KoolbIade

How exactly are we supposed to test any of this? Can't really deduce server performance with low populations, alerts rarely trigger on PTS and we can't cause "maintenance," etc. Is there a playtest coming sometime?

We will be manually triggering and ending alerts. But just having some random behavior tested out on PTS would be good to catch any potential server or client crashes. So far, I have not seen any crashes. We will of course review the /bug's but that doesn't guarantee they get fixed with the next hotfix depending on the severity of the bug.

SirCypherSir

Wouldn't server performance testing still require more than the 1-5 ppl that habit PTS normally? How about an organized playtest? Or are these fixes too small to warrant such?

More players do offer a more practical test yes, and we will take all we can get. What we usually get from larger groups is a larger range of behaviors to find any strange edge cases. And we are confident the changes we made will improve performance as these are based upon profiling we do on live servers when the population is at maximum for a continent. Its more of making sure those changes didn't break anything or cause a crash of some sort. Hope that all makes sense.