17th February 2016, the Emerald dragons have been launched, the first one, Emeriss in the Hinterlands was killed by Synced/Horizon, there were more Alliance than Horde but it happened well, NA players wanted to participate but the Kronos team can hardly connect at those hours. More and more new players are seen in-game, the world chat becomes of lower quality and more reports happen, with threads about it. A Nostalrius GM bans PvP players for abuse, which were apparently known for a bit, but details about how he knew who did what is lacking. Players warn Kronos about potential incoming PvP players from Nostalrius that could represent a threat to world chat. The Census has been down for a couple days already, no one know why and Aurigon doesn't seem to show up for his monthly population thread.
19th February, experience bonus event, 750 players on the Horde side at 19:00 ST, world chat is much more lively but a bigger mess, moderators keep it under some control. I get ganked many times both by old level 60 Kronos players, a couple twinks that stay in STV. After about 2 hours of playtime I have gotten from 30-40, nice.
24th feb, according to the server team the peaks are above 1500+ players online. Crashes over crashes on the 24th feb for about an hour according to forum posts then fixed. 8th march, war effort opens up, thorium finished in a day (supposedly a bug coming from Dire Maul resets, others say they had those stacked up for a long time), players from Alliance guilds (Synced and Vanguard, reportedly) had been abusing a bug to get more silithid fragments (as many fragments as players contributing to a silithid kill) and some players get banned, reputation reset. Many players are seen leveling some characters at the same time on /follow.
13th March, 10% of the War Effort has been collected, the population seems steady to me with no special increase those days (my point of view). After some calculations I warn players and the team that the herbs for the War Effort might take much too long to gather due to limited spawns and respawn time.
19th March, PvP tournament, moonfires, Yolam wins again, roughly 300 participants.
20th March, in the evening about 2000 players online (900 Horde). 6th April, 25% of the War Effort has been collected, with Spotted Yellowtail, and Rugged leather completed. At this rate we will need about 3 more months or more to finish the War Effort, probably much more if we consider the least progressed mats to collect (4% of the Silk bandages, 4% Wool bandages, 6% of the Baked Salmons, 11% Purple Lotus).
7th April, Nostalrius (biggest Vanilla WoW server to date, 10,000+ players) announces that it will close very soon, topics pop on Reddit, the Kronos forums, MMOchampion and everyone talks about it and what it will mean for Kronos and vanilla servers. A petitition asking Mike Morhaime to allow vanilla server has been started and currently has over 13,000 people signing. Their source code and players data should become available after anonymization and encryption. Upon logging ingame I notice 700 players on the Horde side, with 473 (67.5%) being level 1-10, the Nostalrius players are moving en masse. Some players warn about potential password theft for players on Nostalrius now that their data will be available. By the end of the day the Kronos server admin, Chero had announced that the server would be optimized. A couple updates happen in the day, with the /who no longer displaying the amount of players online beyond 50 (last time it was available there were about 2500 players total online), fixes to reduce the amount of lag and the introduction of a queue. When I try to login I get into a 1400+ queue with 30 minutes remaining until I can enter. A short time afterwards a skip is introduced, players with a level 60 on the server will enter instantly.
8th April, morning. While my latency is somewhat decent although higher than usual (60-250 ms) I keep seeing delays between player movements and I get disconnected roughly a minute after login on my characters. I don't know why. The world chat and zone chats are filled with spam. I can't get to play until sometime in the afternoon where for some reason my disconnection issue gets fixed. The server gets restarted to re-introduce dynamic spawning. Pets get bugged during the upgrades and stop following at the correct speed. 1800+ Horde players according to my Census addon in the afternoon. 1700+ Horde players at night, with a 500 player queue when I want to connect on my second account, which leads me to believe the server is now limited to about 3500-4000 players. New guild names have appeared like "Kronos leveling society" and "Nost refugees". In the evening delays no longer happen, my latency in Orgrimmar is around 70ms.
10th April, echoes of Nostalrius launching a Naxxramas-end event end up on Kronos, this is their very last day. Many, many, many players connect on that last day on Nostalrius. The petition for change has already been signed by 60,000 players. An impressive number of players talking chinese, often refered to as "chinese" have come on the server and there is fear that goldfarming, cheats & account theft will come back with them. Due to issues with latency many of them use proxy and VPNs to connect on the server, something forbidden, which leads to an announcement from Jeniczek (Twinstar head) that this will no longer be allowed to happen. Seeing this as an opportunity, I write about the new chinese players and I make a guide to talk with them. The server, again, gets updated many times in the day.
11th April, my Census addon no longer works correctly, neither do some functions in the /who (searching for guilds, searching for players in some zones, searching for classes). The twinstar server statistics, which used to display the amount of players are also now disabled. All this makes it difficult to know the amount of players online, but there are not yet official statements on the matter (if this is intentional or related to optimization goals). This might make it more difficult to make groups as it is no longer possible to /who c-warrior, for example. The draw distance has been reduced since a couple of days and some ask for it to be increased again, just like on Nostalrius. You can see a comparison with how far herbs can be seen on those screenshots.
