I haven’t experienced anything close to this in terms of bad performance anywhere in the game and the expansion has been out for more than two months. Valdrakken is a disaster because it tanks everyone’s FPS, but considering it is a central hub for the server, some 2000 constantly dragons flying around it and heavy load created by crafting orders and AH, all of this is entirely expected. Still the most important is that the performance remains constant.
I don’t use an SSD so the world and its assets don’t load instantly for me. Sometimes Dalaran can take up to half a minute before I can even start moving, otherwise I’ll be blocked by invisible walls every two steps in all directions. That’s fine.
In this specific area, joining a group sometimes takes forever. At first your screen freezes, some time later raid frames appear. A minute later you’re still in the old phase and can’t see anyone in the game world around you, the game freezes again for ten seconds and the shade of your raid frames lights up indicating there are other players close to you, but you can’t do anything, because now your game has become a slideshow and it takes a while longer to catch up, by which time you didn’t even get the chance to tag the boss having no control of your character and the event is over, so you are doomed to repeat the process, except that by the third time, your game crashes, screen turns black and you must restart the PC by force.
The area is simply crammed with too many players and this is the root cause of all the issues. The event itself is very boring but players can still reap the rewards with minimal to absolutely no participation. The gist of it all is to realm hop like crazy for several hours until you have killed the end boss some 70 times in a row until you can afford to buy all the player collection items from the vendor.
Repeat boss kills within the same day, in the same reset window grant 6x currency but the base event reward once every 5(?) hours gives less than that in the box which you receive. This is not gameplay, the content is boring and no one enjoys doing it past first completion, yet everyone is here doing the same thing because they want the Mount from the vendor.
The problem is with zone and content design. I’ve probably found myself around the Dragonbane Keep event in The Waking Shores hundreds of times by now with hundreds of other players on my screen, yet it never led to a less than ideal player experience. The same can be said for the Iskaraa Soup event (after some adjustments).
