncommon ones
• Better gear will cost honor
• Heirlooms will be available through arena points on your level 80 character
• Enchants cost honor
• Professions can be leveled by getting HK’s in battlegrounds.

We are currently in the process of internal testing. All of this is subject to change. Feedback can be given here.

Edit: The Twinking system on Blackrock went live. You can find the Twink NPC's in Dalaran Sewers on the Blackrock realm.

Now that it has been a little over a month since we released our newest Wrath of the Lich King realm, Frostmourne, we would like to share a technical challenge we faced on launch day and how we’ve learned from it and the solutions we came up with.

Having launched several realms in the past with the same codebase we felt very confident. With previous launches, we would slowly increase the cap to ensure the world service remains stable. However, with Frostmourne we decided to do things differently by already having the realm service online before launch, allowing the full 12,000 player cap to sit at the character list furiously spamming 'Enter World' waiting for the server to be opened. Doing this allowed as many players a fair and equal start as possible, but we ran into one unexpected issue that is explained by this devlog.

At 13:00 Frostmourne was launched, and we immediately knew we had a problem. We had far exceeded our 1Gbps bandwidth capacity on our Realmserver due to the overwhelming amount of players in the starting zones. While the Frostmourne realm and world services were performing great with low latency, the bandwidth cap created an illusion of server performance issues.

Historically for performance reasons we have always been very relaxed on our compression of object update opcodes, using the fastest compression level (Z_BEST_SPEED 1) and a very high minimum threshold (8192 bytes). This is because compression is slow and at the time was handled in our map threads which meant if overused it had a severe effect on our overall world latency.

During the first few hours we had to play a very careful game of manually balancing bandwidth and performance by constantly adjusting our compression values. Not enough compression and we would go over our network cap, too much compression and we would begin to lag the realm.

First, we knew we had to move compression handling from map threads to network threads. Doing this would allow us to enable aggressive compression all while actually improving the performance of the world service. This required a complete rework of how we send packets.

Second, we quickly noticed that one of our biggest bandwidth consumers was movement opcodes, which accounted for up to 50% of our total outbound traffic. Players in busy areas could receive thousands of movement opcodes per second. We came up with a solution which uses the previously unimplemented SMSG_COMPRESSED_MOVES opcode. This opcode can combine an infinite number of small packets into a single big packet, we call it “Movement Batching”. This new system will batch together every movement packet in the same server tick into one packet, significantly reducing overhead. Initially only active in major cities, it was eventually expanded to include the entire world (only in busy areas, excluding raids, battlegrounds and arenas).

April 15: Frostmourne launched. Analysis and work on solutions began.
April 23: Initial version of reworked packet sending and moved compression handling to network threads was committed for testing.
April 24: Movement batching and compression was committed for testing, also we replaced our default zlib compression library with a more performance orientated fork from cloudflare.
April 27: Changes went live.

Cherry picked logfile entries of how much bandwidth we are saving:

SMSG_COMPRESSED_UPDATE_OBJECT: 472876 bytes uncompressed, 134385 bytes compressed.
SMSG_COMPRESSED_MOVES: 307635 bytes uncompressed, 16132 bytes compressed. (about 1500 packets combined into one)

Conclusion: Due to the changes and improvements made, we saw a reduction of approximately 33% in bandwidth, as well as improving overall server performance. We feel much more confident that bandwidth will no longer be an issue in future server launches. Obviously we could always upgrade our bandwidth cap if necessary, but that would have required downtime. Optimizing your code is always the better option.

Our new realm Frostmourne is part of our crossrealm system. There are a few changes we made to ensure things remain fair though.

Level 80 Players from Frostmourne are automatically placed in the 'lowgear' battleground bracket. Players from Icecrown and Lordaeron can also play in this bracket if they qualify. There are certain limitations on gear to keep an even playing field. Any player which has progressed past the current Frostmourne status, will NOT be placed in this bracket. This includes gear in bags, bank, and so on. These limitations will be changed as Frostmourne progresses through the expansion.

Players in the range from 10-79 will be playing with the other realms as usual.

Frostmourne arena remains seperate right now.

This dev log will be a bit more technical than our other devlogs:

Our team has been working on improving the networking code, specifically in the movement area. We have already done this in the past for spells by implementing a 'Spell Queue' system.

The changes to movement greatly reduce stuttering for medium to high latency players. Here is a comparison between the old behavior and new behavior. Both are recorded with artificial 200ms latency on both clients:

As you can see, when a slowing effect is casted on our target the movement warps and jumps around every time his speed changes. This is because the new speed is applied instantly for observers, which is incorrect. The 'lagging' player isn’t aware of his new speed yet and continues to move around with his old speed until he finally receives the message from the server that he has been slowed. The client on the left side however has already received the message from the server that the target has been slowed and has adjusted the targets speed accordingly.

This causes a desync between the two clients as they assume different speeds for the player, which in turn causes server correction and warping.

The new behavior takes into account the latency of the target and waits until it informs the observers of the slowing effect:

The most obvious difference is that the slow does not take effect the moment the aura is applied for observers (left client). The speed change is delayed shorty until the right-side client has been informed of the slow. In reality, this doesn’t change anything. It just provides better timing for observing clients which no longer have to be server corrected and greatly reduces warping.

BUT WARMANE, I HAVE A GOOD LATENCY. THIS DOESNT AFFECT ME AT ALL!

- These changes affect everyone, they are improvements for observers, not for the laggy players themselves. Every time you play with or against a player with higher than average latency, the new code is in effect and it will be buttery smooth.

These changes went live on our WoTLK server today.

The warmane developers are currently working on a few things:

- Holiday events. Our script team is currently working on some special events which we have planned. They will show something never seen before in this game and will surely give a lot of laughs and cries. More info will follow soon on our forums.

- Replay system. While we aren't yet sure if this is going to hit our live realms, we have a working internal version of a Replay system ported over from the old Blackrock core. It is however not easy to make it crossrealm compatible thus we cannot make promises yet.

- External instance hosting. Moving instances away from the main Worldservers, it will further increase realm stability and decrease the potential lagging during peak times (especially on icecrown).

- Focus on stability continues, we are now consistently seeing 7 day uptimes across all our services. We are restarting the realms once a week for maintainance and updates.

This are just a small part of what the team is working on. We hope to show you some results on our realms soon!

We have been improving our anticheat lately, while no specifics will be given. We wish to inform players that we will no longer allow edits of maps. We have been logging terrain edits for quite a while and have seen a number of players having these altered, some giving an unfair advantage. Starting this week we will move these checks from logging only to kicking so everyone can get rid of these illicit client modifications.

There are currently multiple projects running on which the Warmane team is working. First of all we are looking into refining the leveling experience on MoP, working up from the lower level zones. It’s a big task which has to be done separately for our MoP realm as the 'old world' is completely different from the other expansions we offer.

We are also putting focus on our realm stability. Over time a few coding errors have sneaked in which can cause realm instability. It is very hard to find these, but we have had a 7-day uptime on Icecrown a few days ago. We are still looking to improve this. The situation we want to create is one where only the gamemaster or development team restarts the server when its needed for maintenance, which is usually once per week.

Another small thing to note is that we have recently updated our algorithm which assembles the "lower gear" battleground bracket. We were starting to see a lot of twinks which basically destroys the situation we are trying to create. The algorithm will now separate players better and twinking will now be harder to do so. We will continue to monitor the situation and make more changes if need be.

Lastly, we have upped our game against botting, the chances of being caught are greatly increased due to new detection methods, If you get caught with any kind of bot you will get a permanent ban.

The Warmane team has been putting quite some time into improving our low-level zones. Every character will have to go through this content one way or another, thus it must be as perfect as can be. We reworked scripts and abilities to over thousands of mobs so far and we will continue until we have touched every single mob in-game. These improvements will be across the board for our TBC and WoTLK realms since they both share the same creatures in these zones.

Frostwolf will also be getting a bunch of mid-level zone updates as we are fully porting Outland and Northrend in addition to many low level instances across all continents.

We have also improved our tracking of quests which will better help us understand which quests a have a low completion and/or high abandonment rate. We will use this data to find out which quests have potential issues.

On a more technical note, we are reworking the back-end of player movement. Currently, the implementation isn't very latency friendly. When this is done, there will be much less warping/jitter going on when observing high latency players.

For the programmers amongst us, we are implementing propper handling of 'movement ACKs'.

We have recently held a Poll on Mercenary mode. Currently, the results are 64% in favor, 36% against. So the developers and staff of Warmane have tried to come up with a compromise which will hopefully please both sides.

What we are currently working on is having mercenary mode only enabled for players on Blackrock. Since the realm is already fairly faction free, we made it so its players can be placed in the opposite faction while in a Battleground. Players will be morphed into one of the other faction races during the Battleground. Even though this change only affects Blackrock players, it will also ensure fast queues for Icecrown and Lordaeron while not touching their lore and rivalry with their own server's enemy faction.

We hope to have this system online in the first half of April.

Over the past couple of days we have been improving the experience for non-English players using non-English clients.

If you are one of these players you have surely noticed that spell, item, achievement and more links are now automatically translated to whichever language client you are using. For now, this feature is only on our WoTLK realms untill we feel confident enough to port it to our other expansions. We have also fixed an issue where Russian and Asian clients would have to edit their config files in order to change realms. This was caused because their client did not allow picking an Engish realm at Realm selection.

If there is more issues which only occur on non-English clients. Please let us know in the bug tracker.

Update: This feature is now ported to our TBC realm aswell.

We are currently finishing up Blackrocks final changes, it will also join the WoTLK battlegroup in the next couple of days. When this is complete, we will also be making a few additional changes to Crossrealm:

- The Arena queue system will prioritize matches against players from your own realm. Only after a set amount of time, it should start looking for opponents elsewhere. (This part went live on the 13th of February)

- Battlegrounds will also get an update which will separate battlegrounds based on player gear. But only when enough players are in the queue. (This part went live on the 11th of February)

We hope to have this all up and running in about two weeks.

We have recently, after months of internal testing brought our implementation of crossrealm live. For now it only links together battlegrounds. We are unsure when or if we will link arenas too. But next arena season seems to be a likely candidate. Before that time a lot has to be done though. We will have to change Blackrock's core to our main WoTLK core. We hope to keep most of the special functionality which is on Blackrock. Sadly, the replay system will not be one of them.

We will also look into the functionality of separating lower and higher geared players in battlegrounds. We have heard your feedback but as the system might have significant effects on battleground queues, we are unable to determine whether this will become a feature for sure.

As we venture forth with cross-realm, we have taken a huge step towards completion. Arenas and battlegrounds are now being played on an external World server. This has several major benefits, first of all is that Arena and Battleground games played while Icecrown is fully packed will feel much smoother. Second is that it will cause less strain on Icecrown itself. We will soon attempt to link Lordaeron and Icecrown together.

When all this is completed, we will look into moving Blackrock into the same system. We also hope to have instances and raids running on the external World server. While we do not have any plans for cross-realm instances, the benefits of having them not running on our main World server are huge.

Sunwell trash is valuable, so valuable in fact we had a good second look at the droprates, exploits, events and a lot of other things. We have fixed several exploits which make farming Sunwell trash easier then it should be. Obviously, we will continue to look out for such exploits and fix them whenever we encounter them. We have also released the last few bosses of The Sunwell Plateau last week and so far we have seen no major issues. We want to thank the involved guilds for actively testing the instance on the PTR. Next to Sunwell, we are fixing up NPC's around the world, the current focus is on waypoints and on their walking behavior. One detail for example is that you will see patrolling city guards with weapons in their hands now amongst many other things.

We are fully reworking the Death Knight starting zone. As this is written the final changes are being made and very soon it will all be tested internally. After this we will focus our WOTLK efforts towards vanilla zones and quests. While most of it is already in good shape, there are a few things that could get improved and we rely heavily on the bug tracker and player reports to find these.