12 April, official announcement, the /who has been altered to reduce server load. Access to the server with VPN and proxies will be limited to curb hackers and goldsellers. The amount of tickets has skyrocketed (1 per 30 seconds) and the Kronos team had to face challenges constantly since the fall of Nostalrius to this day. They are now finally getting some relief, but efforts at keeping the server at the best possible quality will continue. The War Effort is now at 33% and some cloth loot has been added to many creatures which might help making the long-missing bandages. Players can now only talk on the world channel at level 10, to make it harder for goldsellers and trolls.
15th April, 39% of the War Effort has been collected. VPN connection is now limited (which lead to a couple of my asian friends to seriously consider leaving the server) and a trailer for the Ahn'Qiraj raid has been released. Asian players are now a significant part of the playerbase, a frequent topic of discussion among players. The forums are much more lively and so are the goldsellers whispering everyone.
16th April, after a small amount of reverse engineering I have come up with the number of 8000 Horde characters online at 18:55 ST, I thus decided to run further calculations to check my numbers. 16,000 seems huge. Lowered estimates later on, 12,000 maybe?
20th April, The server data gets moved which results in some players getting blocked by their internet provider, they can no longer access the server. Many server crashes and latency gets up during the day. 21th April, server attacks? The forums are down, the server crashes. At 21:24 ST, a 1000 player queue and 962 players on the world and china channel combined, Horde side.
23rd April, over 2300+ players in the queue in the afternoon and evening.
24th April, 4000 players in the queue. A new PvP server will be released on the 27th of April.
27th April, Blizzard has answered the petition for legacy servers, they suggest making "pristine servers" instead, with special limitations. Mark Kern (developer on the original WoW) brings 10'000 printed comments to Blizzard. The second Kronos server (Kronos II) launches, with new forum sections and well-known Kungen joining (a vanilla veteran from Ensidia/Nihilum). At 20:00 ST both servers have a combined queue of over 6000 players (2000+ on Kronos and 4000+ on Kronos II). Starting zones are overcrowded. People start tweeting openly about Kronos. At this time the Kronos 2 announcement post on the forums has 100'000 views and 996 replies. The forums stop working, perhaps due to the increase in traffic or DDOS attacks. Servers remain online, working as usual.
29th April, after a long period without goldsellers they are back again. Mark Kern is planned to meet Blizzard's CEO and the Nostalrius team will meet Blizzard in the following weeks. An announcement is incoming.
30th April, the Kronos queues now seem much shorter, with 1000 or so maximum, but take longer to end. Some theorize that the queue now only displays 25% of the players in it to not attract too much attention from Blizzard. Others suggest that players are now using anti-AFK macros, addons or autowalking to stay on the server at all costs.
4th May, Juon, a hunter from the Orion guild has got to level 60 on the Kronos II server (server first?). Kronos I War Effort currently at 65% completed, with the Horde ahead by 7%. Firebloom and Purple lotus are still behind (23% and 27% respectively), as expected, but Baked Salmons are also slow to come (28%).
6-7th May, server down for a couple hours. Afternoon, another round of DDoS attacks, the server goes down again. Players suggests those attacks are related to banned goldsellers and chinese players playing with VPNs and that the team has been contacted/blackmailed by those, others say this is Blizzard's doing. Those become the main hypotheses due to lack of other information. K2 goes up for a short amount of time and down again in the evening. While some chinese player groups suggest going to Vanillagaming, players on Reddit seem more about hoping for the best. According to an announcement the issue should be fixed in the following 2 weeks. Kungen stopped playing on the server (due to queues, server downtime, and not being allowed to stream on Twitch, I believe).
8th May, 7AM IRC, Jeniczek (Twinstar project leader) announces that there is no serious source of where the attacks are coming from. 8AM, K1 is up. Another round of DDoS, the servers go down again and again.
9 May, servers still down. Supposedly the DDoS attacks are over 500 Gbps (=very big ones), but some allege that the worst was over 320 Gbps (Jeniczek citation on IRC), sources are hard to come by and contradict eachother. The DDoS attacks might have happened after Kronos banned a large amount of goldsellers and mule accounts. For a bit more clarity, a simplified explanation of what a DDoS is has been created by Defeated. False gamemasters sometimes spawn on the server IRC. Players show support to the team with many posts and threads. Interestingly, although the server is down the Facebook likes of the Kronos page go up.
10 May, the servers are still down. Official announcement, after careful examination the team has decided to keep the server offline until sunday 15.05 / monday 16.05, this time will allow them to move the server to a different host. In the meantime we must stand together, there are no plans to ever stop the server or bend to the attackers. 21:35 PM, The Rebirth server has a queue.
12 May, Play TBC (a recent TBC private server) brutally closes down after their lead developer reportedly quits, gets the money and prevents all other members of the project from doing anything about it.
