It must have come to a surprise to us that Arena Tournament is now merging with Molten-WoW. Malaco and Kaer have both posted on their forums notifying players of the merge.
It’s very important that you read the whole text before coming to any conclusion
This might come as a surprise for most of you, but for the past few days AT and Molten have been talking about the possibility of a union. The conversations went better than we could have expected and we came to terms both sides agreed on.
AT and Molten will be uniting as one, we’re certain that this will benefit not only our players but also the server itself. We hope that our players can be as open minded about this as we were and give this the chance it deserves.
We are looking forward to combine two very powerful teams which can bring quality that will be hard to find elsewhere.
In the near future this union will receive its own new, original name.
Due to the size of Molten’s player base we will be merging our account database into theirs.
What will happen for me as an AT player?
Nothing that you achieved will be lost in the process, you will keep all your characters, donations and progress.
For you as a player there won’t be any noticeable change to the server, except for the possibility of competing with thousands more players.
What will happen to my donations?
Every donation made before the 15th will be transferred over, none of your benefits will be lost.
They will however not be applying to any of Moltens original realms.
The donation system will be adjusted in the future.
When will this union happen?
We will officially be moving the server after the wotlk season end on sunday 15th feb 21.00 CET.
You can already merge your account now! HERE
What expansions will be moved over?
Currently we will only be moving WoTLK over, and will add more expansions in the future if there is demand for them. We will have a community poll in the upcoming weeks.
Your characters will be backed up(saved) for any expansions that are not immediately moved over.
MoP / WoD & Cata will remain open until the we announce a date of closure
Im sure there will be a lot of questions and we’re going to host a Q&A together with the molten staff on friday 18.00 CET and you can ask question HERE
*EDIT*
The merge means that the two communities are going to be ONE.
It does NOT mean that AT’s current servers will be merged in to their servers.
The ladders will be seperated as well.
WotLK will stay online and stay more or less exactly what it is, but hosted somewhere else.
Your WotLK donations, character progress and everything will be the same. It’s the same server.
Your character progress is NOT transferred over to the other, original Molten servers.
Cata, MoP and WoD will be closed down for now and we do expect to open up PvP realms on those expansions again, where all your current progress on AT will be restored.
Your character progress is NOT transferred over to the original Molten servers.
After extensive background discussions and a lot of positive emotions we have had with Arena Tournament staff we (Molten community) would like to welcome Arena Tournament uniting with us as we have risen from ashes stronger and more determined than ever. For many years this unity had been looked forward to due a strong potential of achieving the most longed-for advancements and improvements in private server emulation.
Merging of Arena Tournament accounts and staff joining us is already in progress and is being implemented to ensure the smoothest transition over time. Arena Tournament players can already start merging their accounts by clicking here. Officially the merge will complete this weekend as Arena Tournament’s current Arena Season comes to an end and their current WotLK realm (PvP-only) will be joining the ranks of our realms as Blackrock and considering popularity and queue on Neltharion, we are considering reopening Warsong 4.3.4 to also join the ranks of our servers.
Extensive QA sessions will be conducted through our Twitch TV channels to answer and many questions as well as FAQ topic will be created on our forum. I would like to keep this announcement brief at this stage and once again, on behalf of Molten community, welcome Arena Tournament’s competent team and skilled players to join us as we march forward with one goal – to bring a better private server for everyone to enjoy, community and staff alike.
Using this opportunity we would like to remind that we are looking to move realms back to EU in near future.
Molten WoW has come back after a few days of being offline and has endured one of the worst things a private server could imagine; their database had been compromised and now all our characters are gone. Anyways, here’s what Kaer Wolf had to say.
Update: A false DMCA claim has been posted by Hermes on our hijacked Facebook page.
Hello Molten community,
As of January 22, 2015 all of our databases had been hijacked by (public ref: www.companycheck.co.uk) the security administrator Gianfranco Panico (Jeff) employed and instructed by Mikayil Mammadov (Hermes) through a network of companies (incl. Artabazan Ltd., Crossroutes Ltd., Skiddaw Ltd.) operating in the United Kingdom and who have been responsible for safety of all our databases across our server infrastructure, including backup server machines that were operated and maintained by the same individuals. Considering the disastrous scale of community damage and in hopes for a investigation we have come to a decision to provide all information, data and details of Mikayil Mammadov, Gianfranco Panico and Vyacheslav Chernyshev and related companies to the United Kingdom government authorities and institutions through legal means, and where applicable, with community support.
