goodbye, cruel world...

[sud]

Problem with the engine as it stands now is a graphics clog so to say can cause DC's because the network thread goes caput waiting on IO thats stuck trying to show some insane DK battle graphics.

Well, this finally clears the problem to me!
I have a quite shitty computer but I used to play with around 20 fps in TBC raids.
I can still keep roughly around 15 fps in 10 mans but in any 25man raid my frames drop to a miserably unplayable 2-3 fps, which I think is quite unwarranted for that 2.5 times as many people.
I even bought a pretty decent video card (512meg) and doubled my RAM (to 2 gigs) only to angrily realize that my upgrades helped almost nothing - its my MB and CPU that are old and apparently those to the major load of the graphics computing in raids.

Anyway, it's very very frustrating as a tank, holding back your guild and your raids - not because you don't prepare, or gear up or whatever, but because of your hardware limits :<

[blahism]

That "latency" is a million fucking people being in the area at peak hour. Thus, your computer takes a crap trying to render everything at once. Not only do many people in small areas require more computer power to run smoothly, but it chokes up the servers as well.

If you could put shitty performance in a vacuum (like, say, being in Icecrown where there's not a ton of players, but is near Dalaran and on the Northrend server), you'd see you'd still most likely have awful lag when the server is under a lot of pressure.

Poor server performance/unresponsive servers do not actually cause the client's (you and I) computer to run poorly.

Oh please Xav, you should know better then to assume I'm an idiot. WoW is a client server architecture - latency on the server directly results in poor fps on the client and you can't fix the server without fixing the client - especially if the architecture is reaching critical mass.

1. I experience in the world server and wintergrasp and all the cities
2. "Instance Servers" don't seem to have this issue.

Does that spell it out better now?

The issue I have in instance servers is when a DK goes wholy ape shit and people DC. So the people that were DC'ing in my guild i had them turn absolutely everything off in graphics candy and guess what they stopped dc'ing

So 2 and 2 means there is an issue with realm capacity as well as a failure within the client.

Again, its not rocket science.

Even on my i7 with now 8 gigs ram running X2 4870 spell damage or raid buffs cause me instant lagg regardless of what the ping time to the server is and when a DK goes crazy i get HUGE FPS STUTTER AND SLOWDOWN.

However if i'm on at 5 a.m. in the morning most of this isn't a problem at all for me. I just don't think its a black and white server problem. Of course they need to fix their server capacity - but it won't do any good if the client is a dismal failure in handling its own load.

And yes, realm capacity directly relates to FPS for me. If its peak i'm down about 15fps average, if its not peak - i'm frame locked at 60fps where i like it. with the exception of dalaran which doesn't like to get much above 37-40 no matter how much horsepower i throw at it. again, ON THE REALM/WORLD SERVERS.. INSTANCE servers don't seem to have as much issues tied to ream capacity beyond the obvious failures i've mentioned - i could be running in icrcrown at 45 FPS during peak (when its normally 60) and run into Naxx and naxx will run 60..) beyond that the instance servers never drew that much client load anyway. their design is simplistic & flat compared to world areas (And smaller)

[Kelstet]

As a subscriber, I'd say the biggest caveat is that now the game is accessible to the masses as opposed the minorities. Achievements, difficulties, all that additional stuff that the hardcore can now do to peen it up as you were is great and well. I think that the hardcore raiders need to understand, they had their cake for a very long time. It's time now to let the rest of the world and I would say a vastly larger group of people, enjoy the game in it's entirety not just those who suffer from elitism.

The lag issues will take care of themselves in time, blizz is always looking at streamlining things to make the experience better and I know that they will continue to hammer on the issues until they can finally lock down what's making this exp not so streamlined.

It's time for the hardcores to evolve as all mmo's do in time, WoW just may not be the game for you if your idea of the game is a small minority are the only ones that get to ever fully play the game from start to finish. It was a design flaw in prior versions of the game and I think they now finally have in mind the right direction to take.

My two cents.

Kel

[kolben]

in response to a few previous posts...

the players in my guild are not leaving due to some addiction where they need to be playing wow 24x7, it is down to a radical change in the way the endgame pans out at level 80.

we have gone from (at 70) raiding 4 nights a week with really challenging content (and lots of it - 2 multi-boss instances per raiding tier usually), wipe nights, and a real sense of achievement for first-kills, to (at 80) 2 nights a week of (pretty much) facerolling content.

i am trying to think of a good analogy here and all i can come up with is comparing it to someone who races Formula1 (or Nascar for you yanks) coming into work one day and being given a go-kart, with only blind pensioners on the track to compete againt.

regarding the actual performance issues we are seeing, i could spend hours detailing what my thoughts are here and (being an operations manager for a hosted services provider with accountability for a few thousand servers and the services they deliver to our clients) i could probably have a good stab at what they may be. but, without knowing blizards actual architecture, it would just be educated guess-work.

any problems on a hosted platform can be fixed though and, usually, without too much difficulty. i am slightly bemused by some of Kolben's claims as issues such as "wonky" frame sizes and spanning-tree are extremely easy to identify and remedy, given the right resources (including skilled engineers). i also doubt they would be using Foundry SI's given their reputation in the market. F5 LTM's or Cisco CSM's are more industry standard these days.

the issues are, quite obviously, load related. it is just a case of where that load is causing a break-point in the architecture and resolving. it won't be a change in trunk provider (unless one they made between TBC and WotLK) and even it it was it should be a simple case of re-optimising the routing with the carrier. if the issue is at the edge of their netowrk, which i doubt, it is more likely to be related to their peering points.

aaaaarrrrgh, i said i wouldn't get started on that and i did.... back to work.

