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Bigfoot intros lower-end Killer K1 network interface card
Perhaps a $250 network interface card was a bit too much for your wallet to handle, and even after reading the review, you were left wishing that Bigfoot would introduce a slightly less-spec'd rendition for the budget-minded set. If that's you, today's your lucky day, as you can take the money you didn't end up spending on an overpriced-for-the-day bouquet of roses yesterday and put it towards a probably unnecessary NIC. Similar to its big brother, the PCI-based Killer K1 boasts Lag & Latency Reduction (LLR) technology that "optimizes the way networking works in your computer" in order to deliver the best possible ping times. Moreover, it touts gigabit speeds, a 333MHz network processing unit which runs a unique version of Linux to remove the burden of processing packets from your CPU, 64MB of DDR RAM, a USB 2.0 port for future FNApps upgrades, and support for both Windows XP and Vista. Of course, with a card that looks this good, you'll probably end up forking out for an acrylic case while you're at it, but the Killer K1 itself can be picked up now for a "special price" of $149.99.[Via ExtremeTech]
The Burning Crusade: Lag and Instability
The vast amount of coverage I have seen on The Burning Crusade rollout has been positive. I'm having very negative experiences. For the first time since I started playing Warcraft I got to bed early last night. Not because a raid got cancelled, or because I was tired, but because I couldn't actually do anything.Every quest spawn in Outlands was camped. As a warlock, I'd typically get a couple DoT's on a mob, and some warrior would charge it. DoT's don't tag mobs until they do damage. It was taking, oh, 20-30 seconds for DoT's to tick because of the breathtaking lag. So I'd do about half the damage on the mob, the warrior would do the other half and get all the quest credit. Excellent. At least I was still out mana for the cast.So I rolled a new Draeni. Every quest spawn in the Draeni starting zone was camped. As a mage, I'd typically get 8 seconds into a 10 second frostbolt cast (did I mention it was laggy?) and a shaman would earth shock the mob, and I'd kill it half and get no credit. Nobody wanted to group, because of the XP penalty. The Outlands and the new starting zones are all on the same server. How do I know that? They all crash together. So I went back to my warlock, back to Outlands, and decided to get a guild group together to try the Ramparts. We zone in, the server crashes. Twice. Before the first pull.Then I get clever. I go to bed early, use flextime for the early in-early out and get home at 4. That would give me 3 hours of playtime before prime time. And they rebooted the servers this afternoon. I got 20 minutes in before the waves of crashes started again. I'm moving one of my level 60's over to a different server. A server that isn't crashing the outlands over and over and over again. Maybe I'll hit 70 there. Because it's not happening on my main server. So far this patch has been a uniformly horrible experience for me. Anyone else having bad experiences? Vent (but keep it civil) below.
Up and down, all week long
Well I'd love to give you first impressions of the Burning Crusade, but the only land I've visited is Outlagg. So far, my realm, Thunderhorn, has been all over the place tonight.I started out by taking my Shaman to Outland-- Hellfire Peninsula was up, but lagging so much I couldn't even get off my mount. So I pushed inland, to Shattrath City, where I got my first quest done (the tour of the city is fun and easy, and gives you a little lore, a little XP, and that nice Aldor vs. Scryer decision). Eventually, however, that too was lagged. My friend and I then decided to start up our Blood Elf alts (I'm doing a mage), but while there were plenty of player Blood Elves in the starting area, the NPCs had decided to stay home. It's about then that the world server crashed, kicking us all off.Later I tried to run Hellfire Ramparts, and we started rolling, even as the Outland server crashed (all of our guildies exited the game). Unfortunately, we had a bad pull, and wiped, and then as soon as I released, the server did a "what the??" (because it wasn't there), and kicked me out of the game again. Our instance group is going to try again later.It's too bad, because everything else I've seen of the expansion is terrific-- the lands look great, the story is deep, the music is terrific, and the items are droolworthy (even the few greens that dropped in the instance made us all go "whoah", and we're in Tier 2 sets). If it weren't for the lag, things would be great (and on the less popular servers, things probably are). But considering how many more people are going to be picking up BC and playing this weekend, outlook not good for Outland on the high traffic servers.
Life of a SOCOM Player: females FTW!
This video is described simply as such: "This is the life of a Socom: FTB Player."That's all you really need. It captures the life of one girl (yes, gaming girls do exist!) and her obsession with SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo. Watch as this pretty professionally made video makes fun of suburban female life, full servers, and lag. Any more details would spoil the fun, so start watching!
IGN found a solution for gaming lag: DVDO's VP20 and VP30
IGN has had...issues...with HDTV lately. Well, rather with HDTV gaming lag, but they have found a remedy - DVDO's VP20 or VP30. IGN blame the lag on the HDTVs over-processing of the incoming signal. So, these set-top boxes just make sense as they do all the processing for the HDTV. The VP20 and VP30 takes the incoming audio and video signals and output a single clean resolution to the TV. DVDO just released a daughter card for these scalers though that can preform rapid deinterlacing processing. This allows for two gaming modes that can preform ether a one or two frame delay with edge adaptive deinterlacing. Sounds great right? Well, it comes at a price as these processors aren't cheap. The VP20 is $1699 and VP30 $1999 with the daughter card add-on for $499.Would you be willing to spend the extra cash for no "gaming lag."