The hijack had started by having all our staff accesses to our servers removed, effectively denying all services and means of securing our data, and refusal to our agreement to any demands in our efforts to save our databases. Considering these circumstances and as a result of our investigations into suspected misappropriopriation and unduly assignments of Molten’s community funds, we have strong reasons to believe that individuals responsible for this hijacking had a sole purpose to destroy evidence and traces of their suspected grand schemes and misconduct. Our initial suspicion of misconduct had started when Mikayil Mammadov (Hermes) had announced that Molten is suffering from financial losses and proceeded with cutting community and staff short of due payments and bonuses in December 2014 and dismissal of key staff members motivated by “cost cutting”. Additionally we were informed of large amounts of tax liability that Skiddaw Ltd. has had to pay in fines due to tax evasion, which in turn had always been declared and assumed to have been paid throughout these years of operating in the United Kingdom as maintenance expenses. The data and information that we have been able to secure indicates a grand scale misconduct, misappropriation of funds and suspicion of money laundering through a network of offshore companies and bank accounts, all of which will be provided to authorities and institutions to investigate. Our new Facebok page is located atwww.facebook.com/moltenwowofficial. Our previous page has also been hijacked, is no longer representing our announcements and as such, any information posted on facebook.com/moltenwow is not longer a valid announcement and can be reported athttps://www.facebook.com/help/contact/797573933590053 and as per Facebook Page Terms and Facebook Terms of Service . Considering the loss of character databases, we have no objections should our community members decide to dispute payments to Skrill Ltd. as per Skrill Terms and Conditions.
We have been able to secure our accounts (incl. coins history), we have retained our core and website code that we have been developing all these years. All staff members have been working together to mitigate the damage caused by this disaster.
What can we do to mitigate the damage?
Everything we can, such as refunding 100% of coins ever donated back to community accounts, instant levelups, starting gear, boosts etc. We are working to come up with a refund and boost system help us to mitigate the damage, and later today, open forums for feedback, backlash and answers to any discussions.
I, Kaer, the founder and former leader of our community, am also back to staff this day. It was my decision today that we stand our ground on a devastated Molten, whatever hardships and understandable community backlash is to come. I apologize and take responsibility for failing to quickly identify and investigate these individuals that have resorted to inflicting tremendous damage in their attempts to cover up the traces of their suspected misdeeds. We ready and willing to do everything we can to heal damage done to us over time.
In response to user aukuni‘s post: “Did they make any demands upon Molten? If so, can you elaborate?”, Edifice responded with:
Yes, they asked us for money & not publish names, they couldn’t get “more donations” because we rerouted the DNS.
The person responsible for all financials and one of the hijackers (Hermes) asking us for money, pitiful.
Sadly this has resulted in the loss of a few staff, including the following staff:
Green_dev: instances, writing them from scratch, all entirely his work, goes as far as watching a video to get a general outline how an encounter works.
Shortbuckle: No idea what he did, but Edifice describes him as an “Angry dev”
Ramires: Core reworks, infrastructure, optimizations, heavy CLB work, formulas, arena, correcting the non-standard c++ abomination of a core trinity spawned, class work, excellent c++ coder.
Let me be one to say welcome back to BeepBeep. BeepBeep was banned from the forum a few years ago. After reading the Molten Wiki I recall his user page saying he had been banned for something to do with another private server. Anyways, he was a great website designer for Molten.
Also, welcome back Kaer. A lot of us knew that he was coming back prior to the database compromise, but sadly not under these circumstances.
Anyways, for those still sticking to playing on Molten I can tell you a few things.
Molten is the most popular western, english speaking private server. However there are a few flaws that come with the server that need to be outlined to the players on this server. I’m writing this as the server will be down for a few days due to unknown circumstances. It may be something to do with database compromise, server host misconfiguration, data loss, bad SQL query to do with clustered load balancing, I don’t know. I would however like players to know the server that they’re playing on and some of my past experiences with Molten.
About me:
I have played on Molten since late 2010 and am a very patient and understanding person. Not a ex-staff member and never have gotten banned on Molten’s servers, so I’m trying very hard to not make a hissy fit on their servers. These will just be observations found by me and other players on the past few years on Molten. Criticisms given by me will be with the highest sincerity to the people that run the servers. My identity will remain private as I do not feel confident with giving my character name here as Molten staff will likely terminate my account. I know some of these stories may cause me to be recognized by some players, but I urge Molten staff to take this with a grain of salt and take in some of my observations.
I will try my best to be honest and blunt about the server and it’s situation. This is not a blog post aimed at ‘exposing’ the server for what it is.
The multiple expansion issue
Ever since the release of the Cataclysm realms Greymane and Deepholm, Molten’s Wrath of The Lich King servers have gone neglected. Wrath of the Lich King players had since never seen anything done on the servers for nearly that whole year, until the Gunship battle had released.
I saw that this was even more evident when many events stopped working properly as opposed to the previous year when they had no other expansions. For example, the Brewfest dungeon finder reward hasn’t worked the past two years however it worked seamlessly when Molten only had WoTLK realms. You’re still able to get the Brewfest mounts… except now it’s only available on the vote shop.