We've has a pretty good launch of Isle of Quel'danas and apart from a few oversights, we are happy with how the release went. The stages of Isle are being progressed and we are fully focused on getting the Sunwell Plateau ready. The bosses will be released gated as they were back in the day. Meaning we will release the first three bosses at first, then the next few, and so forth. Currently, a few guilds are testing the raid on our PTR and feedback is being processed and issues are being fixed.

Effort has been put into porting content from TBC realm to WoTLK. We are able to finetune these raids and instances much better than before because players are actively going through the content on our Outland realm. We try to keep the two cores as closely connected as possible, so fixes that work on one core also work on the other. Furthermore, we have just launched the Midsummer festival event and are monitoring the realm for issues. The plan is to have a changelog up somewhere in the following weeks.

We are finishing up our work on Zul'Aman. Our current plan is to release on the 30th as will be shown on our front page any minute now. After this we will start our work on Sunwell Plateau, Isle of Quel'Danas and Magisters Terrace. We have also been fixing a few issues which popped up in Gruul's Lair which made the fight harder then it should have been.

For the Zul'Aman release, we will remove lower tier raid attunements to help newer players get up to speed faster. This includes lowering the reputation requirement for heroics to honored instead of revered.

We recently fixed the Surprise attack quest and are continuing to work on getting other important quests and events up and running such as Operation Landfall and the Warlock Green Flame questline. Our plan is to smoothen the leveling experience on Frostwolf as well by fixing up quests around the world and improving the overall leveling experience.

Effort is being put into reworking several areas in Northrend to include all the small events and details, as a result, several quests and events have been completely rewritten. However, it could be possible that there are a few new issues introduced due to the reworking. We are actively testing and fixing any issues that are found. Should you encounter an issue with a quest or event in Northrend, please report it on our bug tracker.

For Lordaeron, we are planning to open The Ruby Sanctum soon. We hope to open it at the same time as Zul'Aman is opened on Outland, more information will come soon.

Work on Zul'Aman continues as we are testing the instance with selected guilds from the Outland realm. We hope to iron out the last issues with these full-scale tests. We have also opened up Onyxia's Lair and are looking towards downgrading Naxxramas to its pre-WoTLK state. Our work continues as normal as we hunt down bugs on the bug tracker and ones we find during our internal testing. Have a look at the recently released changelog for more info.

TBC has had a lot of correction to battleground's honor. One of many fixes is for example in AV where controlling mines and towers should grant honor to the owning faction at the end of a battleground or WSG not granting honor to the losing team when WSG is the holiday battleground. Work is also progressing on getting Zul'Aman and we expect to have internal raid testing ready within a week. As usual there have also been lots of spell fixes and creature fixes all around the world.

We are currently working on reworking the battleground queue and related systems from the ground up. It is a big task, but one that is needed to progress further with our cross-realm project. Furthermore we are cleaning up lots of scripts and creature behavior in Northrend and its instances.

The work on our anti-cheat is also progressing and we are continuing the battle for fair play.

On Mists of Pandaria we have been focusing on getting several events ready for when it is time for them to be released. These events include Noblegarden, Children's Week and several smaller fixes to Love is in The Air which we found during its runtime. We have also been looking through the bugtracker for spell fixes and fixing them accordingly.

We are working on hard on getting Zul'Aman ready for testing, the groundwork for the instance is mostly done and the focus is now on fixing found bugs and fine tuning mechanics. A lot of attention has also gone into re-creating the Love is in the Air event. This event was totally reworked in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion so we needed to start over pretty much from scratch.
Furthermore we are working hard on getting many smaller world events and NPCs to be completely accurate. Tuning out the fine little details.

The preparations for crossrealm are progressing further. We have recently deployed stage 2 of the project. Players will now no longer connect to a worldserver, but to a realmserver instead. The realmserver can be seen as a sort of middleman between the player and the world and it has taken over a lot of tasks from the worldserver. 
Work has also gone into some remaining Icecrown Citadel issues with assistance of various public guilds.
We have also reworked our anti cheat system. We will not comment on this any further apart from: Cheaters beware.

Work has gone into improving the back end of our Mist of Pandaria Core in order to make it more stable. This will also result in less work when moving fixes from our other realms to Mists of Pandaria.
In addition we are working on getting the Greenstone Village Scenario ready for release and we will communicate it when it is.
Work on completing the next chapter of the Black Prince quest chain is in progress and players can expect to continue their journey soon.

A lot of our focus lately has still been on Black Temple, as the release of it comes closer and closer. With only a few days left til release, we are now polishing any remaining smaller issues. We have already started to work on Zul'Aman as well and will continue to do so after the release of Black Temple, in addition to correcting any issues found. Apart from that, starting zones up to level 25, as well as outland zones and dungeons have received special attention in the last few weeks with lots of quest and AI issues resolved. Our next focus is the release of Zul'Aman as well as Sunwell Plateau and Isle of Quel'Danas preparations.

The implementation of crossrealm battlegrounds on Wrath of the Lich King is moving forward rapidly, with stage 1 out of 3 already completed and stage 2, the realmserver, tested at the moment. We are looking to deploy the realmserver to the live realms next week. Smaller issues may be expected as this change applies to hundreds of files and tens of thousands of codelines. However, we will moniitor the realms and resolve any issues as soon as possible. After stage 2, our focus will be the development of the battleground server itself, which is expected to take approximately 1-2 months. Afterwards the crossrealm battleground project will be considered complete.

In addition to that, we have also worked on Icecrown, Dragonblight and Sholazar Basin zone fixes and dungeon fixes, as well as burning crusade content. Apart from that we also continued to resolve combat and spell issues for classes.

After the release of Lion's Landing we temporarily shifted focus to cleaning up several pending dungeon and raid issues, as well as finalizing the holiday events. Afterwards we started work on a new scenario called Domination Point. At the same time we also continued to resolve spell and combat issues, as well as pet battle abilities. This month we will continue to work on scenarios and do general cleanups.

In addition to a lot of fixes coming over from Burning Crusade in regards to older content, we have also worked on fixing several general issues related to Looking for Group, items and immunities. Apart from that, a big focus last month were the preparations for Christmas events. Further changes included fixes to spells and several dungeons. Next month we are looking to begin with the implementation of crossrealms on our Wrath of the Lich King codebase and will keep you updated on the progress.

A big focus currently on the Burning Crusade is Black Temple. Since we are looking to release Black Temple soon, we have already started guild testing and polishing the raid as much as possible. In addition to that, we continued to work through zones and related AI and quest issues. Another focus this month were the preparations for the Christmas holiday events starting in two weeks. Quite a bit of planning and work has gone into it and we are looking forward to see your feedback about it.

Our crossrealm project has now successfully completed phase 2 and is already live on our realms, but not apparent to players. We have moved all necessary systems from the worldserver to the realmserver and are now planning our final phase of the project, the battleground server itself. Once that is done, crossrealm battlegrounds will be released to our Burniing Crusade realms, and we will start to implement the same on our Wrath of the Lich King realms.

Recently we have released two major improvements to Mists of Pandaria. One such feature is a system called mob fanning, which makes sure that NPCs properly arrange around a target if multiple NPCs attack the same target. The second was a change that significantly improved handling and movement of pets. Tomorrow we are planning to release Lion's Landing, together with a lot of spell and combat fixes. In addition to general holiday event preparations we have continued to improve movement, pathfinding and other general issues within dungeons and raids. Apart from that, we are currently working on finalizing our flexible raids system and hope to release it soon.

We have continued our zone fixing spree and managed to resolve creature AI and behaviour in pretty much all zones considering almost all reports on our bugtracker. Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, Nagrand, Shadowmoon Valley, Netherstorm, the Barrens, Desolace, Ashenvale, Wetlands, the Hinterlands and many more received additional fixes and updates. We are now at a point where we will shift focus to other areas and consider AI polished - for the moment. Black Temple, while still being quite far away from a release, has been prepared for testing on our PTR and we expect first guild tests to happen soon. Hallow's End also received quite a bit of attention last month. We are now working on preparing for future world events, general class and spell fixes, as well as further fixes for the Black Temple release and usual dungeon and raid fixes.

We are especially proud to announce that we are currently working on implementing crossrealm battlegrounds for our Burning Crusade realms (and Wrath of the Lich King afterwards). While this is a highly complex project and will definitely take some more time to develop, we have already made a first step towards it that is currently live on both our realms, but most players probably did not notice. We have successfully implemented realmservers, which can be considered a bridge between the client and underlying worldservers. Both of our Burning Crusade realms already run on this implementation. The next steps will be the creation of a battleground-only worldserver and establish communication with normal worldservers. We will keep you updated on the progress.

Icecrown and Lordaeron have received a lot of attention this month with quite a high amount of fixes towards raids, especially Icecrown Citadel, as well as new focus on Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, starting with Drak'Tharon Keep and Utgarde Keep. We will continue to go through each dungeon to rework and polish it as we see fit. Spells and PvP issues have also been a focus this month, including several arena and battleground related issues. In addition to that, we have introduced several new anticheat protection measures to further prevent any abuse or unfair behaviour.

A lot of focus recently has been put on general zone and creature fixes, as you can see in our latest changelog featuring over 2,000 fixes with a lot of them related to general creature AI and behaviour. Additionally, after the release of two new scenarios, namely Crypt of the Forgotten Kings and Dagger in the Dark, we are already preparing the next scenario for our live realm. Lion's Landing is currently undergoing final testing and will be released soon. In the meantime we have opened Shadowfang Keep after a rework. We are looking to keep our continuous scenario release cycle going for the foreseeable future. Currently released content will also keep receiving new polish updates, and more fixes for zones are incoming as well. The Brawler's Guild release has been monitored carefully and we have pushed out fixes for issues as soon as they have been reported. A Brawler's Guild competitive leaderboard will be available on our website shortly.

We are glad to announce that we are now consistently reaching up to 7 days uptime on both of our burning crusade realms, only stopped by the weekly update. Thanks to our hard work in the background - often unnoticeable - we are now able to provide a truely undisturbed gameplay experience. Our main focus this month was the rework of vanilla zones, one by one, of which 13 zones have been completed already. These zones include Stonetalon Mountains, Ashenvale, Tanaris, Felwood, Thousand Needles and others. At the same time we have also prepared for upcoming events such as Hallow's End. Hyjal and other raids have also been polished further while already starting preparations for Black Temple. Additionally we are constantly working on improving general, spell and combat systems, as usual.

In preparation for our competitive PvE tournament held last month, we went ahead and re-evaluated all of Icecrown Citadel. Thanks to that, we managed to correct lots of smaller, but important details and bring its quality to the next level. Trial of the Crusader as well as Ulduar have also undergone the same process and received a fresh polish. Additionally, Brewfest has been prepared and lots of spells and combat issues fixed. Currently we are working on implementing latest fixes for pre-wotlk areas and further cleanups in raids and the spell system.

With the full implementation of pathfinding on Frostwolf we paved the way to the highly anticipated release of the Brawler's Guild this month. A lot of work went into scripting it and we are very happy to finally be able to present it to our players. We are also working on providing statistics for fights in the armory on our website soon. Several new scenarios such as the Crypt of the Forgotten Kings and Lion's Landing are also pending release after passing the final testing stage. We expect them to be released next week. On top of that, we are preparing a full rework of the vehicle system to resolve several issues and in general improve its overall handling.