15 May, the relaunch is postponed to tuesday. After many complaints of inappropriate behavior, unsusbtantiated claims and bans on the forums and reddit (some of which get removed) by Nala (a moderator on those places, although not officially from the Kronos team), the Kronos reddit and Discord lose their CSS style.
17 May, early morning, the servers come back up. Latency issues with players having over 1300+ ms and random disconnects start happening, the servers are brought down for maintenance during 4hours in the afternoon but the connectivity issues remain. The second part of the action plan against DDoS is still ongoing.
21 May, War Effort at 71% total on K1, 35% of Silk bandages, 33% Baked Salmons, 25% Firebloom, 33% Purple lotus Horde / 40% Alliance, 34% Wool bandages.
May, this is roughly the time when most players coming from China/asia left the server, according to my character still on one of their guilds that is able to see last connected data.
6th June, the new hardware for the server still hasn't arrived, DDoS attacks are still happening on a daily basis but are mostly taken care of, a new account manager is getting created, a new IRC will soon come. 9th June, Nostalrius has met with Blizzard, the meeting went well and everyone seemed motivated for vanilla realms, they have the source code (but maybe not all data files required), no definitive answer on what they will do next but they plan to keep in touch with eachother.
10th June, War Effort at 79% on K1, 52% of Silk bandages, 52% of Baked Salmons, 35% Firebloom, 54% Purple Lotus H / 49 % A, 44% Wool bandages. The War Effort will soon have been up for over 4 months. Another article about Blizzard being very interested in vanilla realms, especially after the team had a Stratholme run on Nostalrius. Goldsellers have started advertising again, in trade chat, world, in-game messages and many channels have become filled with spam at off-hours. According to some unofficial source, the DDoS issue and problems that followed reduced the Kronos population by about 70%. Also, according to this source, the server population status has been heavily modified to display "High population" when it is not the case. In march 2017, GM Gurky said it wasn't reliable ("100% incorrect" are his words).
16th June, I stop playing on the server,
13th August, The gates of Ahn'Qiraj open on Kronos! They have lasted about 6 months. See my full post for details. Lots of players get the Qiraj mount (30+ ?) and more than 3 different guilds kill C'thun on that very same day.
October, Chero changed the way Black Lotus spawns, there are now over 100 spawnpoints in different areas and a lotus will spawn every hour at a random spawn point (there can only be one per zone). Previously 4-5 spawnpoints existed and players (so called "mafia") farmed them by waiting on them with multiple characters.
2nd November, Poll from Bazzil about what players would like the Kronos development team to focus on.
7th November, Nostalrius announces that Elysium WoW will get Nostalrius's old core, data and characters. According to their announcement, Elysium was chosen as it adhered to 3 core values of Nostalrius (quality, passion, non-profit) and already had many of their old team members. Stress tests are incoming, no release date is currently known. On the same day, Kronos announces that they will have another 1-7x experience bonus event on K1 from the 11th November 2016 until January 6, 2017 (2 months). While I sometimes check the forums, both reactions are unexpected to me. [Update 7th november : The experience event is cancelled before it even started due to negative feedback]
4th December, Kronos II War Effort starts, dragons are released.
17th December, Kronos I and Kronos II will merge in 2017 according to an announcement from the team, some time after C'thun is defeated. Race and faction change are planned to become available.
14th January 2017, currently, according to a post by Viper (Nostalrius admin), only 10% of former Nostalrius players "generated a token to join Elysium". Viper says they now see the decision to share their source code as a bad one as it makes them again like "pirates", they ask Elysium to stop using their data. Account transfers from Nostalrius to Elysium are closed from this day. The Nostalrius team wants to focus their efforts on official legacy realms, not private realms. Some suggest Blizzard is threatening to sue Nostalrius and trying to close discussions about it (as a supportive anecdote, mmowned recently closed a thread about private realms that had being going on for 1900+ pages).
Elysium answers they will stop using Nostalrius's core and rename the servers. Existing and claimed characters will not be deleted. They boast the following numbers : "30,500 players simultaneously online over 4 realms", "62 volunteers", "50% of total accounts were active in the last 7 days", "155% increase of active accounts compared to Nostalrius." and "52% of Nostalrius active accounts transferred over 16 days(token generator uptime)".
15th January 2017, as I was whispering players for feedback about how to select a private server someone informed me that The Rebirth (another Vanilla WoW server created in 2011) will close in march. Muggle's (The Rebirth's admin) said on the 12th January that they couldn't keep up with the server and real life and will close on the 26th March. Code, database and character info will be open-access. There is some internal discussions about allowing Rebirth players to move to Kronos.
20th January, Tests are done on Kronos to improve latency for all players. US/NA/Norway/UK/Asia/Sweden/Czech/Belgium see a decrease (10-130 ms lower), France notices an increase and Canada/Spain/Portugal/Switzerland no changes. Mixed results for Italy. K2 War Effort at 55% overall.