When Isle of Conquest was released, The airship at Hangar had it’s three airship cannons working perfectly, however when the Gunship had arrived months later, the airship cannons ceased to work and has not been working ever since. That was four years ago. I personally was very disappointed when my post regarding this in the Gunship feedback thread was deleted due to not being related to the Gunship battle event. Oh well. More the reason to yell ‘OMFG GO DOCKS NOOOOB’ in Isle of Conquest. Classic Molten tactics.
Developers
Some efforts to increase productivity on their multiple expansions have been to hire new developers. If you have noticed recently, there have been recruitment posts under the latest news to hire new developers.
Some of the staff members that have since left are the following:
BeepBeep (Website designer from New Zealand) From memory, and reading the Molten Wiki, he got banned and removed from staff for trying to start up another private server. BeepBeep was responsible for creating the original website designs on Molten. Apparently he worked almost nonstop. This transferred to be a job for Edifice if I am correct.
Mammen – I believe he was the developer named Spp that had released Dungeon Finder for TrinityCore, an open source wow private server core. Why I believe this is because Kaer (the server owner) was talking on Ragnaros Alliance global chat one day and also said something along the lines of “One of our developers released dungeon finder to Trinitycore”, I asked if it was Spp and he replied back to me with “yes”. His forum profile on Molten lists his country of origin as Spain which is the same as Spp’s github profile, along with his inactivity from Trinitycore and Molten. One of Edifice’s posts described his work as “Big functionality, instance systems, random dungeon finder, big core addons that are unique to Molten”. According to Edifice, he was “not a full-time developer here, aquired his skill set for the odd thing.”.
Mef – One of the administrators that was around for a long time since the beginning. I have no idea who he really was though.
Misc – other developer roles that are still here. This was posted by Edifice.
Ramires: Core reworks, infrastructure, optimizations, heavy CLB work, formulas, arena, correcting the non-standard c++ abomination of a core trinity spawned, class work, excellent c++ coder. Greendev: instances, writing them from scratch, all entirely his work, goes as far as watching a video to get a general outline how an encounter works. KosmoKoz: Same as green, heavy heavy instance work, some item related work and quests, all his own work. Nepenthe: Heavy database work, 10 man workforce in 1 person, fixing 90% of quests. Raufen: Massive class work, balancing, formulas, quest scripting, extraordinary amount of work produced by this guy. Shortbuckle: Angry dev Edifice: Any and everything web and database related.
Some community members have noticed that Kaer will be coming back as the project manager/team leader of Molten. As I am writing this, Molten’s servers are down, every other part besides their main website is down, however I can confirm that Kaer was active on his forum account a few days ago, he was placed as project leader on the bugtracker. Edifice subtly confirmed this by replying to the thread with “Who knows?”. I see the next forum announcement being from Kaer to announce his return to the server and other major announcements to the server.
Ulduar Releasing on Wrath of the Lich King realms
In late 2011, there was an Ulduar feedback thread started by one of the developers. I do not have the post available as it was deleted and is no longer indexed by Google anymore. No fixes were done and we then never had follow-ups from the developers regarding Ulduar until late 2014. This is most likely due to the multiple expansion issues that Molten is facing.
Administration
Some time in 2011, a staff member posted a few images on their main website, along with a message warning these people to stop. I forgot the entirety of the message, but I did manage to save the images. Furthermore, I found out the person’s identity by obtaining their facebook ID from the filename, and posted his information on a forum thread. After that, the thread and the website post was quickly removed. I will not be releasing his identity here, but I’ll give you what image was posted on Molten’s main website: http://i.imgur.com/DSJi0aD.jpg
Website Features
Some thoughts on the website features
Edifice promised in earlier 2013 that there would be some new account features that never saw the light of day.
Armory 2.0 will be released soon has become a big joke
The forum 2.0 is useless and is missing features. Molten should remove it and revert back to 1.0 as default for everyone. Even moderators confess they use the 1.0 forum. Even I use it for taking a lot of my screenshots here.
Molten’s wiki was removed even though it brought some SEO value for Google. Maybe the spam was too much for the huge moderator team.
Changelogs
“Changelog will be posted within 24 hours”
The beginning of cataclysm was undoubtedly Molten’s most productive time in it’s history……..
Promises
The Forward into 2014 thread is probably the best example of how optimistic Molten Staff are, however with
Some of their promises include
Infrastructure improvements
This includes, but is not limited to improving server-side response times, latency, optimizations and etc.
A lot of us Molten players are left in the dark when it comes to infrastructure improvements, however we do get to know from time to time about updates on their proposed Clustered Load Balancing, the server feature that was announced later in 2012, in late 2013, Clustered Load Balancing have been ‘kicked off’, and now we’re in 2015 with no news.
