WoWAreaA World of Warcraft database turned into our high-load testbed

From gaming passion to technical breakthrough

By 2011 our studio launched WoWArea 2.0 — an ambitious fan project dedicated to World of Warcraft. On the surface it looked like a classic database and guide hub:

• 📚 Comprehensive knowledge base — strategies, profession guides, item stats, and raid tactics.

• 🛡️ Armory integration — players linked their WoW characters, syncing equipment, progress, and stats directly into their WoWArea profiles.

• 💬 Forums and community — custom-built boards specifically for WoW players, complementing the main content.

• 🌍 Social sync — support for Facebook and VK, enabling quick sharing of achievements and posts.

But under the hood, WoWArea was much more than just a game site.

Testing the limits of Deridex Core

We used WoWArea as a sandbox for new infrastructure experiments:

• ⚙️ Percona Server with XtraDB — rolled out here before anywhere else. For several years it ran as our primary DB engine, stress-tested under real community load.

• 🔄 Custom admin modules — tailored panels for editing highly specific game data.

• 📈 High-load proofing — WoWArea handled thousands of player queries, giving us insights into database scaling, caching, and bottlenecks.

Although Percona didn’t ultimately replace MySQL across all projects, the lessons learned shaped how we approached performance tuning in the years that followed.

From Chasm to QRaway

Just like our earlier project Chasm, WoWArea relied heavily on object–tag logic. Items, bosses, professions, and tactics were all stored as objects, interlinked by tags.

👉 That model became the missing bridge:

• Chasm showed us how tags could structure communities.

• WoWArea proved the same could work for vast, structured data.

• QRaway later united both worlds — people and objects, content and commerce — on the very same architecture.

Why it mattered

👉 WoWArea may have been “just a fan project,” but it gave us exactly what we needed: a live environment to test, break, and refine technologies before deploying them into commercial ecosystems.

It was our reminder that sometimes the best R&D doesn’t come from labs — it comes from games.