28th January, Kronos developers Jursky and Kioshi have made some fixes again. They hadn't made fixes on the server for some time (5 months for Jursky and 4 months for Kioshi). Naxxramas open testing will begin on the 5th February.
2nd of February, KII War Effort at 79% overall. 37% and 27% Purple lotus for Alliance and Horde respectively, 27% Firebloom, 18% Lean Wolf Steak. VPN access to the server is allowed again. French players are getting higher amounts of latency due to the improvement tests. The Kronos server was hosted in France for some time (but it is no longer there).
4th February, Dodgykebaab runs some tests on the anti-cheat systems on private servers, Kronos ends up stopping all his tries.
5th February, initial public tests in Naxxramas, spider Wing planned to last until the 14th, with some caveats to prevent players from "testing" too much. Anub'Rekhan Locus Swarm was interruptable.
10th February, 92% of the War Effort is completed on K2, huge amounts of ressources are missing (80% tin bars, 68% mithril bars, 70% Fireblooms still missing), but the overall progress is automaticaly completing. Naxx fixes based on internal reports : corpse scarabs should now despawn when not in combat, spiders will now pull players, cultists no longer mind-controllable, Anub'Rekhan no longer opening during combat.
14th February, KII War Effort completed, 100%. Planned end of the Naxxramas Spider Wing tests.
20 February, Opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj on KII and first C'thun kills by <easy> followed by <Wipe Club>. A handful server crashes happen during their runs. Some drama on Reddit about cheats and hacks on Elysium, team members being ex-hackers or goldsellers.
23rd February, the Elysium drama is getting difficult to follow, apparently shady things happened on their servers (creating chars with high-level items, goldselling, not fixing bugs at all, few care about what players say, etc.) and admins/mods kept lying about the situation without any transparency. Leaked screenshots from potential ex-team members show controversial contents and many members of Elysium leaving (Hades, Nightmare, Suzerain). A megathread was made on Reddit about it. Sad for all people that contributed and trustable, hard-working members of Elysium.
24th February, Gurky explains that the latency and connection issues some players were having those days are due to DDoS attacks happening again. The Kronos team doesn't know who does it and almost all services are intact.
28th February, the Nostalrius and Elysium server cores are now available freely on Github after an alleged leak. Shenna, the Elysium admin announces that their project is going open source.
March, Chero, the Kronos server administrator had announced that K1 and K2 would merge in 2017, some time after the fall of C'thun on K2 [1]. On the 19th February AQ40 was released on K2 and C'thun defeated [2], which led Chero to say the merge date should be coming "soon" [3], although on the 28th GMs still couldn't give a clear deadline [4]. On the 5th March GM Davros said they were "close to an announcement" [12]. On the 10th of March Chero announced in the official Kronos Discord that the merge is schedule to start at 6AM server time on the 15th of March [27]. Some players plan to do a PvP event in Hillsbrad on the merge date.
On the 12th of March Chero announced that the merge is scheduled to start at 6AM server time on the 15th of March [38]. The team expects the merge to take anywhere from 2 to 6 hours. Players have now access to a "stash" that they can use to store excess characters, should they have more than 10 after the merge. Players with the longest /played time should be able to keep their names and those that have to change will be asked to rename their characters on login. The guild that has been running for the longest time will keep the name, the newest version of the guild will be renamed to something similar to the original name. Any characters with less than 60 minutes /played that has not been logged in since the 1st January 2017 will be deleted. The deletion of the characters cannot be reverted. The team believes that auctions will not be affected by the merge. However, they highly recommend that all auctions are canceled manually. All items in the mailbox from any source will be kept in the mailbox. Changing your name will not cause any issue with any mail, neither with CODs. Regardless, the team recommends clearing mailboxes. Before the merge, all Kronos auctions will be canceled and any bids will be returned to their respective owner [38].
13th March 2017, Kronos has authentification issues for about 30 minutes during which players cannot connect to the server, then it is back to normal. Elysium's PvP server Anathema is shutdown for unknown reasons according to Elysium's admin Shenna, which asks for direct payment to sustain the server with Paypal. Many players had misunderstood Chero's announcement about which characters would be deleted.
15th March 2017, the Kronos II and Kronos subreddits are getting merged, says GM Grifinger. The merge is happening with the servers still down (11 AM GMT+1) and some players cheering. [100% unrelated picture]. SAKUJ0 creates an updated Reddit post with details and news from the Kronos team, at 15:39 Chero said an issue was slowing the merge. As of 18:45 PM GMT+1, the server is still offline, delayed again. 22:10 PM GMT+1, server up!
247 players on the world Horde channel at 23:37 ST (this is about a 2x increase when compared with a mid-day in January 2017 on K1), with an interesting increase in players in Orgrimmar. About 8 different players talked every minute on the world channel when I logged (too much to follow). Playing for some reason feels subjectively much smoother, perhaps the purge of old characters helped (or the restart) or I am having false impressions. Lots of players I have never heard of. 8x Warsong Gulch battlegrounds are up at the same time. First server crash at 00:23 ST.
