About the recent releases on Chromiecraft

Dear Time Traverlers,

Firstly, this is going to be a bit of a different post compared to normal. We don’t tend to respond to rumours and external chats (be it on places such as Reddit, community Discords, forums etc) but we felt given the recent trends of some topics, we would take this chance to do a bit of a Q&A style response, clearing up some misconceptions about what Chromiecraft is, what we do here and how we operate. To say its disheartening to hear some of the attacks both on the handful of developers we have plus on our community, that is has come to a point we need to put something out now, is putting it lightly.

Hyjal

It was a mess, we aren’t going to beat about the bush here. Unfortunately a number of bugs which caused the raid to lock went undiscovered despite around 50 runs on the PTR. These have been fixed as of this week, bringing our total fixes on Hyjal to 54 seperate issues with just 6 open issues on it to be looked into still. We can safely say had we known about the issues, we wouldn’t have released it as is. We have had many people state we don’t run raids ourselves, which isn’t true, we even released a video of the insights into fixes on Hyjal. Until it is tested en masse by full raids however, it is hard to catch everything before release when solo running / going off of retail sniffs. We will do better next time, simple as that.

Release schedules

Our releases are way too slow, people get bored and leave.
Our releases are way too fast, why are there bugs still, how dare you release it like this.
Why do we keep moving on despite bugs being still a thing from two years ago?

It does feel that no matter what we do here, we will be pissing off somebody and Reddit is going to hear about it. We do not have any schedules to hit, however we need to find a balance in order to keep the server flowing, giving content to people and moving forward with our progression plans. Our dev team is small, our primary development team is made up of two people, Nyeriah & ElDiablo. Their focus is on the current content of Chromiecraft, with an aim to approximately hit a new release every 2-3 months. Given the entire focus of Chromiecraft is to improve the code behind Azerothcore, our aim before a raid release is simple. No critical bugs, ensure it is completeable and what we would consider a 70% state or so. During the weeks after release when we get a lot more runs and tests done, it allows us to polish the raid further and continue clearing up issues. We know this didn’t go to plan with Hyjal sadly and we will try better in the future.

What about the existing issues?

Thankfully, Chromiecraft isn’t the only server running Azerothcore nor is it just two developers working on it. We have a growing team who are tackling the thousands of open issues we have and they are doing their best to go through that list. It is probably our fault as well that we aren’t singing and dancing of every old world fix we make. A couple of recent examples is the complete rewrite of each and every single gatherable node in Kalimdor & Eastern Kingdoms by Gultask. Nyeriah has been working hard on multiple raid issues in almost all TBC raids. Diminishing returns is a thing now on all taunt skills after a large amount of work on the bug and we have gone through some very painful modernisation of the core, which has lead to many regressions recently. These are however a necessary evil, some parts of the code are over a decade old and needs to be brought up to date to help with issues down the line. This has meant we have had to redo content such as Karazhan, with raids being worked on again due to these changes and should be in a much better place by the end of the month. The eagle eyed amongst yourselves would have seen some fixes on Ahn’Qiraj as well due to this, as well as some scripts in Ulduar. Paladin core skills have been getting some love as well. While Chromiecraft is the main source of bug reports and development done on Azerothcore, it is far from the only source however. We understand it is hard to follow the development logs and we will endeavour to provide better changelogs going forward where possible.

We will continue on with our progression plans, it was never going to be feasible to fix everything in a bracket then move on. We know we have years of work ahead but despite all the haters, doomsayers and drama, we just keep our heads down and keep on working to bring you all the very best 3.3.5a core out there, for anybody to use and enjoy for free, forever.

The future

We understand the server is in a decline in population currently, whilst we have had some serious burnout and real life issues amongst staff what we are getting over. We are actively working on ways to boost population, improving the experience of new and alt characters. Expect a couple of votes in the coming week or two about proposals on this, as well as some new approaches to marketing which we are hoping to see some good results on.

Once more we can only apologise for the way Hyjal was released and we will do our upmost to ensure lessons are learnt and no repeats are made of this.

We continue to march on with our progression plans as we always have throughout the last few years!

Closure

We ask people to judge us where we were before we started this journey, against of the thousands of fixes, countless hours spent and all the work still to come. For everyone who takes the time to help us improve Azerothcore, those who make Chromiecraft the incredible community server it is or even takes the time to put in a positive word, thank you. For those who take everything to the extreme, only exist to try to cause us harm, disrupt the volunteering work we do or try to discredit the work of our contributors, we aren’t leaving anytime soon. In the politest way, go f!@1 you.. have a lovely day!

Much love as always,
Construct & the Chromiecraft team.