After the successful release of Siege of Orgrimmar: Heroic and Looking for Raid, the opening of the Unga Ingoo scenario and reworks of several bosses and a huge amount of npcs and quests, we have continued to progress on upcoming releases. On Wednesday we expect to release Alterac Valley, as well as the first part of the legendary cloak questline called Chapter I: Trial of the Black Prince, which has been fully implemented.  Next week we also expect to release the fully scripted Brawler's Guild, with the only issue remaining being a client crash. Shortly after we are planning to release the full flexible raid system. As usual, we will continue to fix general, spell and combat related issues.

We are now close to finish updating all the burning crusade and vanilla related fixes to Lordaeron and Icecrown and have started to switch focus over time to our next step; A complete review and rework of current Northrend zones, quests and npcs. After completing this last step, we will be able to offer an unseen and authentic experience of all the content available in Wrath of the Lich King. To kick that off we have started on two fronts: On the one hand with a full rework of Borean Tundra, including all the tiny details, on the other hand we have initiated a quick-fix round on all highly voted quest and npc issues on the bugtracker. Make sure to continue voting for issues you deem important so that we can resolve them fast. Apart from that, we have continued to fix remaining spell and combat issues, as well as implemented improvements to anti-cheat and other general systems.

After gathering lots of feedback from players, we have decided to make difficulty adjustments to parts Lordaeron's old and new raid content over the following 1-2 weeks. We are still in the process of preparing a collective changelog for Wrath of the Lich King and it is expected to contain at least 2.000 fixes. Please be patient as this is a time-intensive task but rest assured that we are updating all our realms every week with new fixes, as usual.

Part of our focus in the last few weeks has been to prepare Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep: The Eye for their full release. We have fully rescripted Tier 5 to pre-nerf state to allow players to relive the challenging environment it provided at the early stages of the expansion launch. After lots of internal testing, revisions and raid testing we are now fully confident that the state of these raids meets highest quality requirements. Therefore we are happy to announce that both, Serpentshrine Cavern and and Tempest Keep: The Eye will be released on July 12, 2017 at 13:00 server time.

Apart from raid fixes and cleanups to already opened dungeons and raids, we have also implemented all quests and events related to the Midsummer Festival. Additionally, we continued to resolve lots of spell and general, as well as quest and npc issues as visible in our old and upcoming changelogs.

Our next point of attention is now to prepare Hyjal and Black Temple. Most interal development and testing has already been completed and we will soon start to gather guilds again for raid testing. While the release is not yet in sight, we will start early to be able to fully polish everything in time.

A month full of a massive amount of changes precedes this devlog with more to come until the official release of the realm. Since last month we were able to produce 2,400 changes on the burning crusade repository alone, which makes it approximately 80 fixes a day. This astonishing progress is clearly visible on our bugtracker and a great display of how the community can help us shape and improve the quality of our project.

We have made great progress on all fronts in the past month. We managed to prepare Tier 4 and Tier 5 raids and bring them to a new level of quality, while already laying the foundation for Tier 6, Zul'Aman and Sunwell Plateau. More Tier 5 testing will be performed shortly and we are calling on guilds to contact our community managers if they are willing to help out. Most quest and zone issues have been resolved by now, with less and less new issues being found. Spells and combat fixes have been focused on heavily as seen in our changelogs. At the moment our focus is to prepare for release by cleaning up remaining bugtracker issues and implement specific features that will help us monitor and balance faction ratios if deemed necessary, as well as rechecking dynamic respawn systems which will be in place for the initial launch period. We are prepared to host many thousands of players with excellent performance, but also acknowledge the importance of having a smooth release and reasonable player amounts in starter zones. This means we will likely start with a lower population cap of a few thousand and increase as players begin to leave the starting zones, similar to how it was done on Lordaeron. We are very much looking forward to the server release on May 20th and will continue to resolve any issues that come our way.

We have continued to make a lot of progress on old content raids and dungeons, ranging from early vanilla dungeons to end game burning crusade raids. While most of our progress has been on PvE, we have also kept improving combat and spell mechanics in general as well as implementing specific, unique features such as the leeway mechanics and spell batch delay. Creature movement has also seen a big polish with new systems the likes of creature fanning being introduced and fully implemented. This is currently undergoing testing and will be available shortly. We will continue to provide new content updates and combat fixes, as well as implement new features as usual.

Lots of new releases are coming up for our Mists of Pandaria realm this month. Frostwolf will receive a wave of releases starting with several pending old content raids such as Ulduar, Bastion of Twilight and Dragon Soul. We have also prepared Siege of Orgrimmar Looking for Raid to be fully opened, and are doing final changes to Siege of Orgrimmar Heroic - especially Garrosh Hellscream - to release it as soon as possible as well. On the PvP side we are testing the revamped Isle of Conquest and Alterac Valley battlegrounds at the moment and are looking forward to pushing them out as well. We will also open the doors to the fully implemented Brawler's Guild for fearless adventurers towards the end of the month. New scenarios are also in the works with no specific release dates, but will be opened on the go as usual.

After a month of work we are now preparing to fully release Tol'Barad and all related features. This includes a full rework of the battlefield system and queue packets. We have also fully implemented blizzlike leeway mechanics for an improved combat experience. We will continue to provide new updates and features over the next few months, as usual.

It all started 9 months ago. An idea was born, an idea to shape yet another legacy adventure. Initially it was only a thought. A thought of "what if..?", a thought of nostalgia that sparked the series of events that led us to this day. Many of us had fond memories of past times, memories of friendship, hard work and a feeling of achievement. What if, we could spark this flame of nostalgia once more? What if, we could bring quality and stability to a shaken community? What if, we could create yet another legacy?

Back when we started to look into our options, we always had the same priorities in mind; Stability, expandability and compatibility. It did not take long for us to realize that there was only one way for us to create a truly epic experience. In that moment, we knew that Outland would only live up to our standards if its foundation was based it on the highest quality core there is; Our own Wrath of the Lich King core. Tens of thousands of changes over the course of two years have shaped this core to what it represents now; A true standard of quality. If we wanted to achieve the same quality on Outland, there was no other way.

And so we began, at first with only a very limited team, backporting our Wrath of the Lich King core to Burning Crusade. We separated the project into four different stages from the beginning; Packets and data structures, system changes, mechanics and finally scripting. Initially lots of packets had to be changed, many systems had to be reworked or ripped out completely and data structures adjusted, until we could finally do our first actual gameplay on a Burning Crusade client about two months after the project had started. This was our first milestone, and surely enough we started making fast progress on new pet systems, movement changes and client crashes, just to name a few. We reached stage 3, mechanics, around December. This was also when we slowly started to increase our team size and ressources. Much more mechanics than initially expected have changed from Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King, some in minor ways, some majorly. We have put a lot of effort into going through all the patch notes and comparing to retail videos of that time, basically recreating the true Burning Crusade experience one by one. Slowly but surely we reached stage 4 at the beginning of 2017. Work intensity increased gradually, with its peak last month. Within the last month, we were able to produce over 2,000 fixes purely on Burning Crusade. This clearly shows how passionate and excited the whole team is about the release.

We are now at a point where we are waiting for the PTR announced here, to blow through any issue reports we will receive. It is important to note that while we have done our best to prepare for the PTR, we do not see it as a completely finished product. The whole point of this PTR is to fix any remaining issues with the help of player feedback. Do not be disencouraged if you find an issue, we are very confident that we will be able to resolve any issues reported in very short amount of time. We look forward to shaping Outland the same way we shaped our Wrath of the Lich King realms, as close to perfection as possible. 

Thanks to the work done on our new Burning Crusade project "Outland" we were able to fix lots of issues in vanilla and outland zones, dungeons and raids for Wrath of the Lich King as well. From a full Karazhan, Gruul's Lair and Magtheridon rework, to a complete overhaul of dungeons and outland zones, almost everything we worked on for Outland has or will be applied to our Wrath of the Lich King realms as well. Due to both cores sharing the same framework and underlying structures we will easily be able to work on both expansions at the same time without neglecting any. Apart from thousands of fixes in that area, we have also continued to resolve Wrath of the Lich King specific spell and combat issues, as well as further improvements to performance and stability. Icecrown and Lordaeron both reached over 7 days uptime recently with 12,000 players on Icecrown every single day. This is a major achievement in stability and performance terms and brings to light all the background changes we have been making over the past year. We are looking forward to further optimize and improve our realms to deliver the highest quality out there.

Mists of Pandaria has received several new releases over the last 2 months, including further old content releases from Cataclysm zones such as Bastion of Twilight, Dragon Soul and Firelands. Apart from that, we have put a lot of work into several new features and releases. Siege of Orgrimmar has received a lot of attention with the Looking for Raid version already completed and almost all of its heroic modes finished. Internal testing on heroic modes will commence this month and we are hoping to release it soon. Additionally, we have put a lot of attention on the Brawler's Guild and managed to script almost all bosses as well as the underlying systems already. We expect to be able to release it shortly. Finally we have fully implemented pathfinding in all zones and instances. We are looking to resolve one more critical login issue related to it before releasing it. A few more scenarios are also being worked on as we speak and are expected to hit live this month.

Over the past 2 months we have updated over 300 fixes to Cataclysm. With our main focus being on spell and combat reports, we managed to resolve 150 issues in that area. At the same time, we have worked on general creature and loot issues in all of Azeroth. At the moment we are almost out of confirmed spells and combat issues, and thus are focusing on other areas.

In the past month we have put heavy focus on spell issues on Cataclysm. Thanks to this, we were able to resolve almost 100 spell issues in less than a month. Several important PvE related issues have also been fixed in the process. On top of that, lots of changes had to be implemented for our self-made Christmas events, which were also fully released on Cataclysm.

Similar to Mists of Pandaria, we have also started a review process for all lower level content and managed to almost completely resolve all remaining issues in vanilla and tbc raids and dungeons. Soon we will also start to revisit quests and general zone issues. However, we have also continued to polish Icecrown Citadel and Trial of the Crusader based on new feedback and reports. Additionally, our self-made Christmas events have taken some time to perfect and implement. Other than that, we have mostly been focusing on underlying core changes and the usual spell and combat fixes.

Lots of work has also gone into the preparations for the Wrath of the Lich King PvE tournament held for both, Lordaeron and Icecrown, this weekend. We are very excited to see how players will react to it and look forward to an exciting weekend.

The past months we have been working diligently on finalizing the scripts for Garrosh Hellscream and the Paragons of the Klaxxi. Today we are pleased to announce that both bosses will be released tomorrow, Wednesday. This will complete our raid releases and conclude the Siege of Orgrimmar raid. We are proud of the end result of our work and look forward to see how players will tackle the final two bosses in Mists of Pandaria. Battle pets and the Celestial Tournament have also been a big focus of ours and have been a bigger challenge than anticipated. However, we believe that we have polished it to a more than acceptable state now and are planning to release it shortly.

In the meantime we have also worked on several other important projects. Scholomance and Stormstout Brewery have received a total rework close to perfection. At the same time we have continued to fix an enormous amount of spell, combat and general npc and behaviour issues, totalling up to over 1.500 of these fixes in less than 2 months. While we continued to implement low level content such as Trial of the Crusader, Ruby Sanctum, Obsidian Sanctum, Ulduar and the Eye of Eternity, Winter Veil as well as Lunar Festival have also been prepared and fully implemented. We are now working on Cataclysm content to be implemented in Mists of Pandaria. Another focus will be the implementation of new scenarios, as well as general issues.

A lot of work has been put into Icecrown Citadel this month and we are glad to say that we have reached an almost perfect state of the raid. Along with the full implementation of the unique raid difficulty swap, we are proud to say that we have definitely created the most blizzlike experience. Apart from that, we have fully scripted three world events including Pilgrim's Bounty, Hallow's End and the Day of the Dead. Our Looking For Group system has also seen some more fixes and changes.

Apart from that, we have put some effort into reworking and polishing lower level content, starting with vanilla and burning crusade instances and raids. We also continued our work on spells and combat systems and thanks to that, we have reached a point where mostly minor issues remain. Holiday season is approaching and we have prepared several surprises for our players to get cozy with and enjoy the azerothian winter.

