We hope you all enjoyed the second stress test. We wanted to give you a follow-up breakdown of various points of the test, the data, and what we accomplished today. So, let’s get to it! First of all, we want to address the amount of players that attended. When Nostalrius first began, the max amount of players it had was around 4,000 at launch. With this second stress test, we had 8,000. When players are densely packed together, such as in a starting zone, the lag grows exponentially in the zone. This situation is unique to launching a new realm and does not reflect the behaviors of 1+ month old realms where players are scattered all over Azeroth. In the end, there is no hardware in existence that can completely mitigate this particular form of lag. However, this does bring us to our next subject! We have developed a new system specifically designed to tackle the rigors of a launch and smooth the experience. All of the various problems such as dense zone population, mob respawns & calculations, view distance, and zoning are taken into account. Testing this system is the primary purpose for these stress tests. The crashes you noticed during the test were all due to this feature which gave us a lot of useful data to improve it. As we want to make our launch as smooth as humanly possible, we will be having a 3rd and final test to confirm the coming improvements of this system to be production and launch ready. As with the other tests, this one will be this coming weekend -- Sunday, December 4th. We exceeded our expectations with this test in relation to both the amount of players that participated, as well as the success of the server, hardware, and our launch systems. We hope you will grace us one last time by participating in the 3rd stress test this coming weekend. Your efforts will be rewarded with the official release date right after the final stress test ends. Our Legacy is soon upon us!