Thread: Wintergrasp Quests Changes, 3.1.2 Notes

So Activision Blizzard made fat profit in first quarter but they won't invest in hardware to remove the WG lag? That's not nice ...

"The Santa Monica, California-based company posted net income of $189 million or $0.14 per share for the first quarter, up from $43 million or $0.07 per share in the prior year quarter."

Originally Posted by dsswoosh

LoL this is so true, i cant even possibly begin to imagine how much combat log information the poor server must trying to calcuate between 400 or 500 clients all spamming the crap out of each other all at once.

Eve online does this quite easily now, and often with battles involving more than 1k players. These used to be lagfests until they put up a flexible (and just awesome) server architecture where some servers acts as backup, when one starts being overloaded a second server shares computing with it, and if needed, a third one, etc. Managing thousands of players in one zone is really doable (not easily, but very doable), the real problem after this is done is your own computer... very few are able to display all this quick enough (hence a lot of people complaining about "lag" when it's only their computer displaying 5fps).
But this should be really easier to do in wg, since battle times are fixed, whereas in eve this can happen anytime, and anywhere.

I was quite interested to read your comment about EVE- I work in Enterprise Application implementation and I'd read about EVE's single server infrastructure before, but I was surprised to read that 1000 player battles were possible, so I did some research and found this article from about 6 months ago:

"With a single game world, players are free to flock to whatever solar system they like even if the server that solar system is on can't handle the load. Popular trade hub Jita and several popular mission-running systems such as Dodixie suffer badly from lag at peak play times on the weekend. Massive fleet battles over important territory often suffer from the same crippling lag, turning what should be an amazing sci-fi space battle into a poor slideshow."

(Original article here http://www.massively.com/2008/09/28/...-server-model/)

So EVE experienced the same problems as you said... In fact according to the article they've put player caps on solar systems that are overpopulated- so however good their server architecture is, it still couldn't handle excessive load. They've subsequently had to rewrite all their core code to implement changes to manage that load. That's a massive investment in time and effort, which is warranted in their case (massive PVP is the whole point of EVE) but wouldn't be in WOW which is first and foremost a PVE game...

The other point to make is that redundant server architecture is a lot easier to manage in a case like EVE's where you have only one game server- you can pile as many servers into the mix as you like and balance server load across them. Slightly trickier when you have hundreds of game servers, probably architected around server clusters- having extra processing power added to one cluster isn't going to help you if it's a completely different cluster having load issues... I don't think there's a tech solution to this- it would make zero business sense to spend a hundred million dollars chucking technology at an aspect of the game that runs for 20 minutes at a time and is overpopulated 3 times a day in the evening. I'd rather they spent that money on developing additional content and instead found a functional rather than technical solution to the issue- the 3.1.2. change is their first attempt at that...

Originally Posted by gilfanon

I was quite interested to read your comment about EVE- I work in Enterprise Application implementation and I'd read about EVE's single server infrastructure before, but I was surprised to read that 1000 player battles were possible, so I did some research and found this article from about 6 months ago:

This new system was introduced in the end of last year, with Quantum rise expansion ( http://www.eveonline.com/pressreleas...ssReleaseID=51 ), so I'm not sure this article tested the game with these improvements.

Few days after this was deployed, the well known "Jita" system they talk about in your article went up to 1400 players (about 800 usually before this patch)

Originally Posted by Hypocratus

To reduce amount of people hitting WG every 2 hours the *good* solution would be to create an appropriate alternative. Implement new BG. Improve old BG - for instance find the reason why most of BG oriented PVP guilds are disbanded now and find a solution for a problem. Make something with arena, so it's not for few elitists from the right classes. Create another world PVP.

New BG apparently coming in 3.2. That will hopefully help. The reward ratio of WG still needs to be tweaked though- it's too beneficial to run WG, that's why everyone does it. If that wasn't the case people would have stopped running it after all this lag started, because we sure as hell ain't doing it for the fun times at the moment...

Originally Posted by Infinitus

Don't forget that one of the other main reasons to go to WG is because of the WG marks since you need them to buy the gear. Hence there will still be more people in there than the servers can handle so the quest nerf will not end the lag. You still need to be in a lot of WGs to get the required WG marks.

Building my druid tank set, (got outbid on the tier 7.5 chest, still have a blue) means I need 40 WG tokens for the chest and I've already spent the 40 for the headpiece. Took a while to get those tokens, with a 2:1 alliance:horde ratio on my server, if we (horde) lose WG, we might not get it back if the incentive to be there is gone.

