As a general rule I am pretty forgiving of Blizzard. After all, I’ve never made the most successful MMO in history, so I really cannot speak with authority on the design and technical aspects of WoW. I do know that, despite best efforts, sometimes things just break. I understand that regardless of how much testing is carried out Blizzard cannot possibly know every consequence of everything they do. It’s is the nature of the beast.
So, if the new skin for Troll totems causes Durn the Hungerer to bug out, I forgive. If the introduction of the Core Hound Pup means that some spiders in Redridge start acting funny, fair enough. I know Blizzard will fix it as soon as they can and I move on with my life.
But right now, I’m shitty. Very, very shitty. Wednesday raid lag is making me a very, very angry Shaman.
Pirates raids twice a week and, unlike many others already dressed to impress in 25-raid items, we don’t out-gear the 10s version of ICC. This means we need to be very, very good to get our progression. Two Wednesdays in a row we’ve hit a brick wall in Rotface for no other reason than the lag.
We’ve managed to struggle through the early content with lag, but none of them are overly difficult. Rotface was the first example of a harder encounter in ICC and the frustration at trying to do this when your instant cast heals take two-three seconds is unbearable. This is playing havoc with our progressions, with plans of getting some good work on the Princes going out the window after lag induced wipe after wipe.
But that’s not what really bothers me. What really bothers me is it’s not fun. Even killing bosses is not fun. It’s all frustration and rage. Healing isn’t a set rotation, it reaction and timing. With lag it’s like Russian Roulette and knowing that that person should be at full health but waiting for your heal to finally go off, only to see them die before it does, makes me want to throw my keyboard out the window. Personally, I’d rather the servers just went down that have to continue to struggle on with this lag.
What’s my point? I don’t have one. I’m just pissed off and want it fixed.
Yeah, I find this rather upsetting too.
I am sure that it would only cost a fraction of the total Australian subscriptions to supply us with physically-local servers. The good will they would generate from such a move alone might be enough to get many unsatisfied quitters to come back.
Or they could spend that money (or even less) on merely adding more nodes to their instance server farm. That would at least restore us to the latency we are used to.
The mind-boggling part of this is that not all raids are run on the same farms. While latency was murdering us in Icecrown the other night, we didn’t have any such problems at all in Ulduar (or it might have been Trial of the Crusader). Why is there valuable resources being reserved for older content when they know full well that the latest raid is going to be in highest demand? Couldn’t the load be spread more evenly?
WTF?
I agree. Our Wednesday night raid was more a case of “which class copes well with lag?” or who has the most decent auto-attack.
Lag isn’t a challenge. It’s a pain in the ass. It doesn’t matter how good a player you think you are, when you’re trying to factor around a 0.8-2second (because it’s not a steady amount, of course) delay it becomes near impossible to hold any kind of rotation or priority casting system in place.
It’s not fun. Actually I think it’s one of the fastest ways to remove the “fun” factor from raiding. Make Lady Deathwhisper’s RP speech twice as long i don’t mind. But for heaven’s sake let us raid with a constant 400ms and I’ll actually be happy.
LOL 400ms HAHAHAAHAHAH
Yes, 400ms is our normal lag in Australia. We agree, it’s a laughably unfair situation.