latency
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Breaking: North American Aion servers to be located on east coast
One of our keen-eyed readers tipped us off as to a forum post by Ayase, aka Sebastian Streiffert, Aion's community manager, which confirmed an original email stating that North American servers will be located on the east coast. Forum-goers whipped themselves up into a frenzy quite quickly over this news, especially those residing in the Oceanic region.Gamers from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore are often faced with crippling latency issues when playing on servers located stateside. This is usually mitigated by having some west coast servers or actual dedicated Oceanic servers. Since Aion has such a focus on PvP(vE) where lightning fast reflexes and speedy server responsiveness matter especially, you can kind of understand their concerns. Ayase's response after the cut confirms this news and tries to assuage their fears.
The Queue: Nobody expects the Druid Inquisition!
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Allison Robert will be your hostess today.Adam and Alex are busy packing for BlizzCon, so I've sneaked into the Queue offices to answer some questions this evening. There's no consistent theme here, folks; we're all over the map today with BlizzCon, lore, and player textures. If you don't see your question here, I still have a few in mind from the last post to answer tomorrow.Smapdor asks...There are 3 historical scenarios that can be found in Yogg-Saron's "brain room"...What is the Shadow Vault event? I would guess that it is something as important lore-wise as the (other) two, but I have no idea.It's widely believed that the Shadow Vault "memory" depicts a very recent and very unfortunate occurrence that took place (without player knowledge) after the Wrath Gate event. The NPCs in question are thought to be the souls/spirits/incorporeal whatsamajiggies of Saurfang the Younger and Bolvar Fordragon, who perished in the fight, victim to the Lich King and the Royal Apothecary Society respectively. The Wrath Gate cinematic implies that the Arthas has at least Saurfang's soul to toy with (which would explain the Orcish Turned Champion), but the identity of the Immolated Champion is less clear. Bolvar is by far the most likely possibility -- after all, the Immolated Champion is wearing the same armor Bolvar wore going to his death -- but nothing's been confirmed. Bottom line? Expect to see both Saurfang and Bolvar show up in the Icecrown Citadel raid in some capacity.
Naxxramas optimization
Crygil posted an important announcement last night concerning the lag and associated performance issues in Naxxramas. Blizzard has made some recent optimizations to Naxx, and they want to know what all of our experiences are like in the instance this week. As such, they're asking everyone to post feedback in terms of performance in the thread over on the official forums.Now by performance I don't think they mean "My pocket Paladin can't tank." What they're looking for are detailed reports such as "When I was attempting to do the Heigan dance, my entire group lagged behind a good 5 to 10 seconds. We decided to go and raid Hogger after we wiped for six hours in a row." Or "The Ice Block appeared after Frost Breath when my guild was taking down Sapphiron because of the 30 second lag."Matt Rossi wrote a great piece yesterday on the need for designing the fights around latency. Hopefully this will become less of an issue as Blizzard works out their backend mechanics; and it appears this change is a major step forward.
Designing around latency
Now, I do enjoy Naxxramas, especially in 25 man (the place feels very empty in 10 man) I have to admit that I despise certain fights, depending on how my connection is holding up. Some nights it's fine, and some nights I'm trying to do the Heigan dance with 1800 MS latency. I've wept, swore dire oaths, and of course died to a wave of green crap that was nowhere near me on my screen. It can be baffling because one day we'll be doing three drake Sarth and I dodge every lava wave and avoid all the void zones, and the next day I'm in stutter hell, no obvious reason for why it varied. And on fights like Thaddius, one person lagging can kill 10 in a second.Over at The Many Relms of Relmstein, Relmstein discusses how Naxxramas was originally created to be the hardest of the hardcore 40 man raids and how what was then not as much an issue (namely, extreme latency causing issues) for the very few at the top is now somewhat more obvious. Since Blizzard designs raids to take buffs like Replenishment into account, should they go that one step further and assume there's going to be some latency? Some players report unusual latency in the raids that seems to have nothing to do with their internect connection (an issue that was supposed to be fixed in patch 3.0.8) so should lag just be considered a fact of life? And would we lose interesting mechanics (Relmstein himself mentions the Thaddius fight as one that would be hard to do with latency in mind) like the combined three drakes and their abilities?Obviously I don't know, but I think a little thought placed into making lag less lethal for an entire raid would be a good thing, at least as long as it's out of the players hands like it seems to be now.