Last month has been steady, with constant progress on spell fixes and new fixes to zones and quests based on community feedback. Apart from that, we have also implemented the Headless Horseman event as well as the Day of the Dead event for players to enjoy. Tol'Barad has also been fully scripted, including graveyards, siege engines, world states, capture points and more. However, the battlefield queue to make Tol'Barad accessible is currently in progress and therefore, Tol'Barad has not been released yet. We will continue to work on spells and quest issues, as well as finish up Tol'Barad's queue system to be able to release it.

Prior to the release of the Celestial Tournament, battle pet functionality and trainer AI had to be perfected. Therefore we have been working on resolving all remaining battle pet issues and implementing all the necessary AI in the past few weeks to be able to release the Celestial Tournament in a fully completable state. Apart from that, we have continued to fix up all remaining issues in already released dungeons and raids, as well as continued our efforts on scripting Garrosh Hellscream and the Paragons of the Klaxxi.

We have also fully released the Tiller's Farm this month and wish you all happy planting! One more constant focus was low level dungeons and raids. We managed to implement a batch of eight new low level raids, including Magtheridon's Lair, Onyxia's Lair, Mount Hyjal, Gruul's Lair, Karazhan, Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern and Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. We are planning to continue the implementation of the remaining low level content and afterwards start to progress further on scenario scripting.

Lots of updates and releases have been deployed to Lordaeron in the past weeks, including major raid releases such as Trial of the Crusader and Onyxia's Lair, as well as new season gear and epic gem vendors. We are monitoring the progress of the top raiding guilds on Trial of the Grand Crusader encounters closely, and will continue to tweak them as necessary. At the same time we have started to prepare the announced balance changes for older content and are making good progress on that task.

Other than that, we have continued to polish Icecrown Citadel and Ulduar, as well as Northrend zones. Additionally we have been testing and fixing all issues we found related to upcoming world events, starting with Hallow's End. We have also been working hard on a PvE ladder, listing all relevant PvE bosses, their kill times and lots of other information about each fight on our website. This exciting new feature should be available on our website next week, more information will follow.

Similar to Mists of Pandaria, reputation quests and hubs have been of high priority last month. We were able to clean up all major issues before the reputation rate decrease and released the patch on time. We can also say that, after going through several pages of issues - 150+ reports - we are proud to announce that we fully scripted Hyjal and implement all quests and events. All related fixes will go live in a patch next week. Afterwards we will start on a new Cataclysm zone and continue to work on spells and combat issues as usual.

In the past month we have put a lot of focus on the full implementation challenge modes, which also included a complete rework of how achievements are handled. We expect to be able to release challenge modes on next Monday, the 17th of October. This update will also include a full release of Terrace of the Endless Springs heroic and raidfinder, which has been fully scripted. Apart from that, we also worked a lot on reputation related quest chains and hubs, to prepare for the rate reduction. However, there are still reputation issues which made us delay the reputation rate decrease on Frostwolf only.

We are also planning to fully release Black Temple, Icecrown Citadel, Naxxramas and several other instances on Wednesday, 19th of October and continuously release more old content. The Paragons of the Klaxxi and Garrosh Hellscream had to be paused temporarily for reputation fixes, but are now also being prepared for their release. A final release date will be announced shortly, after latest tests.

With the release of Isle of Thunder last month, we have now completed our Isle-release cycle. Of all Isles, the Isle of Thunder was definitely the most work-intense, but we were glad that the hard work paid off. Community feedback about it has been great right after launch, with close to no issues to hotfix, which is a major accomplishment with a release of this magnitude. After this release, we have taken a step back to re-evaluate current plans and decided to clean up already released raids, starting with Terrace of the Endless Springs. All bosses have been completely re-scripted and re-released. In addition to that, we have almost finished the heroic mode for the raid, and are planning to release it shortly. Despite the Garrosh Hellscream encounter being almost finished for Siege of Orgrimmar, the Klaxxi fight has taken up more time than expected to complete. However, we are now close to releasing the Klaxxi encounter, followed shortly after by the final boss in Siege of Orgrimmar; Garrosh Hellscream. We will also open the remaining wings for LFR at this point, concluding the Siege of Orgrimmar release cycle, with the exception of heroic modes to come.

Apart from that, we have also made good progress on the Celestial Tournament involving pet battles. Obtaining the required data for it has proven difficulty, but we managed to retrieve most of what we need. In addition to that, we have fixed lots of pet battle abilities and functionality. On the topic of low level raids and instances, we have prepared several of them already, and will release them as soon as they have passed our internal testing. The first release will cover a mix of 5-10 dungeons and raids, including the Black Temple. After that, the next badge of low level content will contain (amongst others) the Tempest Keep, Icecrown Citadel and Ulduar. We expect to be fully done with the low level content release cycle next month.

As announced previously, we have put a lot of focus on Mount Hyjal in the past few weeks, which resulted in more than 100 fixes to the zone alone, and we do not plan to stop until it is fully scripted. Last month we have also resolved all known issues on Dragon Soul, as well as several other raid issues across the board. On top of that, we have also fixed over 60 spell and combat issues in a matter of a few weeks. We are planning to continue fixing spells in this accelerated rate and hope for the community to support us with updated reports and feedback on the bugtracker. A changelog containing all fixes in the past month(s) will be released shortly.

In the past month we have gathered a lot of feedback on the Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Champion instances, as well as the Argent Tournament. Thanks to that, we managed to release the Argent Tournament on Lordaeron less than a week ago, and are preparing for Trial of the Crusader and Champion to be released on the 21st of September. New vendors and patch 3.2 related changes will be applied during the update as well. This includes the release of Relentless PvP gear and the reset of PvP currency. Arena teams will be preserved.

Apart from that, we have been working hard on fully finishing Northrend's outdoor zones. Starting with Icecrown which is now considered complete, we have also began work on Storm Peaks and Sholazar Basin and are approximately half-way done.

After approximately two weeks of development we have now successfully released the Battle for Undercity questline including all pre-quests and events. We have also fixed most high priority quest issues and will continue to work through Wrath of the Lich King zones now to get them all to a high level of perfection. At the same time we have also been working on spell and general issues, as well as further improvements to our Anti-cheat system.

Ulduar progression on Lordaeron has now reached an acceptable state for us to start our internal Trial of the Champion test realm, which will be held in a closed environment. Previous public test realms have proven to be not effective enough to meet our standards, which is why we will open the test realm for selected groups and times only, to be able to properly monitor and supervise the tests. These tests will be focused on polishing small details and properly tuning the content for Lordaeron. Further information will be made public in a later announcement.

After the release of Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria and Thok in Siege of Orgrimmar, we are now focusing on the last three bosses of the raid. Siegecrafter Blackfuse and Garrosh Hellscream are already undergoing development and internal testing, leaving only Paragons of the Klaxxi to be scripted. Based on the progress, we expect to have the last three bosses of Siege of Orgrimmar ready for release within the next two weeks. Additionally we are preparing final touches to our Isle of Thunder work and expect to release it next week. Another scenario, A Little Patience, will also be released next week after a much more work intensive development period than initially expected. With the release of full Siege of Orgrimmar we will also release full raidfinder for it and start to work on heroic modes.

We also have a lot of general releases in store; The structure for the Brawler's Guild has already been prepared and we are now working on scripting the bosses before applying it to live. Pathfinding and improved Line of Sight detection is currently being worked on, which will make all creatures and pets follow paths properly as well as improve Line of Sight in several maps, such as Stormstout Brewery. Another new system we prepared is the Flexible Raid system, with only tweaks to a few values remaining.

The community also voiced their opinions about the need for more lower level content. Since this was on our list for a long time already anyway, we will now continue to prepare the core and base systems for the port of low level content from our WotLK core. Same as on Cataclysm, this preparation phase is expected to take approximately two weeks. Afterwards we will move on to porting the scripts and database changes, which can be split in releases over a few weeks. Different to the port we did on Cataclysm, we will split this port into several updates to avoid a massive update with high potential of issues. The first, for players not noticeable changes will be applied next week.

In the past month we have performed several updates to resolve any remaining issues after our big old content overhaul. Afterwards we have continued to work on high priority spell and combat issues. Today we have updated Cataclysm with another batch of fixes, including a major spell fix for Ignite and several other important fixes. Starting next we are preparing to review and improve end game content to bring its quality to a new level, with an increased focus on Dragon Soul. Afterwards we will shift focus to Cataclysm zones again, beginning with Mount Hyjal.

A lot of releases are inbound in July and we will start it off next Wednesday already with the release of two more Siege of Orgrimmar encounters, Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria and Thok the Bloodthirsty. We have also reviewed previously released scenarios to resolve several stability issues and are preparing to reopen A Brewing Storm, as well as release Arena of Annihilation and A Little Patience next week. We have mostly finished Isle of Thunder, including connected scenarios and are currently testing and finalizing it on our test realm. We are looking to release it shortly after Siege of Orgrimmar's 3rd Wing, to avoid having too many releases in one update and cause unnecessary stability issues.

Apart from the usual spell and general fixes, we have been reworking the transport system, especially for Siege of Orgrimmar and are close to releasing it on live. Additionally we have put some work into the Brawlers Guild and are about to start internal tests shortly. Before the release of the last wing in Siege of Orgrimmar, we will review and improve previous Pandaria raids. Your feedback on the current state of those raids is much appreciated on the bugtracker.

The past months we have worked hard to bring the raiding experience to a whole new level. Now, with almost all known issues in all of the Wrath of the Lich King raids resolved, we have started to shift focus to improving remaining quests and dungeons in Northrend and provide an even better gameplay experience. Lots of high priority reports have already been dealt with and we have started development on the infamous Battle for the Undercity event, with the Horde part almost finished. We have also prepared the whole Midsummer event and released it fully completed last month.

Apart from that, a lot of underlying progress has been made that is at most only partially visible to our players. Several performance and stability changes as well as further LFG fixes, pet fixes and quest system changes have been applied. We have also improved our Anti-cheat detection further to catch as many cheaters as possible. For the next few weeks our focus will be mostly on quests and general cleanups. We will also begin a review of Trial of the Crusader by the end of the month, to start preparations for its release on Lordaeron.

Work has continued in full force and we are now at a point to release Siege of Orgrimmar Part 2, meaning Galakras, Iron Juggernaut, Kor'kron Dark Shaman and General Nazgrim. All bosses and events have been fully scripted and prepared. We are also working on a full re-implementation of the transport system to make several parts of the Siege of Orgrimmar raid possible without major issues.

The first scenario, Brewing Storm, has been fully scripted and will be released this week. We have already started work on Arena of Annihilation as well, which is expected to go live next week. Isle of Thunder is still in progress, while most of the major and more complex issues have been resolved, we have a lot of smaller tasks to complete before the release. We do expect to be able to release it this month though. At the same time we are working heavily on implementing pathfinding, improved object detection and line of sight, which should allow for a smoother gameplay and get rid of several issues in dungeons (e.g Stormstout Brewery).

In retrospect, the huge update performed last week went rather well, considering the amount of changes done to all systems. Close to 10 different crash issues have been resolved within the first day, and we worked hard to deal with any new issues found after the patch. Most issues have been fixed within hours, if not minutes after their discovery. Almost all pre-cataclysm dungeons and raids are now available to players with mostly minor issues left to polish, which we will continue to do for the next few weeks. Additionally, are steadily working on resolving important spell and class issues.

With the release of Siege of Orgrimmar's first four bosses, Throne of Thunder heroic, Timeless Isle, Isle of Giants and new LFR wing openings as well as the release of Prideful gear for the new arena season, Frostwolf took another big step forward. While those releases and the continuous work on spells and general issues were huge improvements, we do have quite a few new projects in the works to uplift our players' gaming experience even more.