New armory
The long-awaited “Armory 2.0” will include many new features which will include more statistics and information on characters, graphical overhaul and an overall more clean and easy-to-use system.
I believe most players have lost hope on the Armory 2.0, being something that was supposed to give the armory a facelift two years ago. They have also since removed “Armory 2.0 will be coming soon” from their armory page since the refixup of the current armory. I personally am contempt using the current armory as it is however.
Wintergrasp
Yep, Wintergrasp was scheduled for release on Warsong early 2010 but due to unforseen circumstances, it never saw the light of day. Molten staff now infamously use the “thousands of players in one area will cause huge instability – wait for clustered load balancing and it may happen” scapegoat, which I kind of understand, but since there are servers like Gamer District that net in about 1200 players at peaks with a working Wintergrasp, I don’t see why Molten can’t either given their resources. Whether it’s a never releasing clustered load balancing or a fake population, I don’t know.
Mistakes
Molten has made some mistakes in the past, some of these have personally affected me, however the way they have covered their mistakes was appalling.
1. Molten Tournament
Molten’s arena tournaments were to an extent successful, but they had made some major flaws that ultimately led to the demise of the tournament.
Deathwing originally had unofficial 3vs3 tournaments that players had partaked in, where the winners would win molten coins from the hosters. This was set up in a 5vs5 scenario with two players getting killed, and a modified Pitbull unit frames addon for the user interface.
Following the success of these tournaments, Molten staff decided to host their own tournaments, starting with the WoW streamer Bajheera. When Molten started these tournaments, Arena Tournament, a very renown private server for it’s PvP had posted Molten’s tournament stream on their main website.
In response to this, Edifice made a thread after the first (or second) tournament to invite players from Arena Tournament (and other servers) to their tournaments. Everyone from Molten’s community seemed ecstatic about Molten partnering up with Arena Tournament until about 20 minutes later where he closed the thread, stating that the staff didn’t want that to happen. Later the thread was completely deleted.
Malaco, Arena Tournament’s owner had lost respect for Molten due to this move.
Like a lot of people, I had a bank character. Even more so, I had an account of bank characters. I had multiple guilds for various purposes and ran hundreds of auctions. I had millions of gold on me. I was very much a happy camper until Molten decided that they needed a spring clean of accounts, guilds and characters. The forums are currently down so I looked at the cache of the page.
Of course premium accounts were exempt from that, but not us regular account holders. When I read this post, it had originally read “Characters below level 18 will be deleted”. I can even prove this by pointing out this post that quoted this specific phrase.
A moderator even confirmed this by posting the following:
Anyways I decided to run my alts through Ragefire Chasm until they all hit level 18 and made my guilds have at least 5 members in them. Much to my dismay, I find out after the clean-up that all my bank characters (besides one that accidentally hit level 19) were deleted. All my guilds removed as well as they deleted the characters before checking the 5 character guild limit.
The mistake that Molten Staff had actually done here was that they had deleted all characters below level 19, not below level 18. I don’t know if you can do maths, but ‘below level 18’ means to exclude level 18 characters. Anyways I couldn’t do anything about it and from then I was on the brink of quitting Molten. Later I got even more angry by seeing the post being edited to “level 18 and below”. Proof to this can be showed on this post.
And here’s a deluded Molten player with poor maths skills responding awfully to someone’s misfortune. Luckily his post saved the censored forum post from oblivion.
Some other posts
I was even more disgusted that they took additional measures cover up their tracks; even after editing ‘below level 18’ to ‘level 18 and below’, they had went further to remove any references of deleting low level characters from the main post, and player’s misfortunes. Moderators however still forgot about editing out the quotes from the players. No apologies, just downright refusing that it even happened seems to be the answer for Molten’s administration. Boy, I wonder how many people’s posts got removed from this disaster.
Censorship
Let me start off with saying that I completely understand that staff do not want harsh opinions about their server on their forums. Opinions that may be offensive to the point of disrespecting the server. However I urge the moderator staff to be a little bit more open minded. There are some completely legitimate concerns for the server being voiced on the forums and some of them have resulted in the players being punished.
Many private servers are very much open to critique and Molten should be no exception. However with the current situation, staff seem to prefer censoring user thoughts on server direction. I believe this is due to the very unnecessarily large moderator team Molten has.
Closing threads is another concern of mine. Moderator staff seem to like getting the last word in before closing a thread. This was particularly effective in this post
Dodgykebaab also highlights this post in his Mists of Pandaria video and voiced his opinions.
Dodgykebaab is a Youtuber that recently started WoW private server reviews. He started reviewing Molten’s Wrath of The Lich King realms, and his video was taken very positively. His post on the forum can be found here.
Sapphire’s response to the video was the following:
“Nice cool calm and appealing sounding commentary. Truthful on all aspects covered. Made me chuckle a few times. Here’s my upvote.”
