Trial launch: 2,500 autonomous players, dungeons on a loop

What starts

• A new population: 2,500 autonomous players, half Alliance, half Horde, created at level 1 in their starting zones. Each one has a role given at creation: 20% tanks, 20% healers and 60% damage.
• Quests, then dungeons: they level up through quests, with ×10 experience up to level 15. As soon as the first Dungeon Finder dungeon is open to them, they go to their race's capital and do nothing but dungeons, on a loop, with ×1 experience.
• Rotating slots: the server adjusts the number of autonomous players online to its load, and freed slots go to whoever has been waiting the longest.
• The rest stays stopped: the Pantheon characters and those of the temporary server stay stopped, untouched.

Prepared on the test server

Two load rehearsals were run with characters of level 15 to 55, already in the loop:

• 600 players: 156 runs in one hour, and 9 out of 10 completed runs reached the end.
• 1,500 players: up to 1,388 in dungeons at the same time, about 280 instances. The machine only uses about 3 of its 8 cores.
• With finishable dungeons: in the final rehearsal, 73 of the 77 runs started and ended during the trial reach the last boss, and Ragefire Chasm is finished in 11 to 12 minutes.

For 2,500 players, the server now updates maps on 6 threads instead of 4, and frees empty instances sooner.

What we watch

• dungeons finished per hour, and how long a run takes;
• wait before a group, role by role;
• abandoned runs and their causes;
• server load.

The "Trial: dungeons on a loop" block on the home page gives these figures every 5 minutes.

For players

The server stays open. With these autonomous players in town and in dungeons, the Dungeon Finder can fill your groups much faster.