The final part of our Isles releases will be Isle of Thunder, which is currently in development. The staging system required for it is being worked on, as well as the content reviewed and corrected. However, due to the sheer size of it a release is not reasonable within the next two weeks. At the same time our first scenario, the Brewing Storm, is being prepared for release. Siege of Orgrimmar development is still a major focus for us, and as such the next four bosses in Siege of Orgrimmar - Galakras, Iron Juggernaut, Kor'kron Dark Shaman and General Nazgrim - are expected to be released within the upcoming 1 - 2 weeks as well. The exact release date depends on how fast we can resolve transport issues related to those encounters. If required, we will split the release in two.

After the phenomenal kick-off of our new Icecrown realm, reaching the cap of 12.000 players just a few days after the merge with great stability, we have been immediately confronted with new challenges in terms of performance. Compared to Lordaeron, Icecrown's population is much more dense in major cities simply due to rates and lifetime of the realm. Update packets between players are extremely heavy on performance and can lead to serious delay if there are as many players as there are on Icecrown. One day after release we noticed a significant difference of delay between Lordaeron and Icecrown and over night implemented major performance improvements to counter this issue, which were implemented on Sunday morning and guaranteed a lag-free Sunday and perfect peak time for our players. While we are now out of the critical area in terms of performance, we will continue to work on and improve it.

A lot of time and effort in the past month has been put into improving and completing Ulduar, Ruby Sanctum and Icecrown Citadel. We have made over 600 fixes purely related to those raids, to ensure the best gameplay experience for our players. Additionally, we have started on re-working and cleaning up remaining issues in WotLK quest zones and will continue to do so.

In the past two months we have been working hard on preparing the Cataclysm core and scripting engine for the mass port of pre-cataclysm instances from our WotLK core. These changes affect all systems heavily, and are therefore extremely hard to test fully even with a QA team the size of ours. Nonetheless, we performed tests for a full month, ran through every single instance that was ported and tested all potential issues within general game functionality. Despite all preparations we have faced several new issues during the live update this week, and while we could fix most of them almost immediately, one issue surfaced which does require more time to resolve as it touches the very base of the core. Since then we have put our full attention on this issue and are confident to be able to release the full patch again next week.

The full patch will include a full remake of almost all dungeons and raids from vanilla to burning crusade and wrath of the lich king. On top of that, it will resolve several underlying issues as well as lots of important general and class issues. Afterwards we do expect to get more work done on Cataclysm zones, starting with Mount Hyjal.

After weeks of development and balance testing we are ready to release the long-awaited Ulduar on Lordaeron next Wednesday, the 27th of April. All bosses will be fully functional and scripted, as well as allow players to choose the extra challenge and engage in hard modes. Therefore, Tier 8 will be fully obtainable. In addition to that, we will also start a new arena season and with it, allow players to obtain the next PvP set of the Furious Gladiator.

As announced in our latest news topic, we have officially decided to merge Deathwing and Ragnaros into one big, flourishing realm in approximately one month, 20th of May. The new realm will rise under the name of Icecrown and be able to host more than 10.000 players without any performance issues, as seen by the example of Lordaeron. Players will be informed about the opening of name reservations in the upcoming days, if you are looking to reserve your name it would be wise to keep an eye on the news section.

Following the Throne of Thunder heroic release of last Wednesday, we are now heading towards an even bigger release day with the upcoming Timeless Isle opening, new Siege of Orgrimmar bosses and new season start, all in one day. The past month we have worked hard on recreating Timeless Isle as good as possible including personalized looting and bosses. Additionally, we have decided to fully script the first wing of Siege of Orgrimmar including Immerseus, the Fallen Protectors, Norushen and Sha of Pride. All of those will be fully released and drop loot. Alongside Siege of Orgrimmar gear, we will also allow players to obtain the next arena season gear set, of the Prideful Gladiator. All of those releases will be implemented on Wednesday, 27th of April, in one big update.

We will continue to work on the next wing of Siege of Orgrimmar right after the initial release, as well as implement the Isle of Thunder and Giants. On top of that, we have successfully finished our preparations for the Scenario system and are looking to implement first scenarios soon.

With the start of April, we have shifted even more of our focus towards Cataclysm to be able to prepare our code base faster for the massive ports of old content we have planned. As such, a lot of work in the past few weeks was internal with the intention to make porting of scripts and database content possible without adjustments. We are aiming to have an update with the first batch of old content ports within the next 1-2 weeks.

However, we have also continued to work on class and combat mechanics and were able to successfully fix over 50 class issues alone within the last week. At the same time we are also making progress on Mount Hyjal's zone rework, as well as several general issues related to battlegrounds, guilds, pets and more. An update and changelog with all those fixes will be prepared soon.

In the last few weeks we have continued to polish Throne of Thunder heroic as well as Timeless Isle and are glad to announce the official release dates for both of them have been set. After lots of testing and re-fixing we have decided to release both major projects on Wednesday, the 20th of April.

Apart from that, we have continued to improve class and combat mechanics, and prepared lots of new pet battle updates including PvP pet battles and pet battle queues. In the following weeks we are going to continue fixing class issues as well as start and continue several new projects, mainly being Siege of Orgrimmar, Isle of Thunder and Isle of Giants, as well as porting of old content and scenarios.

The majority of focus for Mists of Pandaria in the past few weeks has been on Throne of Thunder heroic and Timeless Isle. 11 out of 13 bosses have been raid tested and the issues we found have been fixed. Twin Consorts and Iron Qon are the only two bosses which still require some work and therefore we are positive that we are able to release Throne of Thunder heroic soon. At the same time we have been working on Timeless Isle and have successfully implemented the personal chest loot system, rare bosses and several other important parts of the Timeless Isle. Furthermore we have continued to polish class and combat issues as much as possible. While we generally do at least 1 to 2 updates a week, the next big content update is expected to hit in the last week of March, potentially including Throne of Thunder heroic as well as Timeless Isle.

Following up on our first patch for Deepholm a few weeks ago we are now ready to release the second and final patch for Deepholm. This means the whole zone, including all quests, events and npc's will be fully implemented and available to players. Additionally, we will also implement several high priority spell and combat fixes picked from our bugtracker. The update is scheduled for Monday, 21st of March. Following this update, development will focus on porting low level content as well as further zone and spell fixes.

Lots of testing and development work has gone into the preparations for the long awaited core update on Ragnaros and Deathwing. Starting from a full rescripting of Icecrown Citadel to a completely new implementation of Ulduar, we have revised all raids and dungeons to make sure they deliver an even better experience. Today we are glad to announce that the core is officially ready for update on all of our Wrath of the Lich King realms.

Scheduled update time for Deathwing is March 23, 2016 at 9:00 am. The expected duration of the maintenance is 5 hours. This means starting next Wednesday, Deathwing will be on the same core as Lordaeron. Depending on the results, Ragnaros will be swapped to the same core as well in the days after.

A maintenance downtime will be conducted during the update for necessary database optimizations and adaptations. While we do expect the overall gameplay experience to improve significantly after the core change, we are also prepared to deal with any unforeseen issues as soon as possible. Player feedback on our bugtracker will be very helpful to deal with any potential issues faster.

Ever since the big upgrade to 5.4.8 we have applied lots of updates to Frostwolf including several big releases. So far we have successfully released Heart of Fear Heroic, Scarlet Halls, Scarlet Monastery, Ji-Kun in Throne of Thunder and the Battle for Gilneas battleground. In addition to that, we have also fixed hundreds of spell, combat and class issues within the past month and continued our preparations for Throne of Thunder Heroic, Timeless Isle and further Battleground releases. Throne of Thunder Heroic is likely to undergo PTR testing before its live release and we may call upon Frostwolf guilds to join the PTR and help us fix any remaining and unnoticed issues pre-release. The Throne of Thunder Heroic release will be pre-announced by approximately a week to give enough time for guilds to prepare for realm firsts.

Furthermore we have fully implemented Kezan and Lost Isles and are preparing it along with Silvershard Mines and regular fixes for an update next week. To summarize, next month will be another exciting month full of releases including Throne of Thunder Heroic, new battlegrounds, starting zone revamps, Timeless Isle and more.

As announced earlier this year, we have started putting as much emphasis on Cataclysm as possible. This means in the past few weeks we have been working with a focus on Cataclysm quest zones and general combat and spell issues voted for by the community. Based on that work we are going to release the first patch on Wednesday, next week. This update will include lots of quest fixes in Mount Hyjal and Deepholm, as well as several high priority spell fixes. Afterwards we will continue to finish Deepholm and move on to remaining zones, while maintaining a steady flow of spell fixes.

Pre-release Information
With only four days left until the official 5.4.8 release it is time to have a look at what this upgrade means for our MoP players exactly. First of all, starting Tuesday the 26th, you will be required to use the new 5.4.8 client which is available for download here. It is highly recommended to pre-download this client to avoid waiting times on launch day. However, until Tuesday, the current 5.4.2 client will still be required to connect to Frostwolf, do not remove it just yet.

Immediate changes
When you first login after the 5.4.8 upgrade, there will not be any obvious differences. A lot of the work put into the upgrade is purely to support the 5.4.8 client, which looks very similar to the 5.4.2 client for a normal user. In other words, the majority of work done in the past months was ground work to even be able to run on 5.4.8. All 1500+ packet structures had to be rewritten completely, which is a huge task by itself. However, while working on the upgrade we also revisited current content. Several improvements have been made to already released raids and dungeons, and new functionality has been added to better support specific encounter mechanics. Our QA has also restlessly tested and documented every single class issue they could find, whether it came with the upgrade or already existed beforehand. We have done our best to get rid of any critical class and combat issues, and will continue to work down that list after release. Due to that, lots of important spell issues that currently exist will be resolved with the upgrade. In addition to that, we have prepared several 5.4.2 to 5.4.8 spell adjustments according to official patch notes, but did not include all of the spell changes yet.

Post-launch work
While our team worked as much as possible to prevent any disturbances on launch, post-launch issues have to be expected considering the enormous amount of changes that went into this upgrade. Therefore we have a dedicated team prepared to deal with any immediate post-launch issues. Community feedback will be even more important during the first days of release and we kindly ask you to report any problems you encounter on our bugtracker so that we can deal with them as fast as possible.

Upcoming releases
Besides the continuation of spell, combat and general fixes, we have several releases scheduled after the 5.4.8 upgrade. We will start off with the release of the Scarlet Halls and the Scarlet Monastery, followed by heroic releases of Heart of Fear and Throne of Thunder. We are also planning to finish the Ji-Kun encounter and have it ready with the heroic release. Afterwards we will release lower level dungeons and raids, as well as new Siege of Orgrimmar bosses. At the same time we are going to implement three new battlegrounds, namely the Battle for Gilneas, Deepwind Gorge and Silvershard Mine. Once all those releases made it to live, we will focus on further Siege of Orgrimmar, Scenarios, Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle development as well as highly requested fixes on our bugtracker.

After several months of work put into the improved Wrath of the Lich King core, we are now getting closer to releasing it on Deathwing and Ragnaros. As you can see in previous Lordaeron changelogs, we have made enormous progress and reached a level of quality that will greatly benefit all our WotLK realms. Before the planned merge of Ragnaros and Deathwing, both realms will be updated with the core used on Lordaeron currently. Several projects need to be completed before that core swap can be initiated though. As noted in the previous changelog, we have - in addition to our regular improvements - also started to work on Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum. We have completely rewritten almost all encounters in Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum by now, as well as fully scripted Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection. Currently we are working on Trial of the (Grand) Crusader to prepare it for Ragnaros and Deathwing. Ulduar has already been scripted from scratch and will undergo another PTR test before the core swap as well to ensure its quality. At that point we will also ask Deathwing and Ragnaros guild(s) to help us gather feedback on Icecrown Citadel, Ruby Sanctum and Trial of the (Grand) Crusader on our PTR. Once those projects are finished and several internal features are prepared, we will be ready to change the core. There is no official date yet, but we expect it to happen towards the end of February.