VoA is a bother, I go to WG for the fun and raid healing experience (I'm a new to 80 druid).

VoA needs to have a PVP requirement to enter. Something like 5 marks to get in as payment. It sucks that the bosses drop the best pvp and pve items but halfass raiders go in there to get cheap raiding gear but have 12 lifetime kills. They let the 2-3 PVPers int he guild win the fight so they can reap the rewards.

I think you're confusing whining with a logical, well constructed argument.

Really Gilfanon? Why do you keep whining about logic without contributing?

Don't worry, Wintergrasp isn't really getting nerfed, the quest rewards are being changed to fit the new frequency. (Yes, you actually get 20 Stone Keeper Shard for a single quest now)

- This is the source of a lot of the inflammation, except that that wasn't by a blue post and it isn't 20 (10? what?). Interestingly enough, the only source I can find for this is mmo-champion itself. Please someone confirm this. So maybe it's not fair to say it was billed as a non-nerf when the source of the statement itself should be suspect when paired with the screenie or by clicking on the source.

According to a blue, Crygil:

In an effort to better balance the amount of players that are in Wintergrasp at any given time, we are changing the daily quests in Wintergrasp to a weekly format. This has led to an increase in the honor reward given by these quests as well as additional Stone Keeper's Shards. These quests will reset every Tuesday morning at 3:00 AM.

2) doing Lake Wintergrasp once or twice a day to get all of the dailies done is becoming a more convenient, efficient way of obtaining honor than signing up for battlegrounds

- Er, it has always been, not "becoming". This is a bit aggravating to see. Just as people learn how to play (it's all progress bars and numbers in a social context), it's being changed.

Regardless of the (in)accuracy of the mmo-champ posting or if the initial offerings were uncharacteristically high to start, we can see that this is an attempt to balance a gameplay element that could be called BG participation parity. Whatever the name you give this "balance" referred to, it's a nerf by definition.

I don't mind critical trolling, as long as they are correct. Gilfanon's wrong.

Originally Posted by Hypocratus

Implement new BG. Improve old BG - for instance find the reason why most of BG oriented PVP guilds are disbanded now and find a solution for a problem.

a) The removal of honour ranking
b) The implementation of Arena ranking
c) Deserter debuff

Originally Posted by Jack9

Really Gilfanon? Why do you keep whining about logic without contributing?
- This is the source of a lot of the inflammation, except that that wasn't by a blue post and it isn't 20 (10? what?). Interestingly enough, the only source I can find for this is mmo-champion itself. Please someone confirm this. So maybe it's not fair to say it was billed as a non-nerf when the source of the statement itself should be suspect when paired with the screenie or by clicking on the source.

According to a blue, Crygil: - Er, it has always been, not "becoming". This is a bit aggravating to see. Just as people learn how to play (it's all progress bars and numbers in a social context), it's being changed.

Regardless of the (in)accuracy of the mmo-champ posting or if the initial offerings were uncharacteristically high to start, we can see that this is an attempt to balance a gameplay element that could be called BG participation parity. Whatever the name you give this "balance" referred to, it's a nerf by definition.

I don't mind critical trolling, as long as they are correct. Gilfanon's wrong.

a) I have made multiple posts throughout this thread stating what I feel is Blizzard's reason and justification for this change. Every one of my suppositions has been subsequently confirmed by Blizzard posters, for example the post "doing Lake Wintergrasp once or twice a day to get all of the dailies done is becoming a more convenient, efficient way of obtaining honor than signing up for battlegrounds." This was my suggestion throughout the thread, that the reward to time ratio for participating in WG was too high, hence the number of people spending all their time skipping BGs and just obsessively doing every WG that comes up.

b) Those who truly enjoy the WG experience should rejoice- they will still be able to earn (a reduced amount of) honour, shards, marks and gold while hopefully enjoying less lag, and having fewer casual PVPers in WG who are only in there to get free gear. Those who only played WG because "OMG i canz has leet ipx right" will soon realise that there's not much point in them trying to repeatedly farm WG for honour when they can't short-cut to honour-bought gear by making 40K a week in daily honour. How exactly are you interpreting this argument of mine as a whine that contains no contribution? I see no proposal from you for how to fix WG, just a whine that you can't get as much free shit as you used to.

c) Calling me wrong doesn't make you right. I know the internet feels like a fantasy playground where you can just toss out comments and do the kind of macho posturing you're too chickenshit to do in real life, but in reality to get any kind of respect you actually have to back up your arguments. Tell me why I'm wrong. Set out your case and make the points that prove you right. That's called intelligent debate, everything you've spewed is just meaningless cavil.