It all went wrong when he posted his Cataclysm review video to the forums. Staff had decided to censor it, even though he was just being honest, outlining the server’s bugs and flaws at that time. Dodgykebaab decided ask why he was being ‘silenced’ and he got handed with a permanent ban from the forums as well as an IP ban. I do however believe that his Mists of Pandaria server review was made more in a negative manner as a reason to bash on Molten staff. I do however agree with him arguing that it’s state of release is awful though. Although as someone who keeps track of wow server cores, I would like people to understand that reverse engineering the game client to find suitable opcodes for the game client is a mission. Molten staff were also solely looking for a reverse engineer in one of their staff recruitment threads. Open source MoP private server cores are inactive as well. Trinitycore and cmangos just do not have a MoP branch for private servers like Molten to work off from.
Anyways, I was optimistic that Molten would have taken in the criticisms about the server in a more positive light instead of decide to censor it completely. In my opinion, I found it downright disrespectful on their end to treat us players as if we were living in sheer ignorance.
Community
Staff
I believe that this is undoubtedly the most touchy subject for Molten, however I don’t see how staff justify permanently banning players for staff disrespect and wintrading, yet give 10-30 days for first time hacking offenses that harm the community very much more.
Community Engagement
Edifice promises in this post[citation needed due to forums offline] that they would engage the community more and involve us in a lot of their decision making. Disregarding Sapphire’s post, it sounds pretty cool and I really hope this happens for Molten.
Molten promised a long time ago that they would engage the community more through event masters, by having active events all the time. They kind of did that with Molten TV, which was actually pretty cool, but it was short lived. I’m sad that Borrean as MMORPGRussia hasn’t done any more events throughout the year.
Population
Let me start off by stating that the website counter for the population is a lie. Before you raise your pitchforks, give me a chance to explain why.
The fiasco about faking the online population started from the video on YouTube titled Molten-WoW doubles players online uploaded on September 4, 2012, gaining 8,000 views as of now. Many forum members have posted this video and have been getting removed from the forum as a result.
A few times, Molten has had to hide the server population due to ‘security reasons’.
I had personally archived the thread, posted on September 29, 2012 which was later deleted.
The post was made by user drekavac95 (now not a banned account, but also a removed account)
Title: Population statistics removed?
Security reasons my ***….parsing XML is a srs bsns.
Yeah, blame others server for it. OMMMMG THEY SEE US BOTTING THEY DDOSING, ups, I mean have ****load of players online.
Get real, no one is going to DDoS molten because they all know we have fake population statistics, you removed it because pretty much everyone knows about faking it.
And if you’re so scared of DDoSing, show the real population info. I’m pretty much sure no one will even think on DDoSing you anymore.
’nuff said
Shortbuckle (Developer) response to the accusations of faking the online population was the following:
Damn man, you finally busted us *gulp* Thanks for doing us a favor, hurry make another account and reply about your genius conspiracy discoveries, bachelor
Kaer’s (Server owner/Team leader) response to the accusations of faking the online population was the following:
It’s got to do with those new conspiracy videos of imbeciles doing mass “/who” commands querying a maximum of 50 players per zone and excluding idle accounts in character selection screen. It’s the 1% percent, illuminati, masons, zionists Molten staff working lying to players in every corner. Everyone knows that we’re popular only because of advertisements, because we pay xtremetop100 to put others down, because our changelogs are fake and there are no players in-game to verify it in the first place, worst server in existence, basically “EA Games” of the private server world.Should’ve just announced the news that “Highest populated server is likely to attract unwanted attention, be it from Blizzard or from random blackmailing botnets”.
Let’s state some facts about polling server population and in relation to the website’s population:
After the “doubling online population” video, Molten later had limited /who requests to reduce server lag which in turn conveniently broken census polling addons.
/who requests have a limit of 49 people, so it is more useful to refine your /who results
Molten’s website updates it’s population not in real time, but in timed intervals of about 10 minutes if I’m correct.
Molten’s website also counts players on the on the character selection screen, as cited in Kaer’s quote: “excluding idle accounts in character selection screen“
I decided to poll Lordearon’s total population on both Alliance and Horde ingame, not just after a crash, but while the server was still online.
How I went about doing this was doing /who requests for specific level ranges and then doing /who requests for specific classes at level 80. I did not spam these requests through the use of addons, but I went manually and typed these in and waited for the server to respond. Not once I found that the who list went over 49 so there is no margin of error.
My findings were that the total online population of Lordearon was somewhere around 607 players online, which is only 37.1% of the total proposed online which was 1637. I highly doubt that 63% of online players are on the character selection screen. Polling the alliance population just after polling of horde population showed that the player count did not increase at all, which is evidence that there were no recent server crashes.