In terms of general development, we have made great progress on cleaning up remaining quest and dungeon issues and are close to completing that milestone. As written above, Ulduar is already prepared for release with only a few changes left to polish it, but it will not be released on Lordaeron before March because of the progressive realm design. Additionally we have also been constantly fixing spell, combat and general issues as well as improving performance. We are currently preparing to launch Wintergrasp and Vault of Archavon. However, due to performance concerns we may limit the amount of players allowed to join the battle initially. We will monitor performance and make adjustments accordingly. We also have a project in planning stage that will greatly increase performance and allow us to split servers per map once completed, but this is a project of a few months and therefore cannot be expected to have an effect anytime soon. Another changelog will be posted shortly including a few hundred fixes again.

We have received a lot of feedback to our initial new year prospective and have taken that feedback to heart. Shortly after, we have already initiated steps to ensure continuous development on Cataclysm. Work on the highest voted content issues has started, which means that new fixes and releases for Cataclysm zones and quests can be expected fairly soon. Deepholm and Hyjal are the first zones receiving attention, with more to come as we progress. We will also start porting lower level content inbetween. At the same time we have also started work on spell and combat fixes, based on community votes on our bugtracker. We are looking forward to further improving the quality of Cataclysm together with our community.

After a month of preparations for Wrath of the Lich King content on Lordaeron we released the final expansion on Saturday, with an enormous amount of players waiting to flood Northrend and set out to find glory and new adventures. While we prepared as much as possible, a few stability issues were found shortly after launch and dealt with immediately. The day after, we were able to reach a sure milestone in Lordaeron's history; 10,000 players online at the same time and 1,000 in queue. A huge accomplishment only possible thanks to our constant performance and stability updates and a great community.

However, because we have been focused so much on launch preparations, changelogs weren't updated as regularly as usual. Therefore it seems fitting to present a short recap of the past month; Within only one month we created over 1,500 fixes across the board, a majority of them being quest, dungeon and raid fixes but also spells and features. Thanks to the PTR we were able to tune and perfect raids (Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum and the Eye of Eternity) as much as possible to provide an epic experience for our players. Wintergrasp has also been scripted and will be enabled on live as soon as performance allows. Performance itself is still a big priority for us, despite reaching 10,000 players. We are currently investigating any potential new bottlenecks that were introduced with the WotLK launch and will continue to improve performance and stability of the realm.

This week multiple new changelogs will be posted - starting tomorrow - to give a better view on our development process of the past month. We will also open our PTR again for final raid tests in the next couple of days to prepare for the planned raid release this weekend. More information will follow.

The past two weeks have been packed with an enormous amount of testing, fixing and retesting in preparation for the 5.4.8 update. We have discovered a lot more raid and dungeon issues than anticipated, and spent a big portion of our time on resolving these issues. In addition to that, we have cleaned up all spell and talent issues we could find to make sure the 5.4.8 update goes through as smooth as possible. A new client download will be available on our download page soon to prepare for the release.

At the same time we have ported over several raids from Lordaeron, including Molten Core, Zul'Gurub, Temple of Ahn'Qiraj and more. These ports are currently undergoing internal testing and corrections. We are also preparing two new battlegrounds for release; The Battle for Gilneas and Alterac Valley. Gilneas is already finished and currently being tested, while Alterac Valley is under development. Once the 5.4.8 update has been applied to live, we will continue our work on the staging system required for Timeless Isle and Isle of Thunder.

Several high priority class fixes have been implemented over the last few weeks. These fixes included exploitable spells such as ignite and item sets, as well as fixes to pet AI and raids. Now that early content preparations on Lordaeron come to an end, we have started porting of vanilla and tbc instances to other patches. Molten Core, Zul'Farrak and several 5 man dungeons will be amongst the first ports to be introduced on Cataclysm once implemented.

Slightly more than a week ago Lordaeron has opened the Dark Portal, and with it came a sheer endless stream of thousands of players making their way through the Blasted Lands to the merciless and unforgiving Outland. Since then, our development team has pushed out more than 300 changes and fixes. But not only that, we were also able to raise the population cap again by a thousand to 8.000 players in a stable and performing environment. The majority of fixes improved raids and dungeons, as well as general systems.

Currently we are preparing to release Sunwell Plateau along with a reworked Isle of Quel'Danas and Magister's Terrace. After that, most of our focus will be shifted towards Wrath of the Lich King preparations. We have also decided to allow players access to a public test realm that will allow them to test and give feedback on new raids and dungeons before they are released. The PTR will be open starting this weekend and will contain Sunwell Plateau and Magister's Terrace. Afterwards, it will be switched to an instant 80 realm with access to wotlk 5 man dungeons, Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum and the Eye of Eternity. Vendors will also be prepared for respective content to offer players an easy way to provide feedback. This will help us to polish and perfect any future releases.

As anticipated earlier, we will most likely finish our final preparations for the 5.4.8 update next week. Currently we are focusing on getting rid of bad code and replace it with proper solutions, as well as fix more issues we couldn't fix on our current patch. While this can cause smaller issues initially, it will be highly benefitial to the realm in the long run. Once those code fixes and final touches have been completed we will be ready to release. An exact date will be announced after a final assessment. We also have several bigger patches coming up with or shortly after the 5.4.8 update. This includes porting of Lordaeron's classic and burning crusade content to Mists of Pandaria, and the previously announced release of Throne of Thunder heroic.

The planned update of spell and instance fixes has been postponed till Tuesday to fix a few crucial issues found while testing.

As we continue testing of our 5.4.8 update we are able to make better estimations of how much work is still ahead of us. Based on current test results we estimate that it will take approximately 2-3 weeks until patch 5.4.8 is release ready. All our systems have been converted already, but extensive testing is needed to ensure that everything is working as it should. The update to 5.4.8 includes all of our current scripts and data, there will be no changes to their current state except further improvements.

The next MoP update is planned for next week including important spell fixes such as Rain of Fire, Health Funnel, slows duration in PvP and more. It will also include the reimplementation of the last boss in Gate of the Setting Sun, Raigonn, as well as the re-opening of Siege of Niuzao Temple and more Raidfinder bosses in Heart of Fear. Additionally, seven out of eleven Throne of Thunder bosses already have heroic mode scripted, however, the four remaining will not be fully working before the update to 5.4.8. We have not yet decided whether we will release partial heroic mode with the next update, but if we decide to do so it will be announced ahead of time. Furthermore we are currently working and finishing three new bosses in Siege of Orgrimmar, including the Fallen Protectors, Norushen and Sha of Pride. They will be released without loot as soon as they are ready to avoid imbalance in the current item progression.

More than three weeks have gone by after Lordaeron's release. Exciting ones without a question. Thanks to extensive performance improvements we were able to increase the population cap every week and allow more and more players to join the adventure. At the moment we are working on several fronts to ensure progress, stability and continuity of the realm. Some developers have been working in the background, and while their fixes can hardly be seen in our changelogs their work is visible in an ever-rising population cap and close to no crashes at all. Most of our developers currently work on fixing any new issues we can find. Be it spell fixes, quests or npcs, or general mechanics. However, we are also focusing on the future; New content releases, upcoming events, arenas and more. Thanks to a balanced team we can guarantee quality in all areas.

Since release we have produced over 800 fixes within only three weeks. This includes crucial performance updates that allowed us to reach a new cap of 7000 players without lag. We have also resolved any new issues we have found in vanilla content and class spells and started preparing for the big new content release of the burning crusade on 5th of November. While most tbc dungeons and raids have already been scripted we are now working out the finer details, including memorable encounters such as the Chess Event in Karazhan, Illidan in Black Temple or Kil'Jaedan in Sunwell Plateau. In addition we have also fixed lots of general issues related to chest looting, movement and more.

Lordaeron has been successfully launched last Friday and after getting through the first hour it has quickly become one of the most, if not the most stable and lag-free launch considering a population of over 4000 on its first day and 6000 peaks the days after. Thanks to careful planning and analysis followed by lots of code rewrites and improvements in the past months, Lordaeron was able to pull off 1 day and more uptime without lag or crashes at 5000-6000 player peaks, only interrupted by daily updates to the realm.

In the following week after Lordaeron's release we have applied over 410 internal and public updates to the realm to take care of any issues and further improve the quality of the realm. We will continue to do so while also preparing burning crusade for the next stage of Lordaeron's content releases. However, we are currently considering to port updates from Lordaeron to our other realms earlier than expected, before the next major content release. This could cause a little delay of the release. More information about it will follow on our forums or in this section.

As announced earlier in this section, we have worked most of September on upgrading Mists of Pandaria to patch 5.4.8. After almost a month of development we will be starting to test patch 5.4.8 on our internal test realms in the upcoming week. Since upgrading involves changes in all possible systems, thorough testing will be needed before we can apply it to live. Approximately 2-3 more weeks are needed for our internal testing and development before release. While upgrading, we have also been able to fix lots of smaller and some bigger issues which were challenging to fix before, such as issues with movement, dynamic areatriggers and chat.

Even though a number of our team has been focusing on the 5.4.0 to 5.4.8 upgrade, content fixes and preparations for new releases have also been in development. We are planning on updating Frostwolf next week with hundreds of content fixes, some class and spell fixes and 3 new bosses in Heart of Fear, namely; Garalon, Wind Lord Mel'jarak and Amber-Shaper Un'sok. Shortly after, we will also release the full first wing of Heart of Fear in RaidFinder.

As we progressed through classic content on Lordaeron - all dungeons and raids in vanilla have been reworked or fully rescripted from scratch. All of these scripts will be prepared and made ready for release on Cataclysm. After the release of burning crusade on Lordaeron, we will follow the same procedure and also port the new content to Cataclysm as soon as it is polished. Several exploit and stability fixes will also be applied over the next couple of days. We expect to start porting instances to Cataclysm later this month.

Development on Lordaeron is going at full pace as we prepare the realm for its grand opening on September 25th. Only a bit longer than a week to go and it is time for a final recap. Last month our focus was set mostly on vanilla content and general improvements. We have tested and rescripted over 15 dungeons and 5 raids to ensure players will be able to enjoy quality content across all levels. From the stairs of doom in Zul'Farrak to the madness lurking in the darkest shadows of Ahn'Qiraj we have made sure it is all there for you to enjoy and relive. All zones, quests and creatures in the world of Azeroth have also been tested and improved to our best efforts.

At the same time a lot of focus has also been put on general issues and underlying improvements. Spells and talents have been fixed as soon as they have been discovered and we will continue to do so post-launch as well. Anti-cheat has undergone massive improvements to guarantee fair-play for everyone. Most of the major types of hacks are now being prevented before they take effect. Lots of exploits and circumventions have also been resolved. Performance and stability have also been of high priority to us. With our self-made stresstesting and performance monitoring tools we were able to spot and fix several bottlenecks and potential performance issues as well as rework core systems for efficiency and stability. While we did our best to prevent stability issues on launch, it is important to note that there can still be issues which only surface in a huge real player environment. To counter that we have an even bigger team of developers monitoring stability 24/7 to resolve any issues and keep potential downtimes to a minimum. Within the next couple of days we will initiate an instant 60 test on our lordaeron ptr to find any remaining flaws in content. More information will follow shortly. We are all very excited about the release and hope you are ready to enjoy a new quality on private servers.

