- PVP:
- Alterac Valley has been fixed:
- Graveyard guards are now linked
- Korrak stats have been adjusted
- Fixed LUA errors in Alterac Valley
- Fixed LOS issues on Alterac banners
- Commanders and lieutenants will no longer respawn
- Ground assault are working as intended
- Armor scraps upgrade now immediately replace troops
- Wing commanders only aggro if attacked
- Galvangar & Balinda no longer provide a bonus buff if dead
- Mines guards are now affected by armor upgrade
- Elemental/Riders event spawns are repeatable
- Removed stacking npcs in specific locations
- Ores and herbs have been added
- A few modifications in the PvP queue have been applied
- Alterac Valley has been fixed:
- PVE:
- Removed Darkmoon Faire items that were still present ingame
- Fixed gameobjects pooling (devilsaurs, mining nodes, herbs ...)
- Fixed Demoralizing Shout threat computation
- Fly master are now immune to Mind Control
- Fixed an issue regarding Fallenroot Shadowstalker steath in Blackfathom Deeps
- Fixed Majordomo Executus weapon in Molten Core
- Fixed Grark Lorkrub
- The shackles are now available at Lexlort if you haven't finished the quest chain
- Fixed quest [It's Dangerous to go Alone]
- Fixed quest [Gerenzo's Orders]
- [Summoning the Princess] is now available to both factions
- Fixed the level requirements for the quest [Summoning the Princess] chain
- Klinfran will now cast his enrage even while having scorpid sting, dispelling it
- Fixed Primal Ooze (will clone itself at 20%hp)
- Added Nagmara's dialogue option to open the tavern door of BRD
- New gambits are available at Betina Bigglezink
- Sap immunity has been added to 142 creatures.
- Fixed Majordomo Executus' dialogue text
- Removed item [Chimaerok Tenderloin] (from patch 1.9)
- Removed quest [Glyph Chasing has been] (from patch 1.8)
- BFD: Fallenroot Shadowstalker now have correct stats & spells
- Molten Core: Majordomo now yeld his trident
- Missing chair added in the house south of Darkshires
- Secret location event between Elwynn forest and Burning steppes scripted.
- Fixed horde / alliance specific loots in BWL
- Dire Maul:
- Pusillin fight mechanics have been fixed
- Pusillin text has been fixed
- EXPLOIT: Fixed an exploit related to specific chests near Black Rock Depths
- EXPLOIT: Fixed an exploit regarding all Monastery bosses
- EXPLOIT: Fixed a few gameobjects respawn timers
- EXPLOIT: Fixed a way to put bosses out of LoS
- EXPLOIT: Fixed possible double loot of some raid items
- EXPLOIT: Fixed an exploit to gain gathering skills faster
- SPELLS/MECHANICS:
- Windfury totem will now work on special attacks
- Players controlling is now working as intended (you can make the player chase your target, ...)
- Gnomish Mind Control Cap: fixed failure cases
- Fix Grounding Totem charge removal (for DoTs)
- Adjust resistance system to be Blizzlike
- Fixed Blood Fury AP bonus computation
- EXPLOIT: Fixed possible exploit in MC mechanism
- EXPLOIT: Fixed an exploit to reset item cooldowns
- PERFORMANCES/SECURITY:
- Added a clustering system inside a single continent - fixed server lags
- Fixed a few flaws in the anticheat protection
- Fixed 11 crash causes (4 from these actually happened)
- Fixed an exploit that allowed one to cast autorepeat spells while moving (wand ...)
- Fixed an exploit in the trade system
- The yell/say range has been decreased for low level characters to limit the impact of the gold selling websites advertising. Please keep in mind that Nostalrius does not sell ingame gold, and that we permanently ban gold sellers / gold buyers, as stated in our terms of use.
- Various optimizations
- Improved detection of gold sellers
- Added anticheat detection for a few new tools available in the wild
Regarding server stability:
Along with BWL, a lot of fixes / new systems have been applied. You can find some on the above patchnote. Others are more "internal" changes, like a new tickets handling system that will greatly improve GMs productivity, and their ability to handle tickets from different realms more easily.
We noticed that these changes globally affected server stability, by introducing crash sources.
Some technical information regarding how we fix crashes
When a crash happens, we always get information regarding the faulty code. Generally, we can deduce the cause, and fix it within a day.
However, this update introduced a crash we could not easily track, because a faulty instruction would corrupt memory, and produce a crash when another part of the server would access this memory in another context. To identify these crashes, we need to monitor all the memory reads / writes, and to make wrong memory usage crash the server instantly (instead of having a possible crash somewhere else later).
What we did
Once we identified that a monitoring was needed to fix this crash, we had to find a way to monitor code errors that could run with 5000 online players (high performance required). This monitoring has been implemented on the live server during short periods of time.
In total, we got 60 crashes caused by memory errors; all these errors have been fixed now.
25 core fixes and 10 scripting fixes were needed.
We fixed additional issues by running these same tools on development server by simulating high population conditions.
The result
We will continue monitoring the server to see if the crashes are still occuring after the fixes we made, and after this update. Our main focus, in the dev team, is to fix the crashes as soon as possible. We will take all the possible actions to restore the server stability before the end of the week, even if we have to temporarily limit population, impact server performance, etc ...
For the future
In order to prevent this from happening in the future, a procedure has been designed to detect these crashes in early development cycles.