Lag Monster Respawns Again
As you have all probably noticed, and as we've been reporting, there has been a mysterious increase in the amount of server downtime lately, with official "maintenances": being scheduled with little notice & players becoming incresingly more disgruntled as visions of outages from months past creep back into their brains like carrion worms...I guess it was only a matter of time before the ubiquitous "SERVER OUTAGES CAUSE MASS CHAOS" news posts started to creep up, and Gamespot is one of the first major sites to renew the scrutiny.Apparently, the official story from Blizzard is that server upgrades in June, undertaken to increase stability, have in fact done the exact opposite, and let loose some more ghosts in the machine. There is an official thread on the subject over at the Blizzard forums as well, with plenty of rabid responses to the boys in blue. Have you all noticed the recent increase in downtime? Has it affected your playtime? Does it seem as bad as it was before? Chime in...
End Lag...Now!
Lag...the bane of every online gamer. It's even an unpleasant sounding word - "Laaaaaag" - sounds like you're trying to gag on a raw fish. Well, just like any enemy of the people, there are folks out there fighting the good fight against the lag monster, notably the team over at EndLagNow.org, a website dedicated to tracking down & eliminating the menace of the red latency bar.The latest step is the release of a program called LagMeter, that scans your PC's connection to determine where lag is coming from & what the causes might be. From the description: Finally, the causes of your Lag will not be a mystery because LagMeter will tell you if it is your gaming PC, the network, or the gaming server that is giving you grief. Once the causes of Lag are better understood, then gamers, game developers, and hardware manufacturers can work together to provide solutions to our #1 problem – LAG!!!!!!!Sounds like a plan to me. Haven't tried out the program myself yet, but it's definitely worth a look. You can check it out over at EndLagNow's website right here.
Brits Bash WoW Woes
With all the issues regarding player connectivity & realm stability lately, it was just a matter of time before even the oh-so-polite British had to stand up & say something. This weekend's edition of BBC news online ran an article detailing all the damage caused by the lag monster on their side of the pond, and how it's not only homegrown gamers who are unhappy.Maybe they should stage a good old-fashioned soccer riot; that'll might really get Blizzard shaking in their boots...
New Servers: A Month Later
Remember the slew of new US servers that opened about a month ago? Well, a lot of players from other servers jumped on the opportunity to start anew - myself included. The chance to start on a fresh server has been a thrill. No queues, no lag, and no gold farmers. But the servers have already started growing up. Gold and characters are available for purchase on most and queues on my new server have already surpassed those on my old. After weeks of watching the queues increase, I'm starting to realize that this may not be just a passing thing - people aren't just coming to visit the servers just announced or tagged new, they're sticking around to play.So what does this mean for population balance? I haven't heard anything about queues or lag dropping on older servers - though perhaps people are too busy playing to post about it. Short of establishing draconian policies that force players to one server or another, it doesn't seem like there's much Blizzard can do to normalize server population aside from making new realms and transfer servers attractive options to players. But a month after a major wave of new transfers, new realms, and new hardware, are we seeing improvements - or are the problems just moving from one server to another?
Gaming startup aims to eliminate lag with $4m
Bigfoot Networks is a startup that's recently obtained $4 million in venture capital funding. Founded by MBA students, the company has a grand ambition--to eliminate lag in online gaming by a vague-sounding "Network Gaming Accelerator" card.The card will be on show at E3, where curious journos can fire piercing questions such as "So what does it actually do?", but until then we'll have to speculate. According to FORTUNE Small Business, the card "communicates with servers, downloading some of the processes that they perform online and allowing them to run faster". However, according to Bigfoot Networks' own white paper on lag, the majority of the bottlenecks involved in lag are client-side and server-side CPU limitations--not network latency.The paper's references to latency spikes and packet loss imply that Bigfoot Network's magic solution to lag might involve creating a dedicated network processor (offloading network-related load from the client CPU), allowing the TCP/IP stack to be specifically tuned for low, consistent latency. However, as Greg Costikyan points out, games are designed to allow for network transmission delays--it might only be a product that appeals to gamers for whom every millisecond counts.[Thanks, Probot]
Character Creation Management System
All of us have struggled with lag issues at some point or another in our Warcraft careers. Perhaps your server has a queue to log in, or perhaps you frequently end up stuck at the loading characters screen, but we've all had a chance to see what it's like. Blizzard has recently been coping with this by closing character creation on overcrowded servers, and while this seems like more of a stop-gap measure than a real solution, they've decided to expand the practice. Yesterday, community manager Eyonix announced an automated system that would close character creation (for players without existing characters on the server) when there's a login queue.
More Overpopulation Issues
So Blizzard recently decided to allow character transfers from eight of their most overpopulated servers to a new server, Mug'thol. People on Burning Blade, for instance, were having 700-800 long queues for logging in, to the tune of more than an hour wait to get in. This was a good idea, right? Alleviating some of the strain on those overpopulated servers?Problem is that too many people made the jump and now Mug'thol has been having 1000 queues during peak time with 1-2 hour-long wait times, and those people who thought they were escaping one aggravating situation now find themselves in the exact same situation, but worse. And they are pissed off.I have to agree with them. Blizzard seems to have planned this migration poorly and still hasn't posted an update saying they are aware of the issue. I'm a casual enough gamer that I haven't personally been affected by the overpopulation issue on the servers I play, but I can't even imagine having to wait 1-2 hours just to play the game. Sometimes all I have is 1-2 hours to play, and I'm certainly not going to be happy having to spend that time waiting. The bottom line is that Blizzard needs to fix this problem and soon.
