Gamers on the Street logs onto U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.
Oceanic players continue to snarl this week at continued server performance issues that cramp their play. Oceanic subscribers playing from the other side of the world have dedicated servers, yes – but the servers are physically located in North America, and no consideration seems to have been given to shifting maintenance and resource-intensive background processes to non-peak local hours.
Needless to say, a good number of Oceanic players are up in arms over spiraling post-2.4 performance issues. Blue reps continue to take the heat from red-hot flames, reflecting a continued determination to work through the problems. We decided to pop in on a couple of Oceanic servers themselves, away from the heat of the forums, to see what the player temperature seemed to be.
The Arena Tournament Test Realm (TTR) has been live for a few days now.It seems there have been some hiccups, which is to be expected during a stress test.Hortus has popped up in a few instances on the TTR forum to address some of the major concerns that players have brought up.
Lag is far and away the biggest issue on the TTR.Hortus indicated that one of the main functions of the TTR is measuring the best way to handle the massive number of contenders on the official tournament server.Blizzard currently has no plans for opening up any new TTRs to relive the stress.Logging into the server, I find the term "laggy" to be an understatement.Movement is dizzying, and players crowd around.
When I woke up this morning I was greeted to two things: a fist full of WoW news to report on, and my daily dose of MythBusters. Interestingly I found that our chummy Blizzard PTR forum poster Hortus has taken up dispelling some myths of his own. This myth is so epic that I think it would make for a good computer nerd edition of MythBusters.
The myth is this: every time the PTR goes up, my server slows down.
I play mainly in two different servers, Anvilmar and Eldre'Thalas. I've heard it claimed often enough on both servers that the PTR seriously effects stability. Most people claim this is because the PTR and the server hardware are on the same "rack." Most servers are just a small gray box with a few blinking lights on the front of them, and lots of connection ports in the back. When making a server farm, like Blizzard has scattered throughout the country, they physically put the servers in clusters, called racks (no, not that kind of cluster, well kind of, but that's beside the point).
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
When I woke up this morning I was greeted to two things: a fist full of 
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 
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.
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 
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