After Twin Consorts in Throne of Thunder have been scripted and released last week on Frostwolf, Lei Shen is currently undergoing internal testing and finetuning. We expect to be able to release Lei Shen within a week. Last weeks update also brought huge improvements to the achievement system, allowing for several hundred new achievements to be completed, including guild achievements. Additional achievement fixes are being prepared and will be implemented over time. 

We are continuously making progress on the rework of lower level dungeons and prepared a system that allows us to easily port code and data between all expansions. Thanks to that we expect to have the first low level content implemented on Cataclysm soon. We will start off with 2 dungeons and will constantly add more to the mix over time.

Development on Lordaeron is progressing quickly with almost all quests in Northrend zones working we are now switching to Outland. Out of almost 1500 quests in Northrend zones there are currently 12 remaining to be fixed in the upcoming days. All zones in Outland have reached over 95% completion as well and will catch up to the state of completion of Northrend zones soon enough. All Northrend raids have been fully tested and are being worked on. In terms of raids Ulduar was our main development focus this month. Only a few bosses in Ulduar remain to be scripted until completion. Due to our high goal of providing a complete gaming experience all our work includes hardmodes and special events. After Ulduar has been completed we will continue to finish Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum and the Eye of Eternity in our next milestone.

At the same time we are working hard to polish class spells, talents and combat mechanics. Thanks to that, far over 100 spell and talent issues have been fixed this month. Additionally we have made lots of underlying changes to our codebase to improve performance and stability, as well as fixed general issues related to transports, vehicles and other systems. For the upcoming month we are planning to keep working on spells and combat mechanics, but anti-cheat is also going to be an important topic to tackle. More detailled information and updates on Lordaeron can be found in the designated forum thread here.

Tomorrow Frostwolf will receive an update including the release of Archeology and lots of important spell and combat, quest and creature fixes. Frostwolf has received several internal updates related to performance and stability over the past two weeks which had an immediate effect on ingame delay previously occuring when Frostwolf had long uptimes. Stability has been improved significantly which made it possible for Frostwolf to reach 2+ days uptime. At the same time hotfixes have been applied to crucial class and dungeon issues.

Pet battles are being heavily worked on to get rid of a critical stability issue, which has proven to be more persistent than expected. We are also making progress on Throne of Thunder, Twin Consorts have been completed and are currently internally tested and Lei shen is in development. Siege of Orgrimmar's Fallen Protectors are undergoing internal testing as well as Sha of Pride.

Yesterday Frostwolf has been updated with the first part of the previously announced releases. Iron Qon in Throne of Thunder and Immerseus in Siege of Orgrimmar have been fully scripted and released. However, bosses released in Siege of Orgrimmar currently do not drop loot to acknowledge current progression balance. Two new Raid finder wings have been opened in Throne of Thunder and Heart of Fear. Several other raid finder fixes have also been implemented tackling incorrect drop amounts and different raid mode loot. Random Dungeon Finder rewards have also been corrected.

Over the next couple of days several crucial spell and combat fixes will be applied as part two of the update, including buff stacking, Polymorph, Soothing Mist fixes amongst others. Twin Consorts as well as Fallen Protectors are currently undergoing internal testing and are expected to be released soon. Isle of Thunder quests have been completed and the stage system is in progress. Once it is complete, Isle of Thunder will be released. Additional Raid finder wings will also be implemented in the near future.

Mists of Pandaria will be updated in upcoming days. Some of the major improvements will include community-voted high priority issues such as buff stacking and crucial spell fixes, many new quests and NPC fixes, as well as Raid Finder fixes (including instance wing functionality). We are also planning to release Iron Qon and possibly Twin Consort encounters a few days after the update. Additionally Immerseus encounter in Siege of Orgrimmar will be released, however as per community suggestion and with respect to progression these end-game bosses will temporarily have loot disabled, allowing guilds to evaluate quality of the encounter before its eventual release. The Fallen Protectors have also been scripted and are undergoing internal testing. Norushen encounter is currently in development as well. Overall Mists of Pandaria development priorities for near future lay in Throne of Thunder (heroic) development, Isle of Thunder quests, Siege of Orgrimmar (no loot with respect to PvP and PvE progression) and low level dungeons being ported once rescripted in Lordaeron (as mentioned in previous devlog news).

While our primary focus is currently Wrath of the Lich King and its leveling, pre-endgame content we have implemented a system which will allow newly rescripted instances from Wrath of the Lich King to be almost directly ported to Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria realms as long as those instances had no or minor changes in those subsequent expansions. Simply put, we're revising and rescripting instances in Lordaeron and will copy our work to Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. This is the most efficient way of implementing new quality content while maintaining our Wrath of the Lich King focus on Lordaeron, which is updated multiple times a day.

Development on the initial release of the Warmane armory is nearing completion, much time has gone into utlizing the Warmane theme for the armory, which has pushed release times back by a few weeks. Previews are expected to be released tomorrow with the official release following shortly after.

Lordaeron will be Warmane's first realm and is designed to be world's most complete and hardcore Wrath of the Lich King realm where leveling will be a major part of the experience, as such we are dedicated to ensuring that quests, dungeons and raids are complete. We aim to have 99% - 100% of quests working in every leveling zone before realm is released. For comparison, Lordaeron PTR currently has 100% of quests working in Hellfire Peninsula, 99.1% in Borean Tundra and 91% in Howling Fjord statistically. Same attention will be given to a thorough testing and rework of all dungeons and raids, NPCs (mobs, vendors, class trainers etc). Ulduar, known to be the most challenging instance to script completely, will be our raid development's focus in the upcoming days. Please keep in mind that colossal work remains to be done on Lordaeron and realm's release date is not determined. However we are not looking to excessively delay realm's launch and even though realm will not be perfect at launch it will be the most complete Wrath of the Lich King and its improvements will be eventually applied to Deathwing and Ragnaros. This article is strictly based on internal staff testing, development and report.

Following major Lordaeron updates, we are currently considering temporarily (and for feedback purposes only) increasing Lordaeron experience rates in line with opening a Lordaeron section on our forum. In the meantime Borean Tundra quests have been rescripted and are undergoing internal testing on Lordaeron before being released on Deathwing and Ragnaros.

Iron Qon encounter in Throne of Thunder and is expected to be released in one of the upcoming Mists of Pandaria updates. Twin Consorts encounter in Throne of Thunder has also been scripted but requires further internal testing. Immerseus encounter in Siege of Orgrimmar has been fully scripted but Siege of Orgrimmar will is scheduled to be released after community has progresses in lower tier content further.

Having released reworked Deadmines, Shadowfang keep, Uldaman and EndTime and newly fully scripted releases of Well of Eternity, Hour of Twilight End Time on Neltharion, we are now working on Deepholm content. New Deepholm quests are being scripted and are currently at 62% complete (58 out of 107 quests) and are expected for launch in upcoming updates.

Lordaeron has been updated with major spell, script and movement system rewrites. This allows for a significantly improved and optimized content scripting and spell functionality as well as implementation of additional tools for advanced future content development, including Wintergrasp. As a result, Malygos encounter has been scripted and is currently being tested and polished on Lordaeron. Considering the massive scale of function rewrites that we have undertaken it is wise to expect post-update bugs, majority of which we have already fixed through after internal testing and we are pleased with the initial test runs on Lordaeron. Extensive testing of these major updates continues on Lordaeron. In the meantime Deathwing and Ragnaros received another big update fixing lots of class and combat fixes, as well as crucial raid fixes. More high priority issues are being worked on and will be part of another update soon.

We are working to implement major structural Wrath of the Lich King updates on Lordaeron in upcoming days. We currently have 6 team members dedicated to leveling and testing instances based on BugTracker reports AND leveling ourselves on x1 rates with Dungeon Finder intentionally disabled. Considering the relatively good state that Wrath of the Lich King realms already are compared to other expansions, we are looking to bring Lordaeron to a new high standard of a clean, healthy and most complete Wrath of the Lich King realm in the world - a flagship and pride of Warmane team's work. We would like to remind that Lordaeron will have no point store support, limited coin store support with high requirements and no legendary items in the store for that realm. Our team's working pace and dedication to 'deliver' is unmatched, unmatched by ourselves in the past and the competition. We have strong faith that we will be able to deliver. Eventually all of Lordaeron's updates and quality (except its hardcore restrictions) will arrive to Deathwing and Ragnaros.

The movement system update implemented last week is required to fully add new pathfinding, line of sight and movemaps systems in near future, albeit due to the massive scale of the system update post-updates issues are inevitable which are addressed daily.

We're currently working on expanding information page to include accurate information on available and unavailable content in-game. First release is expected in the upcoming days and will include Wrath of the Lich King dungeons and raid availability. Eventually content tab will cover all 3 expansions and information on classes.

Stability and performance fixes are continuously being worked on and are of the most importance at the moment to be applied to Frostwolf. Several sources of delay have already been extinguished and further improvements are expected in the upcoming days.

Development on the first two bosses in Heart of Fear has been completed and final tests are commencing. We expect it to be released tomorrow. Durumu in Throne of Thunder has also been fully scripted and is expected to be released at the beginning of next week. We have also made good progress on Isle of Thunder working and hope to release it again shortly.

Next week we also expect to apply a new patch containing lots of spell, combat and quest updates including the Cloud Serpent Riding quest chain which has been problematic for quite some time.

Last week we have made lots of progress on the transport system in preparation for the Nefarian Heroic boss fight. It is being internally tested as we speak and once confirmed, will be applied to live.

We have also finished a rework of Shadowfang Keep which is expected to be applied at the beginning of next week along with numerous dungeon and raid fixes.

The new movement update has been released on our Wrath of the Lich King realms. Currently we are polishing the last details with it to prepare for initial pathfinding tests along with end game raid fixes. This update also brought the highly requested changes to the battleground queue behaviour and other important quality of life fixes.

At the same time Eye of Eternity is being prepared for its release as announced earlier, as well as further spell and combat fixes.

Our work on splines and pathfinding has reached its final stage and we are preparing a step-by-step release. Since both of those systems influence gameplay a lot we are testing everything very carefully to avoid issues on live as much as possible.  As announced earlier, Eye of Eternity will be released shortly after splines have been implemented. Current PvE development also includes a rework of the Lich King fight and other Ice Crown Citadel improvements, which are work in progress.

Lots of high priority issues have been fixed in the last week and are about to be implemented on live. We have also rewritten the battleground queue system which will allow players who queue for specific battlegrounds to be matched and mixed with players queuing for random battlegrounds. This feature is currently undergoing heavy testing. Also on our list is a rewrite of the arena system that will fundamentally improve MMR and arena team handling.

The first and partially also the second boss in Heart of Fear have been scripted and are undergoing internal testing. We expect to finish both bosses this week and potentially release them on our live realms next week. Simultaneously we have performed cleanups on already released Throne of Thunder bosses and are working on upcoming new ones, Durumu and the Iron Qon. Additionally from now on all expansions will receive improvements on low level dungeons and raids, steadily over time.

PvP pet battles are almost ready to be released, with only one feature waiting to be completed. Choosing a pet at the start of a battle is not fully implemented yet and will take a bit longer to finish. We are also working on fixing RDF rewards, AoE looting, creature gossip text fixes and quest points of interest to be applied as soon as they are done. Custom performance logging has been implemented on live realms to easily identify bottlenecks in the code, get rid of potential lag sources and in general support our continuous work on increasing population limit.

A new update containing lots of spell, combat and quest fixes is also being prepared to be applied this week.

Lots of progress has been made on the Deadmines since the last devlog entry and we are about to re-open the dungeon after less than a week since its temporary closure. Internal tests will be completed tonight for a final review before its release. Following that we have expanded our rework plans to also include lower level dungeons which will be worked on constantly from now on. These low level reworks will also be ported to our other expansions.

Starting this week we are also tackling the last remaining high level encounter that is not scripted yet; Nefarian in the Blackwing Descent Heroic raid. This encounter will require extra care thanks to gameobject mechanics used during the fight. You may follow the progress here.