The video showing my polling of Lordearon’s population is here
About half a year ago, I saw a forum post titled “Molten players, you have been charted“. The community player parsed the HTML on the main website page. Later I found he was banned, so I checked out his website and found the following:
The counts of players displayed in the home page for WotLK realms are fake. I subtract 1000 players from each realm. I am not sure of what they are doing exactly, but the result of subtracting 1000 is very reasonable. In over one and a half million samples, there have never been less than 1000 players online.
This definitely makes sense that I found 607 players instead of 1637.
I also decided to take a poll of Warsong’s population as well. My findings were that the total online population was 319 players, instead of the proposed 565 players. Doing the math in the video, it showed that 319 players were only 56.5% of the 565 players. This means that 246 people (or 43.5%) of the proposed players were supposedly on the character selection screen.
It gives me immense pleasure to announce that we are releasing Stormstout, our first Mist of Pandaria 5.4.2 realm. As you know we have been working on this project for a long time.
We are inviting you to test Stormstout and to provide your feedback. During the testing period we expect you to be tolerant to bugs, phasing issues, crashes and any other unforeseen issues and to help us improve Stormstout. After the test period which is expected to last for one to two months all player data will be wiped to begin fresh on an improved realm.
Stormstout has been set to a population cap of 3,500.
To ensure that that almost every part of the game is visited or used, experience rate on Stormstout is 5x.
This number may be lowered depending on stability and any other unforeseen issues.
Website features for Stormstout will remain disabled for the duration of the test period.
To accompany the launch of Mists of Pandaria, we are releasing a new bugtracker.
The new bugtracker is aimed at improving the development process and the player experience at Molten. Its comprehensive functions allow to track bug-fixing and to manage changelogs more efficiently. The new bugtracker is very intuitive. It won’t take you long to learn how to use it effectively for reporting problems.
We have been told earlier this year that Molten had started working on developing a Mists of Pandaria server. Along with hiring new staff (which included reverse engineers most likely for MoP), we may just see their MoP realm releasing sooner than we think.
I was browsing Molten’s forum today and came across a new guide for installing Mists of Pandaria. It hadn’t really phased me because other members have already made guides for installing MoP if I could recall. Anyways, the moderator Zelta, the one that made the infamous Cataclysm launcher for Molten has now made a Mists of Pandaria 5.4.2 installer, with a screenshot of Molten’s new realm, Stormscout, confirming that Molten may be releasing MoP within the year.
According to staff, there will be a new announcement soon on the website so keep your eyes peeled.
What is currently known about the Mists of Pandaria realm is that unlike their Cataclysm upgrade process, everyone will start fresh; there will be no transfers in and out of this realm, however that may be subject to change. I suspect that they will open the realm in an ‘open beta’ phase so players can spot any serious bugs/exploits before they fully release.
That’s all for now, what do you guys think about Molten developing MoP? Is it too soon, or too late, should they be focusing their priorities on their current expansions, will the work load be too much?
If you played on Arena Tournament before, you may have known that they have dropped their TBC servers as they lacked popularity. Nextgen-WoW had taken hold of their source code and continued to voluntarily host their TBC server core under a different name.
Recently, the server has now merged with Arena-Tournament, leaving this message on their website:
I can’t access my account! It says that the information I’ve entered is not valid. This is because, at the time of the merge, there was already an account on Arena-Tournament with your username (which did not have your password). Create a new account here (or login to your Arena-Tournament account if you have one) and make a ticket; we will transfer your character(s) to your new account.
I had VIP on Nextgen-WoW, will I still have VIP on Arena-Tournament? Yes. If your account was transferred, you should already have VIP. If your account wasn’t transferred, we will upgrade your new account to VIP.
What about Donatorstones? Donatorstones are linked to characters, so they were transferred over as well.
New realmlist? logon.nextgen-wow.com will continue to work for a month or two, but if you would like to get ahead of the curve, you can go ahead and change your realmlist to logon.arena-tournament.com now instead of later.
Note: No characters have been deleted. They’re all still in the database; some of them are just not linked to any accounts. If you are currently not in possession of your character(s), simply create a ticket and we will transfer your characters to your new account.
In the latest announcement post on Molten forums, Server owner Hermes has announced that Mists of Pandaria and Clustered Load Balancing have been ‘kicked off’, meaning they’ve pretty much done them. Seeing as there was hardly any bug tracker activity by developers of Molten staff the past week or two, it’s also great to hear from Hermes, the successor to Kaer, as he has been extremely quiet on the forums compared to what Kaer used to be. That being said, we have since had a member of the Molten team, Edifice, to give us some insight into what Molten is doing.
Molten is currently the biggest Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm private server, boasting over 30,000 connected players at peak times over all their realms.
