The Warcraft Menethil-Auberdine boat is being replaced by NPC Porters, because of some ridiculous reason that sounds made up to me, but what would I know — I’m a user, not a provider. Excerpt, quoting Blizz dude, Tyren:
The reason for the maintenance is that we have identified that one of the problems causing multiple disconnects revolves around the boat system in the game. Specifically, the boat that travels between Menethil Harbor and Auberdine was causing errors that impacted stability for the entire realm.
When the realms come back online, this boat will be replaced by NPCs who can teleport players between these two locations. Once this fix is implemented, we will analyze performance under live conditions and from that point roll out the fix across all realms.
The boat may be restored some day to the game, maybe when the summer interns arrive, who knows. Of course, we all know what this means …
(My MS Paint skills are … lacking. Maybe when AFK Gamer’s imaginary summer intern arrives, I’ll have him spend a day or two improving that.)
Bugs can have unusual effects, and can cause problems in unexpected places. One game I worked on (let’s call it. . . Urban Simulation Sequel) had a problem where placing pipes in a certain configuration would cause a memory leak that would make a completely unrelated module of the game cough and die.
It’s possible (judging from what they said in the post and my observations of how the servers are behaving) that there’s a slow memory leak in the boat code, possibly based on the act of transferring the characters from one server to another. Each leak may be small, but when piled on top of one another they eventually start affecting server stability. This could explain why the extremely popular servers (e.g. Blackrock) crash early and often while not-so-popular servers (e.g. Crushridge) aren’t having many problems at all.
Most likely, though, I’m getting my information from the Federal Department of Colo-Rectal Information Retrieval. 🙂
The porters are from alpha/early beta. Before there were boats. Dunno what bugs could be related, but it “solid” tech, in that it is instance. No more waiting for boats! Just have to wait for everyone to talk to boat guy for instant movement.