Most of the past week went into speed, ahead of Midnight Season 2. A lot of that work is invisible by design: less happening in the background, smaller responses, and pages that are no longer rebuilt from scratch for every visitor. Here is what you should actually notice.
Big rosters
The roster sent every character's full Mythic+ history and entire raiding career on every load, whether the screen you were on displayed any of it or not. It now sends what the current screen uses, and asks for the rest only when a view genuinely needs it.
- Roster, professions, loot and audit screens load faster. The difference scales with guild size, so the largest rosters gain the most.
- Large guilds stop timing out mid-load. Roster responses are about a third smaller on average, which is the difference between a slow load and one that gives up.
- Note lists open faster. The note picker no longer downloads every note's cast summary up front. Hovering a note still shows it.
Guides, help and the spell library
Pages that look the same for everyone are now served from a cache close to you, instead of being built fresh on every visit. Guides, help articles, news posts, the spell library and the front page all fall into this.
Raid night
Twenty people opening the same group in the same minute used to mean twenty of every lookup. Repeated reads are now shared across everyone in the group, and the background checks that keep the hub current are staggered instead of all firing on the same beat.
- The group hub holds up when the whole team arrives at once. Around four in five group lookups are now answered from cache rather than repeated per person.
- Switching tabs inside a group is instant. Moving between sections reuses data that just arrived instead of downloading it again.
- The planner stops straining under live editing. Co-leads typing in the same reset no longer trigger a stream of duplicate checks.
- Group arrangements open faster. Running one auto-arrange strategy after another no longer re-fetches everything each time.
Fixes
- The Tidebound Grotto guide loads. It was erroring on a missing field in its encounter data.
- Patreon linking fails gracefully. An expired or reused link now returns you to your profile with a message instead of a dead page.
- Invite links join cleanly. Accepting an invite no longer flashes a "you're already a member" error straight after it worked.
- Bookmarked player sheets keep working. They used to break once the group your browser remembered was no longer one you were in.
- Droptimizer imports fail fast. An import that cannot complete now says so quickly and accurately, and closing the dialog actually cancels it.
- Small icons load reliably. Some icon sizes had started failing after the framework upgrade.
What we changed, for the curious
- Fewer requests per page. Pages were pre-loading links nobody clicked, re-checking things on a clock when nothing had changed, and downloading the same data two or three times under different names. Around one in ten requests to the site was a page being prepared that no one ever opened.
- Responses carry only what the screen shows. The roster split is the biggest example, but the same pass went through note lists, sync status and the group switcher.
- Deadlines on anything we don't control. Every outbound call now has a time limit, and a failed request no longer retries itself into a pile.
- Less repeated work per visitor. Shared lookups instead of per-person ones, and a logo that shipped at 257 KB to be drawn at 24 pixels, now 6 KB.
Around the app
- Other languages got faster too. Every page in a language other than English was reassembling the full English text on every request. That now happens once.
- One less thing running in the background. The usage tracking that fired on every interaction is gone.
- Alt-tabbing is quiet. Switching to the game and back no longer sets off a burst of requests.
As always, feedback and ideas are welcome in Discord.