Clustered Load Balancing
According to Molten, clustered load balancing is considered the “single most complex and challenging feature we had ever undertaken“. Clustered Load Balancing will allow Molten to utilize world servers for each zone, battleground, and dungeons, which will be a huge plus in stability of the server, no more players crashing the whole server anymore.
Unfortunately, Molten won’t be the first to implement cross realm battlegrounds as a smallish Hungarian server had already released compatibility for it to encourage players to play on their other realms. However, with that being said, we should hopefully see a big improvement in battleground and dungeon finder activity, which will ultimately bring more players to the server.
Mists of Pandaria
As you may or may not know, scripting for later expansions of World of Warcraft have been more and more complex with newer dungeons, quests and features. To put this in perspective, private servers have always been on the same patch as World of Warcraft until patch 3.3.5a, where the Cataclysm had changed the whole of Azeroth, leaving behind years of work to rescript the newer and more complex quests, as well as attempts by Blizzard to curb emulation of their game. Only fairly recently, private servers have moved to patch 4.3.4, while there has only been a few private servers that have tackled on Mists of Pandaria, (and at an old patch), one notably being the French server called Pandashan. Seeing as though Pandaria servers are rare due to there being no open source cores around, and with Molten’s popularity, we will hopefully see Molten’s population growing a lot.
News post
Here is the excerpt from the latest announcement post.
Greetings Molten Community,
We are wrapping up another wonderful year for our community and very thrilled to celebrate Molten’s fourth anniversary. Significant improvements to stability, content and performance of Cataclysm realms, hardware upgrades and Molten International Tournament series are among highlights of this year’s progress. We are excited to announce that in 2013 the development for Mists of Pandaria and Clustered Load Balancing (support for cross-realm features) have been kicked off and there has been significant progress in those areas. We will keep our community updated about further developments in those projects as well as updates on Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm realms that will fulfill our goals for delivering the best gaming experience.
– Hermes
One concern of mine is that Molten will have too much on their plate with handling three expansions and with approximately seven developers. I can only wish them the best that everything goes smoothly. Maybe soon they might open developer positions seeing how far they’re scaling.
Molten Events
According to Edifice’s post, Molten will be having more events during the year, as well as making them not invite only. Invite only had caused issues with the server population being so high. I, myself had attempted to get invited to events last year and the year before, but was unlucky as I was only able to attend the non-invite ones. I personally think this is a great idea and commend them on that. It reminds me of my job on a tiny server as a game master and event master, which was stressful and boring, thumbs up to you event masters if you’re reading this!
Molten Staff
Unrelated to this post, but Edifice recently posted a summary of the position what each developer of molten does, I guess it’s just interesting what each developer does.
Ramires: Core reworks, infrastructure, optimizations, heavy CLB work, formulas, arena, correcting the non-standard c++ abomination of a core trinity spawned, class work, excellent c++ coder.
Green: instances, writing them from scratch, all entirely his work, goes as far as watching a video to get a general outline how an encounter works.
KosmoKoz: Same as green, heavy heavy instance work, some item related work and quests, all his own work.
Nepenthe: Heavy database work, 10 man workforce in 1 person, fixing 90% of quests.
Raufen: Massive class work, balancing, formulas, quest scripting, extraordinary amount of work produced by this guy.
Mammen: Big functionality, instance systems, random dungeon finder, big core addons that are unique to Molten.
Shortbuckle: Angry dev
Edifice: Any and everything web and database related.
Anyways, what are your thoughts on Molten’s decisions? Do you think that having three expansions for a private server is good? Do you think Mists of Pandaria, and Clustered Load Balancing will bring a lot of population?
Corecraft has taken a week from posting weekly updates, to posting a new video, showcasing what they have done with the Player vs Player mechanics which they have implemented during closed beta testing.This has included some custom fixes of their own to accommodate for a better private server experience.
Corecraft is a World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade private server set on patch 2.4.3 that is yet to be released. More information about Corecraft here.
Corecraft’s new weekly update post regarding the PvP video they have released can be located here
A more in-depth view on what they have been fixing related to PvP can be viewed below:
Battleground & Arena Queue
The queuing system for battlegrounds and arenas have been rewritten from scratch. The new queue has a very different approach to the problem and should feel a lot more familiar to players whom used to frequent battlegrounds and arenas. Effects the player might notice include:
– You can now re-log without losing your spot in the queue.
– As a group leader you can overwrite other people’s queue without asking them all to leave.
– Usage of correct error & status messages.
– Accidental invite of too many players to one faction. E.g., no more 12 vs 8 warsong gulch matches.
– Individual queues. Such as queuing for “Warsong Gulch 3”.
– Various visual bugs have been fixed (e.g., the “Eastern Kingdoms” queue).
– And more.
Additionally, we have implemented a solution to minimize empty battlegrounds and to prevent players from leaving one battleground for another. While you are in a battleground, you cannot be invited to new battlegrounds, but you will still maintain your position in the queue.
