Hi everyone,



We'd like to give you an update about the instability some of you are seeing, particularly on the PC EU megaserver, which includes issues such as long loading times, inability to log in, and other "servers are overloaded" experiences. As you likely have surmised, this is related to the Update 24 launch, and has been exacerbated by the Witches Festival event currently live which is resulting in a lot of players logging on to participate.



We thought we had fixed the problems that have plagued the last few big in-game events by introducing an updated LFG system, some server optimizations, etc., but obviously it wasn't enough. The updated LFG system appears to be working as it should, but it has exposed another underlying issue that is causing certain parts of our servers - especially our database clusters - to become overloaded and eventually unresponsive. This is why we put a cap on the number of concurrent players that can log in last Friday, and then published the patch this morning trying to alleviate that issue.



At this time, we have another hotfix that we plan to deploy tonight (around 10:00pm EDT) that we believe will allow everything to run as normal, but frankly, we'll wait to see what it does before making any more promises. This hotfix will require a small amount of downtime for PC EU.



We totally understand it's not fair that PC EU is hit by these types of problems far more often than any of the other realms. This is because there are more concurrent users there during peak times than on any other realm. The problem you all have been experiencing only shows up at levels of concurrency seen on PC EU.



We are already discussing additional options - besides directing all of our resources to identify and fix this issue, of course - which include extending the Witches Festival for a couple days. We'll keep you posted on that as soon as we get a handle on the underlying cause of the instability.



As always, thank you for your patience. We don't like this any more than you do, and are doing everything we can to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible.