Blizzard’s technical quirks continue to surprise.
Recently, players participating in the beta for the new World of Warcraft expansion, Midnight, began reporting significant technical issues. The game suffered from heavy lag, occasional freezes, delays in quest assignment, and characters sometimes disappeared.
Blizzard Entertainment attempted server restarts, but the problems returned soon after:
We’ve restarted the servers multiple times and implemented several changes. While performance improved briefly, it ultimately regressed. The challenge is that this isn’t a single issue but a constellation of factors causing degraded server performance and increased memory usage on the realm servers. We resolved several problems, only to uncover more, and the cycle continued.
World of Warcraft Midnight’s developers continued to investigate and, surprisingly, it appears that clever fish were part of the problem — the enhanced NPC behavior could, in certain situations, generate an enormous load on the servers:
We’re still working on a fix, but it looks like we’ve discovered a new issue. FISH! We added many enhancements to NPC behavior so their reactions to players and the environment feel more natural rather than simply having NPCs wander the map. In most areas this works well, but Midnight features extensive shorelines and therefore a lot of wildlife like fish. Ordinarily that’s harmless, but when a certain number of players get close enough, the advanced NPC routines activate for them and… well… things get decidedly fishy.
Source: iXBT.games