Lordaeron [ALPHA]. Considering community poll's unclear results and shelving the idea of Lordaeron - some of our team members decided to review the experience ourselves. We embarked on a journey on a Wrath of the Lich King realm with x1 rates launched in a test capacity. It turned out many other players were excited to level with us, knowing that the realm was being run for testing purposes and their characters would be eventually reset pre-launch, whenever that would be. This article is written by and describes Kаеr's experience on the realm as a level 14 Orc Hunter.

Having seen unappealing poll results and disgruntled responses, I created an Orc Hunter (because kite). Despite my skepticism, the journey so far has been most pleasant. It does indeed give the vibes of classic World of Warcraft leveling. It actually took me some time to reach level 4, not only because the 'Lazy Peons' felt like waking up every time I approached them with my club, but also because of true retail rates. I was surprised that I did not encounter a single quest issue up to level 15 as I leveled in Durotar, eventually making my way to the Crossroads. At times, and compared to retail, taking a Zeppelin from Thunder Bluff (yes I ran there to group with other players) can seem painful and unusual, but I quickly realised that it's part of what I enjoyed about the game back in 2004 as I camped the store's entrance to get the DVD early in the morning.

Back on topic, the slowness of traveling and leveling has so far been most enjoyable. So have been my lengthy journeys to capital cities to learn professions and class spells. Unlike retail, where I soloed Hogger as a level 8 Paladin in heirlooms and died for the first time in Outland, my character on Lordaeron has already clocked 35 deaths as Kolkar and Razormanes have been... challenging... to run from.

As many in our team share the idea of having a challenging realm giving vibes that classic used to deliver, we considered it most important to leveling and have the experience it ourselves. As such, some of the missing eyecandy and visual bugs did have their impact of reminding me that I was on a private server, especially those mobs running through elevation, objects and the like. Even though this was not reported, not as priority at least, we considered it to be one of the very few, almost only, issues encountered - significant enough to detach from immersion and experience that we would like the realm to deliver. Only today, as Malaco was busy unable to stream our journey due to making organizations for the Tournament, Takenbacon (13 Enchantment Sherman), Drunnsham (16... already... Resto Shaman), Liberalism (15 Arms Tank) and Kаеr (highly skilled 14 Hunter), decided to go to Ragefire Chasm. Before Drunnsham had to respec, we were missing a healer, and the few people I asked "LFM RFC need 1 healer" in Global and responding to Liberalism's offer to tank on his alt "what level" reminded me of the usual LFM/GS communication from regular realms. Skipping the boring part, we 4 manned RFC as level 13-15s, we entered the instance on foot because Dungeon Finder is intentionally disabled to help us feel the journey, traveling and avoid experience boosts so we don't skip content AFKing in a capital. We drooled to the only blue item, because for reference I'm topping DPS and I'm equipped with a level 8 grey Cheap Blunderbuss, some of us got a green item from the instance. Mobs and bosses are scripted well. The aggro range, especially chaing aggroes, seem slightly higher than they should be but the challenge they offered made no difference as we finished the instance with a lot of pleasure and most importantly - a memorable instance run.

Overall, not a single bugged quest for me until level 14. Fungal Spores could spawn more often (so I don't have to revisit it 4 times in 2 days and still be at 3/4). NPCs in Kalimdor (at least) no longer run through objects and elevation, they walk around and can now be properly kited (nothing too hard for a highly skilled hunter as I), combat bug is annoying, very annoying, sometimes mobs seem to be lootable but aren't and a few other very minor things. Barrens chat is missing, unlike other realms, people are way too polite, helpful and responsive. Considering these few issues, the overall journey has so far been very promising and enjoyable. For stability and performance reasons, Lordaeron has been and will have drastic improvements and core updates implemented (such as pathing, movement, line of sight etc) corrections and we hope to be able to post some more  first hand experience as we progress. Creature movement and animations for NPCs have also been updated thousands of NPCs, including those Horde Guards in Crossroads in Barrens. Keep in mind that the article covers gameplay experience from level 1 to 14 in Durotar and Barrens.

Several fundamental systems are currently being implemented or reworked to allow for smoother gameplay and faster development. Splines, a system improving visual movement appearance of all creatures drastically and pathfinding, a crucial feature in PvE and PvP are only some of the projects we are working on and are testing internally right now. Due to the nature of these changes affecting all aspects of the game, thorough testing and preparation is needed before we can release them on our live realms.

Along with splines and spell fixes, we are also planning to release a series of PvE updates ranging from starting zone improvements to the release of Eye of Eternity and Icecrown Citadel fixes.

An update will be applied today including the release of Hour of Twilight as well as lots of dungeon and spell fixes. Pathfinding has also been implemented in specific PvE situations and we will continue to increase its usage over time. Your feedback is welcome here.

Currently we are reworking several instances with the latest being the Deadmines. The Deadmines will be closed temporarily until the rework has been completed, which is expected to be within a week.

New upcoming bugtracker seamlessly integrated into the warmane website is expected to be released over the coming days with barebone functionality. The final design touches are being implemented for the preliminary release. The bugtracker is expected to receive large amounts of updates after release, including better functionality, design and ease of use.

We are making constant progress on Throne of Thunder, with two more bosses being released. Development on Heart of Fear has begun and bosses will be released as soon as they are ready. We are also working on Isle of Thunder to open it in a timely fashion.

PvP pet battles are prepared and a first test version is expected to be released this week along with spell and combat fixes. With the expected population increase on Frostwolf we are aiming to improve performance to be able to raise the population limit and avoid queues.

Mogu'shan Vaults 10/25man Heroic has been released on both Mists of Pandaria realms. Please leave your feedback here.

Mogu'shan Vaults Heroic has been fully scripted and is undergoing internal testing. We expect it to be released next week. We're working on a new BugTracker, to be renamed into Bug Reports for clarity which will be seamlessly integrated into the website similar to the new forum. The most important improvements will include a priority vote system (bug prioritization based on community member votes), a user friendly and clean navigation, sorting and filtering and comment system. Community members will be able to use their Warmane account to report bugs.

Eye of Eternity is currently undergoing internal testing. As of tests so far and due to the nature of encounters further improvements in movement system are being worked on. As soon as it is done Eye of Eternity will be released. Following the release of Eye of Eternity, Wrath of the Lich King focus will be set to general and class fixes. Due to attacks, last month's development focus was mainly set on performance, security and exploit fixes. While these core fixes may not be 'visible' in changelogs, they are crucial for stability of the realms.

A major Mists of Pandaria update, including Pet battles, has been released today. Raidfinder has been fully enabled on both Mists of Pandaria realms, including personal loot system, a rewritten quest system shaped to meet latest requirements to quest objectives and optimizing future quest fixes as well as general and class fixes as well as several crash fixes.

End Time has been fully reworked and is expected to be applied to Neltharion and Warsong along with class, pet and PvP fixes before the upcoming weekend. Hour of Twilight has been fully scripted and is still undergoing internal testing before it is released next week.

We're working on a new Information page to include brief and useful information about realms and available content. The initial release will include realm population, faction ratios, graphs and performance statistics.

Warlords of Draenor public test realm has been delayed to overcome unforseen technical difficulties. As with any other expansion we have released in the past, a substantial amount of it must be playable or up to our standards. A closed test realm has been launched instead to further develope on. We will have further updates as we progress to a publicly available realm.

Mists of Pandaria Raid Finder is currently undergoing internal testing and public test launch is expected to be this week. Throne of Thunder second wing development is almost complete, it will be released shortly after internal testing has concluded, within the next 2 updates. Pet Battle system is nearing preliminary completion and is expected to be available on Mists of Pandaria realms by the end of April. Due to popular demand, Gifting and Trading are expected to make a return within the last week of April, development on the Armory, new Bugtracker and Marketplace update is underway, updates will be posted about the new Bugtracker and Armory as we progress. Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm realms are expected to receive more class fixes, general overall fixes to encounters, quests over the coming week.

Warlords of Draenor Public Test Realm release date has been pushed back to April 15, 2015. Our initial release date was set for March 25, 2015 as we aimed to overcome certain obstacles with patch 6.1.0. Having had little success we are focusing on preparing a 6.0.3 PTR with more content and many of the issues affecting 6.1.0 resolved. Devlog will be updated as we progress.

New forum development is in progress. We expect to release the new vBulletin upgrade and a design consistent with Warmane on March 31, 2015. The mobile version will follow on April 6, 2015. Major new features and improvements include blogs, profiles, mobile versions, security and more.

Upcoming Cataclysm update is undergoing internal testing. We hope to release the update on March 30, 2015.

Shado-Pan Monastery has been scripted and is undergoing internal testing before release on Mists of Pandaria realms. We expect the dungeon to be ready before the weekend.

Cataclysm class fixes are expected to roll out on Warsong and Neltharion in upcoming days. This update is primarily aimed at Warsong player feedback and importance of resolving class issues on Cataclysm and as such this update will be made earlier and independent of the scheduled larger Cataclysm update mentioned in March 13, 2015 article.

Realm transfers are expected to be available tomorrow. We're looking to enable transfers from higher populated realms to relatively lower populated realms as we are committed to maintaining a population balance across realms. For example, Wrath of the Lich King transfers would be available from Ragnaros to Deathwing and from Frostwolf to Sargeras after Mists of Pandaria as soon as server-side support for Mists of Pandaria transfers is implemented. Transfers from Neltharion to Warsong are also being considered, but not from Warsong to Neltharion for obvious reasons.

Old marketplace will be released on Warmane in the next two days, this is a short term convenience goal until the new marketplace is released. Trading will be enabled with the release of the new marketplace in April 2015.

Forum development has started. We're working to develop a completely new vBulletin forum design consistent with Warmane website delivering a clean, feature rich design with a strong emphasis on aesthetics. The new forum would have a compact and advanced versions as well as a mobile version. Upon completion, current forum will be upgraded into the new one. Updates and screenshots will be posted as we progress.

Mists of Pandaria Raid Finder has had all known and reported issues corrected and is undergoing final internal testing. We're looking to release this in the next Mists of Pandaria update which is expected to take place on March 16, 2015. This estimated release date of the upcoming Mists of Pandaria update may change depending on amount of our workload on Warsong's launch on March 15, 2015. More information on the upcoming Cataclysm update and what to expect. Dragon Soul bug fixes, Halls of Origination reworked for improvement and bug fixes, Goblin starting zone quests, End Time bug fixes, Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps fixes and some other general corrections to NPC spells and mechanics. Considering that two consequtive upcoming Cataclysm updates will have overall significant internal changes to support the actual bug fixes, both updates will require extensive internal testing and post-release feedback as new issues may arise and would be immediately worked to correct them player feedback.

Jin'rokh the Breaker, Horridon and Council of Elders have been scripted and are undergoing internal testing. Encounters will be released on a per-boss or per-wing basis, we will announce more information on this depending on our pace and quality of scripts individually.

Cataclysm development includes Well of Eternity and Hour of Twilight scripting, multiple achievement fixes and priority class fixes from BugTracker. This update is still undergoing extensive development with attention to detail. We hope to post a further and more concrete status update in upcoming days as we progress.

Mists of Pandaria Raid Finder is also one of the relatively significant features that we are looking to implement corrections to within a week or two. In parallel to Raid Finder, we're working on Pet Battle system and currently have Pet Journal working, including summoning, dismissing, pet stats, renaming and learning etc. This implementation is expected to go live in the next update. The Pet Battle system itself is undergoing development.

Website development agenda includes implementation of the long planned and awaited account perk system granting distinct perks and bonuses to community members based on activity, account age and contribution. Perks are expected to not have any gameplay impact, while yielding various account-wide benefits.