World of Warcraft Midnight beta hit by heavy lag as Blizzard blames advanced fish NPCs
Blizzard has finally found out the prime suspect behind the crippling server lag that hit World of Warcraft: Midnight beta’s test shortly after it released on November 11, and the answer seems to meander around its fish NPCs surprisingly. Beta testers described the experience as a point-and-click adventure, with waits of up to 30 seconds to accept a quest from NPCs. After some debugging, Blizzard Entertainment identified the culprit to be fish.
After World of Warcraft’s Midnight beta went live, lag issues surfaced almost immediately, prompting many gamers to flood Blizzard forums, inquiring, “What’s with the lag?” The complaints ballooned into the hundreds as players grumbled about delays of 10 to 20 seconds on simple actions like casting spells or looting.
The Lead Game Producer of World of Warcraft, Zorbrix, jumped on the issue and told players that the server delay was a top-priority code issue on world servers and not related to hardware. By November, Zorbrix finally dropped an update on Blizzard forums, stating:
We’re still plugging away at this, but we think we found a new problem. FISH! We’ve made a lot of improvements to NPC behavior, having them react to players and the environment more naturally, as opposed to just a general ‘wander around’ creature flag. And that’s largely working fine in many places.
But we have a lot of coastline in Midnight, and that means a lot of wildlife, like fish get spawned. And that would probably be fine, but once enough players get close enough to the fish, this advanced NPC behavior gets turned on for them and, well… something smells fishy.
However, Zorbix mentioned that fish weren’t the only likely cause for the server delay issues. He stated that developers found “a collection of things causing degraded server perf and increased memory usage.” He said that they were going to do some “mad science” fixes, further stating, “And if that doesn’t help, we’re going to have to do some more fishing. Either way, I’m hooked.”
However, Zorbrix rolled out an update, stating:
Sadly, the Fish might have been a red herring after all. We did see some overall better perf for the first hour or so after restarts, but memory usage has continued to creep up as more players and instances of zones spun up, so we definitely found our silver bullet here.We have a few code hotfixes in test, but we’ll need to keep chipping away at this and may need to run more experiments.
Blizzard is still deploying regular hotfixes, but the impact seems muted at best, as beta testers are still reporting high lag in densely populated areas. However, while this is precisely what beta-testing is for, some users on Reddit seem to have a very different take after forking over a steep $90 for the premium edition to play the Beta essentially. World of Warcraft developers are using the Midnight beta as a stress test before it officially launches on June 30, 2026.
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