16th March, the bosskills webpage shows mages in the best healers and paladins as best dps, the merge has caused issues with this Kronos feature and Chero says he's working on it. 18th March, GM Fenissa and Davros announce that starting today any player caught buying gold will be permanently banned on all his accounts with no chance of appeal.
22nd March, I hear of goldsellers coming back, which could explain the announcement on the 18th March. The server has been under DDoS attacks for over 2 hours today, which caused connection issues, says GM Davros. This was already happening yesterday at night, says GM Grifinger. Bazzil made a bugreport about a potential bug that has made it possible for over 2 years to get strong buffs from bosskills when their heads are offered in Orgrimmar. A bugreport shows that some players have been getting banned for jumping out of the water, a fix is incoming, says GM Fenissa in the bugtracker.
28th March, Kronos's birthday, the server is now two years old !
19th April, Silithyst geysers have been changed in a way that makes it harder to get their buff, which made many players unhappy, especially as no evidence or clear reason for the change is given. The Naxxramas PTR for abomination and beyond is still awaited.
24th April, Silithyst geysers are now behaving as they were before, change reversed by Chero.
30th May, No further news about the Naxxramas PTR so far, no news about race change features either (which were planned for Q2 2017). A handful short (minutes up to an hour, with a single login bug that stayed for hours once) server crashes have happened those last weeks, but otherwise the server feels particularly stable; guilds keep recruiting, AQ20 PUGs at night, etc. The forums are very quiet too, which I interpretate as players being busy in-game. Calm before the storm?
5th June, Fei, guildmaster of horde guild Onslaught says AQ40 is still severely flawed (too big aggro radius on Skeram, extra ability on Vem, Viscidus sometimes disappears, Twins "store auto-attacks", etc.), horde raiding guilds are said to be dismantling and their morale is low. Other players complain on the same thread about the lack of communication on the server future (Naxxramas tests and opening, faction change, etc.) causing players to leave due to having no idea what the future will bring.
11th June, some news from the Kronos team in an announcement. They say they were busy due to working on their bachelor/master's degree. Naxxramas Abomination wing should be open for testing in mid-July and the development for the next wing will be "faster". If no setback they expect to launch Naxxramas by Q3 (which is around september 2017). They say they are working on some transport bugs (pets on boats and zepelins, disconnected when traveling with zepelins, etc.). 360 players on the Horde world channel at 22:42 ST (Sunday).
19th June, curious post on the Kronos forums about players getting the Darkmoon Faire 1-10% damage increase buff and not playing for weeks to push for damage records during raids. Some say this behavior ends up hurting the server as there are less characters available for raids and thus the buff should either be available all the time (and always give 10%), not available at all or decay when offline.
June, an old bug report from December 2014 was revived by GM Cadingel (which is focusing some of his efforts on old reports), the Felwood flowers giving out buffs that currently respawn every 3 minutes should instead respawn every 25 minutes, says GM Bazzil with evidence from 2005-6 (which some say isn't enough). The fix leads to a forum-post where many extreme-raiders (that aim for shortest raid runs, highest dps, etc.) that were happy with how it worked express dissatisfaction with the fix that "should have happened much earlier and will only bother everyone now".
1st of July, little pet peeve of mine, but Chen's empty keg has been reported as not being visible in-game from March 2015 (GM's then said it was in-game, but players kept saying they didn't find it all the way up to 2017). On the 1st of July 2017 a GM finally teleported to the object in-game, didn't find it and made a report -> Issue now fixed on next update.
4th of July, couple alleged server crashes (due to update bug?) with a fix on the same day.
5th of July, I took the time to find sources (patchnotes!) for a very old bugreport from 2014. Apparently we have been able to instantly mail items between characters from the same account since the inception of Kronos, but this quality-of-life change was only added in July 2007, it used to be 1h wait before that. I don't expect players to like this change if it happens.
7th of July, I just learned after seing a report disappear that some Kronos bugreports would become "internal" (can only be seen by the Kronos team) to prevent other servers from using their content. Seems like if I want my reports to remain visible to everyone I will have to publish them somewhere else than on the bugtracker.
9th of July, New announcement, Naxxramas Abomination wing planned to be open for testing on July 16th. Some issues fixed in the recent past : zeppelin bug on Mac, rested status in enemy cities, some npcs lacking spells/abilities/spawns, Swifthistles missing drop from Briarthorn/Mageroyal, undercity elevator bug, etc. 348 player on the world channel at 22:12 ST (Sunday).
12th of July, the Bugtracker now has new categories, "Applied to PTR" and "Ready for live". "Need update" is now "Pending update".
19th July, according to a Facebook post from ProjectKronos, GM Gurky is now part of the "Twinstar administration team" and GM Davros has become the new Head Game Master; GM Lighstky is now his assistant and "Hammerlock" will be "assisting with communication and public relations".