On lag and communication: Two interrelated issues
On Thursday, January 8th Nethaera sent out a memo to all the fan sites asking them to announce it, and Eyonix posted on the forums for all the rest of us. Latency and connectivity issues will be fixed in patch 3.0.8. The crowds cheered, babies cried in joy, and dog and cats started to live together. The world would be right again.Fast forward 15 days later.The high latency while raiding places like Naxxramas and Malygos is still there. The servers are still packed with queue. The patch was a near disaster. And we're still getting bug reports in every 10 minutes, both in comments and via our tip-line.Many people want to know why this hasn't been fixed. People are out looking for blood. The whole head on a pike sort of thing. A better way to approach the situation is to try to come up with contingency plans and other activities to do. If Blizzard cannot get their servers to work, to the point that many consider the game playable, then people will need to focus on other aspects of the game or try to work around the problematic parts.On the couple servers I play on many of the top guilds have decided to stop raiding for the night if there are any problems with high latency in the raid instances. On Alex's server people raid only for a couple hours after 10pm when the queues and population have dropped off. And still other guilds I know have just said forget it completely and are on hiatus until these issues are fixed.
Latency fixes coming for Northrend, Naxx
Although I haven't experienced it so much myself recently (fingers crossed), many players have been complaining about high latency both in Northrend and in the various Northrend raids (especially the Heroic versions). I have had Grizzly Hills especially (for some reason) get so bad with the lag spikes that I just logged off for an hour, but that was back in the first few weeks of Wrath. Apparently, the outdoor Northrend lag has been caused by Wintergrasp battles. There is a "server-side fix" (which I read as hot fix) in testing on internal realms at Blizzard, and Eyonix tells us that they hope to be able to patch up the live realms "in the near future" (which I hope is sooner than "Soon™"). As for Naxxramas, we are informed that there are optimizations in the pipe for it, and that those will be coming in 3.0.8 (which I personally predict for next Tuesday). These optimizations will, allegedly, help both latency and disconnects. Are disconnects a big problem in Naxx? I'm not sure I've seen any.
Video: Shouting at disk drive causes high latency, low morale
Here's a tip for everyone who hasn't made the jump to solid state: try to be nice to your disk drive. Brendan Gregg from Sun's Fishworks team wanted to see the effects of vibrations on his disk array, so he proceeded to shout at it. On video. Yeah, we bet that's pretty embarrassing for the drive in question, and what results is a sharp spike the number of I/O operations that take over 5ms to complete. Moral of the story? Yelling at your computer isn't going to make it run any faster. How about next time we see how it reacts to Ozzy, Mozart and warm, gentle nuzzles? We've placed video of Gregg's sadistic hardware taunts after the break.[Via Slashdot]
Time Warner Cable customers experience World of Warcraft trouble
Many of us with cable internet connections are well aware of the problems that arise when cable companies specifically block certain applications, such as the recent problems with Comcast blocking Bit Torrent. It looks like there may be a similar problem with Time Warner and Roadrunner Cable, as many of their customers have found to it difficult to impossible to play due to lag and latency issues for some time, reports the New York Post. To some extent, both TWC and Blizzard have been blaming each other for a while, with Time Warner claiming they have done nothing to block any packets or traffic related to World of Warcraft, and Blizzard pointing out that all of the players on the east coast with these problems are Time Warner/Roadrunner cable customers. It's difficult to say if Time Warner is being genuine in their confusion, since other ISPs have lied about similar issues in the past, but there are signs they are taking this seriously. They have contacted Blizzard's ISP, and players are saying that they have been contacted by Time Warner representatives looking to fix the problem. Seeing the issue making it into print media, perhaps, will give them the extra initiative they need to get it completely sorted.