- DW

I'm not a network engineer, I've been a UNIX Systems Engineer for the past 15 years working mostly with HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, VMS and *unfortunately* Linux. The majority of my experience has been in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, which gives me a pretty good idea of what a truly load saturated system works like since it's the rule and not the exception on many production critical hosts. It's a good bet that being a video game Blizzard doesn't throw the kind of money at a rock solid infrastructure that a business that loses hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per hour of downtime does. Much to our chagrin.

I don't know what the real problem is, nobody here does. It's in inability to handle the load somewhere, that much we can probably agree on. Hearsay is that Blizzard does use a 3rd party managed hosting service for it's 4 U.S. data centers.

If I was plagued with performance problems on top of being bored silly with the content I know what I would do.

Personally I don't really care if the hardcore raid guilds are bored. The only real solution to that would have been to make Naxx somewhere around BT/SWP level of difficulty for T7. I can't imagine why anyone would complain about entry level content being not hard for a guild that completed content in the previous expansion. It's not that I don't sympathize with your plight, but entry level is entry level.

[Hroth]

I'm pretty sure that changing graphics settings doesn't affect what information gets sent to your computer, only what your computer actually renders. Your computer still gets told the DK just cast that spell, it just doesn't bother to draw it. If people are getting DC'ed in 25 man raids because they have their graphics turned up, it is because they have shitty computers. The point of this thread is the server lag that is found on high population realms, lag that is independent of whatever people have their graphics set at.

I would say realm population does make a big difference. I raid prime-time on a low/medium population realm and have never experienced any where near the level of issues many people post about.

For the record, I run the game in max resolution with all graphic settings cranked too the max and the only time I have ever had any issues with WoW was for several days when my ISP was experiencing packet loss problems between the state I live in and WoW's servers.

[Kilrath]

Just to clarify, this isn't about low FPS or high latency. The issue being discussed is server latency, where an instant cast ability takes 3-4 seconds to go off, when you loot a mushroom in Dalaran and it takes 45 seconds for the shift-clicked process to complete, where you jump on a griffin and it sits there flapping for 2+ minutes before you take off... Your FPS might be 60 and your latency might be 30 but there is still a delay in the act, this is the issue at hand.

If you have low FPS when a lot of things are happening or in certain zones you're talking about a different problem. If your E-Machine is on a Wireless B connection to your Linskee rooter and you keep getting disconnected you're talking about a different problem.

[blahism]

I'm pretty sure that changing graphics settings doesn't affect what information gets sent to your computer, only what your computer actually renders.

Exactly.. its not sending more information back and forth to the server but if your client stops for 4-5 seconds cold in its track because spell casting graphics are more than your PC can handle it does cause the client to DC - sometimes very quickly and sometimes even just a crash.

Spell casting sometimes causes these frame bursts and freezes even on my Phenom, i7 or core 2 duo systems. Its very random. The other day in AQ 40 with only 9 people when certain spell events happened people froze up. No one got dc'd but it does seem random and believe me.. AQ 40 is pretty much a ghost town so its not like there is a peak queue - this was also 1-4 pm server time - very light loads.

Your computer still gets told the DK just cast that spell, it just doesn't bother to draw it. If people are getting DC'ed in 25 man raids because they have their graphics turned up, it is because they have shitty computers.

My point is that that statement is wrong - on so many faces. An athlon x2 6000 with a geforce 8800 is not a shitty computer. Those are the types of computers were disabling all shadow/spell/specular lighting and cutting draw distance had the greatest impact.

I would say realm population does make a big difference. I raid prime-time on a low/medium population realm and have never experienced any where near the level of issues many people post about.

Don't think anyone disputes that. Guess my point is if the clients having issues fixing the server is moot and vice versa, if its really server issues then nothing we can do on the client would help - be that faster hardware, video cards, more bandwidth or what have you.

For the record, I run the game in max resolution with all graphic settings cranked too the max and the only time I have ever had any issues with WoW was for several days when my ISP was experiencing packet loss problems between the state I live in and WoW's servers.

I run at 1920x1200 on a 24" in monitor at max resolution. I just deal with the quirks. I never had DC problems, simply tried to help guild mates debug their dc problems.

[Ion]

My personal guess is the broader implementation of phasing.

There are phased areas all over the entire game now, instead of in a few key places. The phases are seen my MANY more people at once and was THE big technical change of 3.0.2, iirc.

If I were going to be one of the people looking at wtf is going on with the horror that is the lag currently, I'd take a look at that first and destroyable terrain second...I expect destroyable terrain is less of a problem because it's not as widespread and not in instances much at all (malygos? maybe?).

It's possible that it's something completely unrelated to anything we'd even see, of course, but from the outside looking in, those would be my first guesses.

[Delicatesse]

when you loot a mushroom in Dalaran and it takes 45 seconds for the shift-clicked process to complete

Yesterday I got my frying pan for the mushroom daily quest about TWO MINUTES after accepting the quest. I was in the sewers already...