This means that when a new battleground pops up all invited players will actually be waiting to enter a battleground and are much less likely to abandon their invite, which will lead to fewer battlegrounds with an uneven team balance.
Furthermore this will create a natural flow of different battlegrounds. When one battleground ends, those players are more likely to pop another battlegound that they were already in queue for.
Battleground & Arena system
Seeing as mangos is not very modular, the rewriting of the queue ended up in us rewriting a lot more as well. In total, roughly 30% of the battleground & arena system has been rewritten. As a result the system is currently a lot more modular and easy to work with & debug.
Battleground & Arena Queue & Manager
The queuing system we wrote about last week has been completed. For information about it see last week’s post.
Battleground & Arena bugs
We’ve gone through and fixed a bunch of battleground and arena bugs that are related to the actual game (in comparison to our rewrite of the queue & manager, which was for the handling of battlegrounds).
The list of bug fixes are:
– Buffs in WSG (restoration, speed boots & berserker) have had their respawn times fixed.
– The food buffs (restoration) now breaks when you’re attacked by direct attacks.
– The WSG flag bug that occurs if two flags are dropped on the ground simultaneously, and you interact with one of them you end up returning your team’s flag as well as picking up the opposing team’s flag even if they are on different parts of the map, has been fixed.
– The bug where same-faction arena teams were displayed as one big team rather than two on the scoreboard has been fixed.
– When a battleground/arena has ended, people leaving the game in the 2 minutes closing period are no longer removed from the scoreboard as they leave.
– A person who left an arena match before it ended will still be displayed on the scoreboard at the end of the game.
– When attempting a defensive capture of a contested flag in Arathi Basin or Alterac Valley you will no longer be able to complete your capture if that contested flag turns into a fully captured flag of the opposing faction. Instead you will be faced with an “Interrupted” error message once your cap finishes, as was the case in retail.
– The bug where you can sometimes bring up an empty scoreboard in Arena matches has been fixed. The scoreboard is now always disabled until the end of the game.
– The Arena shadow sight buffs have been made to correctly respawn after 90 seconds once they’ve been collected in a game.
– The Arena shadow sight buff is no longer collectable while despawned.
– Picking up the shadow sight buff in arena now breaks your stealth and invisibility.
Unless you haven’t heard of Corecraft already, you may as well be missing out on the second coming of Christ too.
What is Corecraft?
Corecraft is a new TBC server set for release (hopefully) within some time 2014.
Why does this server stand out from the rest?
Corecraft has been in open and closed beta for over a year now, and during that time, they have managed to release content that has never seen the face of private servers. As TBC is objectively the best expansion, there however is a lack of private servers that fully support it, besides a polish server, called Hellground, and Archangel, the realm that Feenix hosts although doesn’t particularly focus on as much as their Vanilla realms.
From porting over and implementing major Trinitycore (Open source WoTLK / Cataclysm private server core) functions and database structure, to implementing complex raid and boss fights (such as the Karazhan Chess Event) to what look like a copy of what it was on retail, it seems like a very promising server.
Features:
Corecraft will be an (optional) instant level 58 server with 1x Experience rates. Content is scripted to 2.0.3 difficulty, which means that no nerfs will be implemented, everything will be more difficult which they intended to be. As with being a private server, I honestly don’t know how this will pan out, since players are for a fact worse on private servers than on retail.
Their huge changelogs can be found on their forum at this link
The following links were taken off Corecraft’s Youtube account. These fixes were made from the default open source core for 2.4.3.
Well February has come, and this is what has been happening in the private server scene lately.
Let’s start off with news from Monster WoW.
Monster-WoW has been pretty steady on population according to the population counter on the main site. They have been focusing a lot lately on class balance fixes, and have also released Zul’Gurub on their less popular 4.3.4 server in hopes players would move to the 4.3.4 patch. A full changelog of their class fixes is available at the main site. I may note on a slightly unrelated matter that occurred since the beginning of this year, is that Monster-WoW modified their forum restrictions so that guests will now need to register to see posts on the forums. I find this a hindrance towards popularity of the server, considering there are very popular guides and posts on servers such as Eternal WoW (although their forums also became register-to-see posts), and Molten (which has a thread of 3.3.5a addons which has over 1 million views).
WoW-Freakz updates:
As WoW-Freakz has upgraded their 4.3.4 realm, a lot of development was made towards end game content such as the development of the End Time dungeon and the releasing of Alizabal at Baradin Hold. Recently, they have also made a realm transfer to decommission their realm Evolution to accommodate other players with more population, perhaps due to decline in population.
Molten-WoW updates:
Molten-WoW will soon be releasing/upgrading to 4.3.4 on the 1st of March on their Cataclysm realms. Here are some things to expect and not expect on their 4.3.4 realm and on the website
WoWbay 