Scattered Shots: New and improved abilities
Scattered Shots: noun. 1. (Scatter Shot, singular) An ability used by Marksmanship hunters, especially to annoy other players in PvP. 2. (Scattered Shots, plural) A column at WoW Insider about anything even loosely related to hunters, except for high-level raiding and completely improper, sometimes libelous personal commentary.Hunters are getting quite a few changes in Wrath of the Lich King, but so far haven't covered them all. Today I'd like to go through the newest abilities and discuss them in greater detail.New Baseline Hunter Abilities:Nope, no Camouflage. We talked about this before, but it looks like the devs read our article, "Do hunters need Camouflage?" and decided the answer was no. So, instead we have a couple other new abilities to look forward to:Kill Shot: This is the new level 80 hunter ability, and it provides us with a bit of utility that help us to stand out and perform better in various situations:
Scattered Shots: Auto Shot
Scattered Shots is for hunters. 'Nuff said.One of the most confusing things about a hunter's repertoire of spells is the exact use of Auto Shot. This ability is unlike the abilities of any other class, quite different from a warrior's swing timer, or a caster's wand shooting. Auto Shot is like a metronome, and the music of hunter DPS requires that we play according to its beat.We've discussed Auto Shot a little bit in last week's introduction to Shot Rotation, but Auto Shot is much more complex than is first apparent from simply reading the ability's tooltip. First of all, there is a discrepancy between what the interface shows you of Auto Shot and what is actually going on. If you don't use any hunter addons, you may have great difficulty getting a feeling for any of what this article is about, because Auto Shot doesn't have any representation in the default UI. If you use an addon like Quartz or ZHunterMod, however, you'll be presented with a timer that looks something like a regular casting bar -- and while this Auto Shot bar will help a great deal, it is still not complete. No matter what, your imagination and inner sense of timing are going to have to do a good bit of work in getting your shots timed right.
Bloodlust realms down to fix latency
As of 10:50 AM PDT, 1:50 PM EDT, Blizzard has brought down all the realms in the Bloodlust (US) battlegroup for brief maintenance "to address issues relating to high latency and disconnections." The affected realms are expected to be done after about an hour, which means they should come back up around 11:50 AM PDT/2:50 PM EDT, which is in twenty minutes. The affected realms are listed as: Aman'Thul, Barthilas, Blackrock, Caelestrasz, Dath'Remar, Dreadmaul, Frostmourne, Frostwolf, Khaz'goroth, Kil'Jaeden, Kilrogg, Nagrand, Ner'zhul, Proudmoore, Sen'Jin, Silver Hand, Thaurissan, Tichondrius, and Vek'nilash. Note that as far as I can tell the Dreadmaul realm does not actually exist. Edit: Never mind, it's the new Oceanic realm. It's just not listed on the Battlegroups page for some reason. I kind of wish they'd do some maintenance on my own realm (Shadow Council), since I've been having relatively high latency myself recently (150-200ms as opposed to my usual 60-100ms).Update (3 PM): Not entirely unexpectedly, the realms are not fixed yet. The new ETA from Bizzard is 1 PM PDT/4 PM EDT.Update (4:30 PM): The realms are back up, but still experiencing issues. Blizz promises to provide more updates as they are available.Update (8:15 PM): Realms down again. They were supposed to be back up at 5 PDT/8 EDT, but apparently that is not the case.
Central US woes [updated]
According to Drysc, there's a Blizzard-external network problem in the central United States that is currently affecting several WoW realms. Symptoms include high latency, packet loss, disconnection, or inability to connect; side effects may include broken keyboards and bruised fists, or in severe cases, deciding to stop playing WoW for the evening.I'm not sure which realms are affected, but it's nice to know that this is being worked on anyway; the glowing tree promises that they are actively receiving updates from the (unnamed) parties involved. There is currently no ETA on a fix. I'll keep you posted if I hear anything else. In the mean time, let's start building a list: if your realm is acting up, let us know in the comments.Update: Drysc is saying the issue "appears to have been resolved," but they're still keeping an eye on it.
Ping faster with Faster Ping
Recently members of my guild have been using a tool called Faster Ping to achieve better ping rates in game. My guild is a West Coast based guild, and attracts a lot of people from Hawaii and Australia, so they naturally have higher ping rates than those of us in the States. Faster Ping seems to be working wonders for them. It is not so much of an addon as it is a tool for Windows (though lots of people mistakingly call it an addon).My first reaction to this was what thinking this sounded like something out of the mouth of Cliff Clavin. I mean, how can a piece of software impact something that is mainly due to physical limits? Well, after thinking about it for a bit, and reading up on what the tool does, it can. WARNING! This paragraph will be the only one that contains technical content! Faster Ping works by removing the acknowledgement delay from TCP packets. This delay happens inside the kernel's TCP stack, and is a necessity for a lot of functions that go on inside a TCP stack. The other modification Faster Ping does is to remove delay in sending small packets (think anything less than a dozen or so bytes). These changes, at least theoretically, should not impact system stability if the Windows kernel has proper TCP/IP stack implementation. Okay, end technical content.
