Blizzard points to fish as the lead suspects in the case of the World of Warcraft: Midnight beta's borderline unplayable lag

When I logged into the World of Warcraft: Midnight beta earlier this week, I couldn't play the game. Suddenly the MMO became turn-based as I clicked NPCs and waited a good 30 seconds for them to offer me a quest. The lag got even worse when I made it to the opening zone of the expansion and watched other players blink in and out of existence as the servers desperately tried to keep up with where they should be standing.

The problem? Fish, apparently.

I managed to play a little bit today without a ton of issues, but I wasn't the only one who experienced severe lag. Blizzard's been trying to figure out what's causing all the problems since the beta launched on Tuesday, and discovered yesterday that it might be some new fish technology that's bringing Azeroth to a crawl.

"We're still plugging away at this but we think we found a new problem," game producer Zorbrix wrote in a forum thread about the lag. "FISH!"

They explained how there's new NPC behavior that's supposed to help creatures "react to players and the environment in a more natural way" instead of randomly wandering around and that it could be going haywire when too many players are nearby. It doesn't help that a lot of Midnight takes place near a lot of coastlines.

"Again, this might not be a magic bullet, or 'The Thing' causing all of the problems, but we're going to do some mad science tomorrow to scale things a little differently," they added. "And if that doesn't help, we're going to have to do some more fishing. Either way, I'm hooked!"

This isn't the first time a fish has threatened the heroes of WoW. In 2018, Blizzard released a cinematic where an old god makes a deal with a queen while posing as a fish, and that led to a whole raid where you had to deal with the catastrophic repercussions. That fish ultimately became a boss, but I don't recall it ever becoming powerful enough to halt the entire world.

The fish that have taken control of the beta have already become a bigger threat. I had assumed the lag was from the number of players piling into the beta. After all, Blizzard has made unprecedented changes to how combat mods and classes work. Tons of players want to get their hands on everything before they go live. I would've never guessed that it was the fish that would stand in their way.

"Come on, Blizzard. You gotta reel it in," WoW player Raivokan wrote in a reply to Blizzard's fish post.

Thankfully, it looks like it has for the most part. The thread hasn't had any new complaints for several hours, presumably because everyone is too busy playing. I'll be keeping an eye on those fish though. You can't trust 'em.