23rd July, new changelog and bugfixes, Arathi basin BG gives more reputation per ressource, creature spawn fixes, some taunt immunities in BWL/AQ, improvements on Naxxramas trash, Hateful Strike target selection (Patchwerk), Decimate timers and modifiers (Gluth), threat switches (Thaddius), etc.
26th July, Blizzard shut down a vanilla TBC server (Felmyst) the day it opened.
30th of July, again, discussions about what the difficulty of Naxxramas should be. Some want it to be harder than "as it was back then", some fear the raid will be cleared in hours after release (main characters are often overgeared with full AQ gear, dps is much higher than back in 2006), others say however the raid is buffed it won't last much anyway and buffing would make it a boring due to consumable farming, etc. Some suggest buffing the bosses and gradually reducing the buffs back to normal or not allowing world buffs inside or running dps tests and adjusting values to prevent players from skipping mechanics.
6th August, Plaguewing Naxxramas planned for the 13th August according to GM Gurky. Guilds will only have 3 attempts on each boss per reset (checked with server logs). GM Cadingel and Nellag are now part of the server developers (programming/scripting).
19th August, Developper Bazzil makes a multiple-choices poll about how Kronos should manage the difficulty of Naxxramas (changing or not changing creature stats, keeping or removing world buffs on entering the raid, etc.). On the 25th the results were fairly balanced between options (26-55% of 346 voters voting for a specific option such as "I am against making changes to...").
13th Sept, Official announcement: Deathknight wing PTR planned for 30th Sept, Sapphiron & Kel'thuzad won't be available on PTR, Scourge invasion planned 1st October (up til 28th) & Full Naxxramas release on Oct 21st. Following player feedback, the Kronos team decided to remove world buffs on entering Naxxramas (they may come back at some point later), trash monsters and some bosses were slightly buffed (health and damage increased). They don't want to make further changes (or invisible fixes) in Naxxramas.
16 Sept, Naxxramas release on the Elysium server. Some discussion about how even without worldbuffs the raid seems to be too easy, especially when considering that few have experience with it.
Oct 1, Scourge invasion begins! Floating necropolis appear to be missing from the sky and not all kills grant reputation as they should. I wish I could login and see for myself.
Oct 6, GM Cadingel explains the Scourge Invasion will last until the end of the month so that all players may experience it instead of 150 battles only.
Oct 14, it appears that being able to see the health of all other players with addon MobInfo2 was a bug (and is apparently fixed due to incoming Naxx-patch boss health modifications). The addon now has to guess the health of players when they get hit. Interestingly this means I cannot estimate what gear-level players have by their health alone, I actually have to look at what they wear... I like it!
Oct 16 2017, seems like Elysium, the main vanilla competitor against Kronos is getting closed... and restarted under the name of Light's Hope due to "systemic problem of lack of oversight on those with the most access to the servers. Due to failures to uphold the projects ideals and integrity" (Source, archived for posterity). Seems like a couple managers had changed their pseudonyms and kept working on the server and that Shenna, the old manager actually grabbed 2000 euros (admin Crogge says 5000) for personal use. And goldselling supported by some of the staff, etc. Bit of discussion on Reddit for the curious. On the Kronos forums, Skosh points out that this will mean, again, a LOT of compromised accounts/passwords.
Oct 20, funny how I forgot about the launch of Naxxramas. Brief Facebook news by the Kronos team announcing that a player will follow the Naxx raid race with an updated Google spreadsheet. 19:00 ST, 280 players on the Horde world channel (Friday). Black Lotus 100g/unit on AH, Mooncloth 35g/unit (mooncloth was 20g/unit just a couple days before).
Oct 21, 18:30 ST, 280 players on Horde world channel. 23:34 ST, 330 players on Horde world channel. Moonclothes back to 17g/unit (I guess too many people have stocks of them), Felclothes now 7g/unit (3.5g/unit yesterday).
Naxxramas released. Seems like some bosses got killed 5-10 minutes after the previous ones by the same guild, which suggests they may be too easy for them. First kill happened at 20:11 ST. GM Davros is online, monitoring and talking with the players. The spreadsheet meant to help follow the kills appears to be bugged and sometimes clears the names of guilds which have killed a boss... (bug? too many requests? bug-abuse?)
Oct 22
Naxxramas Progress 00:05 ST
Boss : 1) first kill, 2) 2nd kill, 3) 3rd kill (average fight lenght according to bosskills)
Patchwerk : 1) Vanguard, 2) Synced, 3) Immortals (4 minutes 30 seconds)
Grobbulus : 1) Vanguard, 2) Synced, 3) Immortals (2 minutes 50 seconds)
Gluth : 1) Synced, 2) Vanguard, 3) easy (3 minutes 30 seconds)
Thaddius : 1) Synced, 2) Vanguard, 3) ???? (2 minutes 40 seconds)
Noth : 1) easy, 2) Wipe club, 3) Memento Mori
Heigan : 1) easy, 2) Wipe club, 3) ONSLAUGHT
Loatheb : 1) easy, 2) Synced, 3) ONSLAUGHT
Anub'Rekhan : 1) Immortals, 2) Vanguard, 3) Synced (5-14 minutes ?)