Raid Rx: I feel the need... the need for speed Part 1
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. I prefer to remember Tom Cruise as he was in Top Gun, crooked smile and no couch jumping. This is Part 1 of a two-part series on reaching your full casting potential. Today we're going to cover how to get around inherent casting latency and next week I'll assault you with so much info on how haste rating affects healing, you'll come back here to hide. First I'm going to give you a bit of background, so grab your blankie and settle in for a story of mystery and intrigue. Once upon a time, all of the Elitist Jerks healers prayed to the god of stopcasting. Me, being in SSC at the time, figured if all the cool kids were doing it, why not lemming along, too? So I did me some research.
Media Player boosts WoW performance
Many players have experienced faster WoW loading times with Windows Media Player (WMP) running in the background. Some players are also reporting lower latency and higher frames per second.This tip surfaced in the Europe forums late November and was picked up by the US forums two weeks ago. Many players are reporting shortened loading times, some by more than 50%.I did a quick test and found that by running WMP in the background, minimized and not playing anything, the login screen popped up about 20 seconds quicker than usual. The world loading time (time between clicking Enter World button and character appearing on screen) was also faster by about 15 seconds. However I did not see any significant improvements in latency or framerate. To eliminate performance boosts due to caching or preloading, I rebooted my machine between each set of timings.Some players have also suggested adding:SET timingMethod "1" or SET timingMethod "2"to the config.wtf file to achieve the same effect without running WMP. For me, this shortened the time for the login screen to appear by 20 seconds as well, but only shortened world loading time by 5 seconds. Combining WMP and the config.wtf tweak resulted in the same timings with just running WMP alone.There's been no official Blizzard response to this yet, although a likely explanation is that WMP modifies how your computer handles background applications. With WMP open, all available CPU resources apparently become allocated to WoW, leading to better performance.Does this quirk work for you? Do you see any improvements in framerate and latency?
Mashing buttons can cause cooldown problems
Ever since patch 2.3, a number of players have been having a lot of trouble with their instant abilities, especially in PvP. They're finding they get constant "spell is not ready yet" and "target is out of range" errors whenever they mash their buttons. The main source of this problem has to do with a change to the way your computer communicates to the server what your character is doing. It's not very easy to explain, but I'll do my best here. First, I'll explain how the change affects longer spell casts, and then afterward look at how it affects instants.Here's how things worked in patch 2.2: I press a button to cast a spell or activate an ability. My computer says, "Hey! Realm server! David wants to cast Frostbolt!" The realm server says "Okay!" 300 milliseconds or so later (this round-trip communication time is your "latency"). My computer then starts a 1.5 second global cooldown, and shows me the Frostbolt casting bar. I cannot use any other abilities from the time I press the button to the time my Frostbalt casting finishes, unless I manually cancel the spell (as with a /stopcasting macro), or unless the server tells my computer, "Okay the spell is finished already!" or "Whoops! That spell got interrupted!" Either way, without a manual interruption on my part, I'm waiting on the server to tell me the outcome of the first spell before I can tell it to start casting the second. Here's how things work in patch 2.3: I press a button to cast a spell or activate an ability. My computer says, "Hey! Realm server! David wants to cast Frostbolt!" My computer goes ahead and starts the global cooldown for me, assuming the Frostbolt will succeed. The realm says "Okay!" 300ms later, and the casting bar shows up. Alternately, if there's a problem, then the realm says "No way, silly! David isn't finished casting Fireball yet! Wait a moment to try again, and cancel that global cooldown while you're at it!" Either way, I can send my commands to the server whenever I want, as long as my global cooldown isn't currently active -- and if it gets activated too early, I just have to wait for the server to tell my computer to cancel it before casting another ability. Sounds fine, right? Before, we had to wait for latency between our computers and the realms in order for any spell to go through, but now we just have to wait if we press a button too early.
