Realm Stability, Test Realm, and a chance in the Burning Crusade Beta
by Elizabeth Harper 
Mar 3rd 2006 at 12:30PM
Community manager Ordinn has announced that Blizzard is planning to roll out new hardware
(for both new and existing realms) at the beginning of April. However, next week they plan on stress testing the
servers, as well as the 1.10 content patch, by opening up the public test realms. And, finally, "to make
things interesting" there will be three skill-based
contests that will grant the winner entry into the Burning Crusade beta. I'll be seeing you in-game!Filed under: Realm Status, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Lock Mar 3rd 2006 4:04PM
Full contest details:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/contests/ptr-contest/
elizabeth Mar 3rd 2006 4:35PM
Thanks, Lock, I've added that link to the original post!
GlennZilla Mar 3rd 2006 4:37PM
Ok so two of the contests are a race to level 50 and a to see how many characters you can get to level 25.
Sounds like a contest for the guys who live in their parents basements and don't have anything else to do.
So much for me being able to earn a seat in the beta. Curse my casual player status and offline responsibilites.
Rombus Mar 4th 2006 3:02AM
Anyone else NOT Going to do it since this contest is going to make the 2 contest servers absolutly slammed with people? Think your tiny server login line of 500 is bad? Wait till you see these contest servers, im guessing probably there will be lines of 1000+. And just imagine hundreds upon hundreds of others all attempting to do the same contests, i imagne that every newbie area will be totally overfarmed.
This is going to be interesting to watch!
elizabeth Mar 4th 2006 3:40AM
Well, the point is to stress test it, isn't it? This is an excellent way to get as many people as possible on to those servers for an immensely thorough "stress test." Whether it will actually be fun to play on is another question entirely.
Joe Mar 4th 2006 4:19PM
GlennZilla, I think you're right about the type of people who will actually win this contest. But of course these are the people that Bliz wants to do the beta test. Who else would be able to devote 80+ hours to beta testing?
It still sucks that they got my hopes up for a fleeting minute before I saw what the "skill-based" contest actually was. This is more like a qualifying event to make sure that the people playing the beta will be able to give Bliz as much free testing as possible in the set timeframe.
Bottom line: good for Bliz, bad for casual players.
Grendalsh Mar 5th 2006 3:28AM
Actually, I see this as decent for the casual players. All the powerleveling Twinks are gonna be busy on the Contest Server, leaving the live servers to the rest of us. So us casual/playing for fun folks won't have to wade thru so many powergamers for a while.
Oh, and I tried to hit the Test server tonite.. queue was 5500.. i can wait to see it on the live server..