Faerlina : 1) Immortals, 2) Vanguard, 3) Synced (2 minutes)
Maexxna : 1) Immortals, 2) Vanguard, 3) Synced (3 minutes)
Razuvious : 1) Risen, 2) Vanguard, 3) Synced (2 minutes 40 seconds)
Gothik : 1) Risen, 2) Vanguard, 3) Synced (5 minutes 30 seconds)
Horsemen : 1) Vanguard, 2) Risen, 3) Synced
Sapphiron : 1) Vanguard (8 minutes)
Kel'thuzad : ????
Oct 23, 19:00 ST
Thaddius : 3) Immortals
Sapphiron : 2) Synced, 3) Risen
Kel'thuzad : ???
Some comments by player "shard" : most bosses were too easy (except Anub, Kel'thuzad and Sapphiron), Anub impale was bugged (hits almost all players, although it apparently worked correctly on the test realm). Naice from <Synced> says most of the bugs had been reported before the Naxx release and were quickly fixed today, but is unhappy with the quality of the scripts/raid (and says a guildmate did a better job on his private test realm). DarkStorm confirms that most of "the issues" were known and adds that Anub made the server lag, that some players got teleported to Silverpine after a logout in Naxxramas, that iceblocks didn't block spell with Sapphiron in some parts of the room and that they could miss players. GM Davros says they tried to carefully increase the health of some bosses to compensate overgear/damage but it didn't always work out with the intended effect, they did their best and being 100% blizzlike would have led to "it's way too easy". Voidzone notes that the abominations on Kel'thuzad hit for over 20k in phase 1, which makes the fight borderline impossible short of kiting all of them all the time and that the run was particularly unfair for Memento Mori which started on the most bugged bosses.
Oct 24, further discussion on Naxxramas, apparently there was some discussion about when Naxx bugs should get fixed (straight away, after X hours, at server reset) to be fair for all raiders (EU, NA, etc.). Seems like Kel'thuzad mind-control resets all his aggro on all players.
Oct 25 (evening), first Kel'thuzad kill by <Vanguard>, congratulations ! Kill with 9 mages, 8 priests, 4 warlocks, 7 warriors, 4 paladins, 3 druids, 2 rogues and 2 hunters.
Kel'thuzad : 1) Vanguard (14 minutes)
Oct 29, second Kel'thuzad Kill by <Synced>.
Kel'thuzad : 2) Synced
Nov 3, Blizzard announces Classic servers... wow... WTF ?
Nov 4, GM Bazzil reveals the voluntary changes that were made to Naxxramas to increase the difficulty, following a server-wide poll (+10 to 30% health and damage to some bosses, trash monsters). New poll : a) reintroduce world buffs, remove buffs, b) reintroduce world buffs, keep buffs, c) remove buffs only, d) don't change anything. Poll is currently lead by 39% (68 voters) that want no changes whatsoever. Now 69 with my vote.
Nov 6
Kel'thuzad : 3) easy
Nov 8, new announcement, Plagueblooms now have more spawns and random spawn timers, Kronos III will release on Q1/Q2 2018, with a 15-18 months content release timeline (details will come in the next 6-10 weeks). The team is working on Kronos TBC.
Dec 3, although I have a nametracking addon (which displays the level and class of players on the world channel), I keep finding new characters every week which suggests new players keep coming on the server. For some reasons the forums moved to a different host, all Twinstar project are mixed up and the new forum look a bit disorganized to me. I'm a bit concerned forum changes could one day lead the forum posts I cite to disappear... I may need to archive all the cited pages. About 11 guilds have killed Kel'thuzad so far (Vanguard, not like this, Wipe Club, Risen, Memento Mori, Immortals, easy, ONSLAUGHT, Unite And Vanquish, Friends, Synced). Characters with characteristic Naxxramas gear are starting to appear in Orgrimmar, lovely !
Kronos announcement, players will soon (Dec/Jan 2018) be able to join battlegrounds with a command from anywhere in the world, the "empty" PvP weekend will get removed and the team will make it possible to see other players health again. Devs says they are working/thinking about a) same honor gains when killing lower PvP rank players, b) fix the ALT+F4 trick to leave combat and not give honor when nearly dead.
Dec 9, Mooncloth down to 10-11g/unit, Felcloth down to 2-3g/unit, Refined deeprock salt is getting very hard to sell even at <3g/unit, Black lotus 70g/unit, Flasks 115-140g/unit, Grave moss 1g/unit.
299 players on the Horde world channel at 15:03 ST (Saturday).
Dec 24, announcement, couple fixes (cannot avoid Hakkar's siphon life by strafing, Anub'Rekhan's Impale target should be less chaotic, slight delay added with charge spells until affected player is stunned, etc.). There will be an announcement about a "third" Kronos server, KIII.