The end of the (patch) day
It's the end of the day (or nearly there) and, if you've logged on at all, you've patched WoW up to the latest version. Oftentimes, patch days are fraught with server instability and all sorts of other issues in game. On top of those problems, UI mods get thrown out of whack and usually must be updated in order to avoid screens filled with annoying error messages.Personally, this patch day was one of the smoothest I can recall in recent memory. Once the servers came back up, I was able to log on right away with no queue and no apparent latency. As the afternoon wore on into evening, there were a few rough patches of lag, but they smoothed out after a little while, never to return. My most important mods were already updated and I can live without the rest for a couple of days. I purposefully try to avoid a reliance on UI mods, which is always helpful on patch days, so I'm not sure that my experience was shared by many other WoW players. Even so, my guildmates who rely on mods more than I do also seemed pretty happy with the transition to the new patch, so hopefully things went well for the majority of WoW fans. How did the patch treat you today? Did you bother logging on at all? If you did, have you had a good experience thus far?
Don't mash in 2.3!
Your character can be less effective if you mash buttons in 2.3, according to Altitis. You can also stop using the /stopcasting command in most macros. In the 2.3 PTR patch notes, "client spell cast requests are now sent to the server even if your player is already casting another spell. This eliminates the need for /stopcasting in macros to compensate for latency." What this means in English is that outside of global cooldown, your computer will try to send a new cast command to the server when you press a button, no matter what.
Patch 2.3: Return of the Hemo? [Updated]
With todays news that Hemorrhage is being buffed yet again in the latest build of patch 2.3, I'm getting more and more excited to take out my old rogue character and use my favorite ability again. Back in the days before The Burning Crusade I used to enjoy using Hemo to succeed as a rogue in PvP when latency and casual gear would have left me at a bad disadvantage otherwise. Hemo was just strong enough that it gave me a real chance at success sometimes, and all the other buffs to stealth in the Subtlety tree made me feel like a real rogue sneaking around and stunlocking people, rather than a warrior without the heavy armor, or a backstabber who could never seem to get behind anyone or crit often enough to kill things.Once The Burning Crusade was released, I felt terribly disappointed to learn that there were few if any more very slow main-hand weapons at the new level cap. Today there are still very few with a 2.7 weapon speed, and even fewer with 2.8, which, before the expansion, was really the minimum weapon speed you needed to start making use of Hemo successfully. This is because Hemo is not "nomalized" like other abilities; it does progressively more damage the more time passes between weapon swings. With only one high-level 2.9 speed weapon in the game (and that a legendary), and all 2.8-speeds being either too low-level to be useful or to far out of my reach to attain, I feared my preferred playstyle would be dead and useless by the time my rogue reached 70.But now I'm not so sure. I still don't know why Blizzard didn't add more slow weapons like they used to have in the old days, but I'm hoping these buffs to Hemo will make up for the loss, both in raids and in PvP. Still, I'm hardly the best rogue theorycrafter out there. Are any of you good mathematicians able to speak authoritatively on whether this change is enough to raise Hemo from the dead?Update: Our commenter, Rick, shared with us a link to an Elitist Jerks discussion in which they provide some good research about this change to Hemo. Among other things, it seems this new version of Hemo is now normalized, meaning that, like Sinister Strike, it won't matter what weapon speed you have when you use it -- it'll still do the same amount of damage. Many of them are eager to try it out.
Counter-Strike shooting slowed by actual shooting
At around 7 p.m. on Monday, ISPs around the country experienced a period of slowdown, which seemed inexplicable until workers discovered that fiber optic lines in Cleveland, Ohio -- reportedly owned by Level 3 Communications -- had been the target of sabotage... by gunfire. Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera AB spokesman, said that the company had lost the northern leg of its network, and when technicians pulled up the lines to inspect, it was apparent that, "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable." The damage was spread out over nearly two-thirds of a mile along the lines, and the effect was felt across multiple networks. Cogent Communications warned customers that they would be experiencing outages, and blamed the disruptions on "cut lines," and Keynote's Internet Pulse Report showed that the provider was experiencing significant latency. As of now, the saboteurs remain anonymous and their motives unknown, but undoubtedly scores of WoW players wait in fear of their next attack.
