Back in ye olde LAN days, you’d hear the call. ”OHHH LAG”
Depending on who was there, some people would call ceasefire, and others would try to use it as an excuse to rush your base. Someone would yell out “STOP DOWNLOADING PORN!“. Within a minute, the network would right itself, and you were back to pwning again.
Server lag nowadays is quite similar to to network lag back then, only without the ability to fix it by stopping someone’s porn download.
Raiding as an Aussie is already hard work. I know Americans don’t believe us when we tell them what our average ping is, so here’s proof:
400ms, on an average day.
Think of the difference that that causes already. Every time Lady Deathwhisper’s Death and Decay lands on the ground, you’re standing it in for 0.4 seconds before it renders on your screen, then there’s the delay of your brain processing it and the delay of your finger pushing the button, and then another 0.4 seconds before your character actually starts moving out of it. You need to have reflexes of a ninja to avoid a tick.
So raiding’s tough. I don’t even want to know about PVP – the last I heard was that Aussies can’t play melee classes in PVP against Americans, because it’s just ridiculous.
Healing is all about reacting – one of the things that separates skilled healers from their less-skilled counterparts is their ability to instantly gauge a situation and react appropriately, and we rely on knowing and using the appropriate spell for the damage – the one with the right amount of healing and the right speed of heal delivery. Lag ruins this – when my instant cast Holy Shock actually takes a second to go off and only delivers 8k as a crit heal, I’m better off casting a Holy Light – after all, I have no idea how much damage that person will take in the next 3 seconds, so the 21k crit heal might come in handy. You know your healers are struggling with lag when your shaman is dropping Mana Tide Totem every fight. Don’t even try to talk to your pally – they’re probably off drinking themselves into a stupor in the corner, gibbering about the fact that they can’t even use Divine Plea because they’ve lost their panic buttons for when things go wrong.
Recently, we’ve had some absolutely shocking nights of lag. And not shocking like an American would say shocking – after all, that’s our standard ping – but the kind of lag that makes you want to throw your laptop off the balcony. As Vok said previously, Pirates raid twice a week – Wednesday and Sunday nights. Every Wednesday, since the second week that ICC was released, we’ve had lag. It vacillates between around 800ms and 1900ms. Yes, that’s 1.9 seconds.
To put it succinctly, it takes away the fun. Your skill isn’t the issue anymore – it’s just you battling against random uncontrollable spikes and looking stupid when people die. You can’t factor it in and you sure as hell can’t control it.
Blizzard’s plan to get more people into the raid instances seems to have worked perfectly – Icecrown Citadel is clearly full of eager people every Wednesday night, throwing themselves against bosses with reckless abandon. The design decision to get more people into raids has to be backed up by the hardware to support that influx of people – to a random user, it looks like the instance servers can’t handle it, and it’s pissing off your customers. Worse, it turns the raiding community into a giant game of raiding chicken, where everyone tries to ride out the lag spikes in hopes that the other guilds will give up for the night and free up the server load. Stubbornness? Gamers? Really?
Please, Blizzard, we’re begging you – do something about the lag! Oh, and while you’re at it, how about moving the Oceanic Servers to somewhere that’s actually “Oceanic”? I’m pretty sure that the title wasn’t supposed to refer to the distance between us and our supposedly dedicated servers.
Based on the performance of the instance server on Wednesday night since Trial of the Crusade was introduced I think it’s fair to say that Wednesday nights are pretty much a write off for raiding.
I use the Report Lag feature pretty much non stop these days. Because when you’re unable to down Lady Deathwhispher because you can’t interupt her frostbolt volleys with a 2 second delay (1.8ms yum)… well there’s not much else you can do while you’re lying dead on the floor.
There’s no enjoyment to be found raiding under those circumstances. It’s not a challenge. It’s a serious disconnect between what you’re trying to do and what you character is actually doing. How would you enjoy driving down the street in a carnival bumper car? Cause that’s how clumsy it feels.
I have started taking arena more seriously for this upcoming season, and competing against americans with 100ping is a big issue. So i downloaded and subscribed to Lowerping.
My ping went from 550ms AVG to 220ms AVG. I noticed that on Wednesday alot of people were complaining of 1000+ms, while i would normally suffer the same issue, i found that my ping was only 350ms. Which made the game for me, still very much playable.
Lowerping only costs $7.5 aus a month, i know this isnt a solution to WoW learning to fix their damn servers, but it is somewhat of a substitute. Lowerping isnt for everybody, and it effects some peoples connections better than others, but i truly found it to be a life saver for wednesday raid.
So if your serious about raiding, it could be something for some people to consider.
@Cassandri – I wonder if the problem is because we lose our Tuesday nights to shutdown. It removes a possible raiding night, and when you factor in that pretty much no one schedules progression raids for Friday or Saturday nights, that leaves us 4 nights a week. Most guilds seem to raid between 2 and 4. The other issue is that Tuesday night shutdown also makes Wednesday effectively the first day of the new WoW week, encouraging more people to schedule their raids for that day.
It would be useful to know if US/EU guilds have the problem of one raid night being ridiculously popular and lagging the server to hell. Anyone with data?
If you run a dedicated Linux box or have enough grunt in your machine to run a Linux VM then you can do the following on the Linux box:
> sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 12.129.225.72 –dport 3724 -j REDIRECT –to-ports 3724
> socat -d -d TCP4-LISTEN:3724,nodelay,fork,reuseaddr,su=nobody TCP4:12.129.225.72:3724,nodelay
Then on your Windows WoW PC, start -> run -> cmd and:
> route -p ADD 12.129.225.72 MASK 255.255.255.255 your.linux.box.ip
It’s essentially what Lowerping et. al. does, except they host the Linux box component for you, and presumably their software does your Windows PC routing. Note that the IP address 12.129.225.72 is for Barthilas, if you’re playing else where, you need to use that server’s IP address.
You can find a list of the servers’ IP addresses here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h…518019717&sid=1
This is not a silver bullet – a lot still depends on your ISPs and their routing habits!
The logistics of it are that Blizz have always operated on a redundancy sort of model i suspect.
IF you expect 3% of the population to be doing the material on average, you provide resources for 5% of the population.
Back when, it was AV that used to lag, because AV was where a lot of people went to gear up.
(note most the stats are guestimates)
Molten Core was open to about 1/3 of the population, because you needed a reasonably strong guild to run it. BWL was open to 1/5 or less of the population, and Naxx was closed to all but hte elite guilds.
ZG 15 and AQ 20 were open to more but still not many, and raid nights were split, depending on when groups could organise.
Come BC, continual nerfs to Kara opened it up increasingly, but Gruul (esp HKM) and Mag were still closed to many. SSC and TK were more open than the equivalent BWL, but still needed a reasonable guild to progress, and BT and MH were closed till patch 2.4 and even then, only barely open till the final nerf.
Along comes WOTLK, and almost everyone had access to Naxx, Ulduar, the first 4 bosses were lootcakes, it got harder after that fair call.
but come TOC and 80% plus of the population have access to TOC.
ICC is marginally harder but still the first wing is open to the majority of the population.
This directly leads to the lack of resources and infrastructure provided I suspect, as people surge to get in early.
I’ve spoken to Rexy a GM for another guild, and her whole guild has moved their 25s to saturday, to avoid the ‘peak hour rush’.
Its not you, its them.