January 14 2018, New announcement, a new server, KIII, will launch on Saturday March 31, 2018 (PvP server). Multiboxing will be forbidden, no alt-tabbing and no /follow with alts. Group experience gains will be slightly higher to encourage group play.
405 players on the Horde world channel at 19:19 ST (Sunday). Couple players in Orgrimmar are now looking Naxxramas BiS geared (from key guilds such as Friends, easy, Wipe Club), which is lovely and helps distinguish raiding guilds. Haven't yet seen players with the legendary Atiesh but it looks like there are bugreports about it already (internal).
Jan 29 2018, New announcement, KIII should have Naxxramas 17 months after the server opens its doors. This new server will start with 8 debuff slots and some items will only appear in the loot tables of bosses/creatures once the associated events (e.g. AQ doors opened) are live.
February 4, New announcement, the team says they have focussed on seasonal events bugs/mechanics, particulary Love is In the Air (guard gossip, interactions, events should be fixed, Peddlefeet too), the Lunar Festival (items, quests, spells, candles, fireworks should work correctly) and the Chinese New Year.
February 11, New announcement, KIII won't have character auctions, character trades or the shop system. Apparently it may not be entirely up to the Kronos team to decide if it will stay that way as it will depend if the servers can be kept with donations only. They say they do not wish to steal Kronos players' money through deception as some previous servers did and will only ask for donations when/if needed (Note: But how will they avoid deception? Are there any plans for increased transparency with donations/spendings? More details should be incoming.). No changes on K1 and K2.
336 players on the Horde world channel at 19:42 ST (Sunday).
March 10, I have been informed that Gurky is no longer part of the Kronos team (voluntary "retirement" if I understand correctly). GM Davros is now head gamemaster of the server. [April 2018 edit: Seems like Gurky actually made an announcement in November, my bad for missing it]
March 18, New announcement, it will be possible to reserve names and guild names before the launch of K3. A character name can be reserved for 15 euros and a guild name for 20 euros. New account manager incoming. An updated pathing system is getting tested on the PTR (creatures should evade less often and should now understand how to use bridges). The current running joke on the server is that K1 will die when K3 will be released.
March 25, Facebook announcement, new pathing system incoming tomorrow (pets on elevators and zeps not yet working perfectly). Naxxramas bosses will no longer have extra damage and health as of tomorrow. 14 guilds had killed Kel'thuzad so far.
March 28, Kronos is now 3 years old. Happy birthday!
March 31, 10:00 AM, cannot connect to the Kronos server, some suggest this may be due to excessive numbers of players making accounts. Some good hype for K3 release on Reddit.
45 players on the Horde world channel at 10:37 ST (Saturday) on Kronos.
175 players on the Horde world channel at 13:17 ST (Saturday), Kronos.
75 players on the Horde world channel at 17:48 ST , Kronos.
17:43 ST, I am stuck on "connected" when trying to join K3, only to be disconnected a couple seconds later. This seems to be a shared experience according to Reddit comments. 1100 viewers on Monkeynews stream.
According to GM Davros there were "close to" 10'000 players on K3 at peak time.
1196 players on the Horde world channel at 22:39 ST on K3. Considering that half K3 players are Horde (kronos-wow stats), there are currently at least over 2200 players on K3, likely much more as only a minority of players join the world channel (you have to type /join world to join it). Highest level player online is level 16, Schwifty, hunter.
April 1st, from what I can gather, beside login issues and what looks like a single crash feedback on K3 launch is generally positive. (personal experience: hard to login but then standard 50ms latency, could play for hours without issues, obviously sometimes too many players for quests, but that's expected)
1044 players on the Horde Barrens general channel (players must opt-out of this channel) at 21:00 ST on K3. Disconnects, while unfrequent (every couple hours of play) are quite bothersome as it is difficult to login afterwards.
75 players on the Horde world channel at 21:28 ST on Kronos (Sunday). Roughly 25% of the usual Kronos population.
April 3
840 players on the Horde Barrens general channel at 00:12 ST on K3.
1270 players on the Horde world channel at 00:12 ST on K3.
April 4, new announcement, there will be some tweaks to dynamic spawns (some people were abusing it for experience), some quest game objects should respawn faster. It is no longer possible for melee classes to kite creatures by staying on the move.
April 7 (Saturday)
1404 players on the Horde world channel at 20:25 ST on K3.
May 19, interesting comment by GM Davros pointing out the many lies told by people buying gold and that gold sellers knowing about the Kronos 1-chance policy suggested players buy gold, receive a small amount, admit to buying gold when caught and get the true amount afterwards.
[---------------Missed timeline (not playing, not following news)-------------]
August 10 (Friday)
19 players on the Horde world channel at 21:56 ST, K1. Looks like population shrinked on K1.
486 players on the Horde world channel at 22:00 ST, K3. Idem, about a third of pop 3 months ago.
For what it is worth, I still have my 11,000 gold on my main character after 4 months without playing, which hopefully is further proof that the Kronos team can be trusted (and that unique passwords not shared with anyone work well).
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