Latency Changes in Patch 4.0.6 and beyond, Blue Posts, MMO Report, Comics

[marrakoosh]

Did anyone else notice the 'Speed' attribute on the 'General' pane in the character screen as well? Not seen it reported anywhere (unless I've missed it) but just tells you run speed, mount speed and swim speed!

[VanishO2]

Did he really say people should disable their firewalls because they might affect latency? Gotta be shitting me... I guess they need to increase Authenticator sales.

To test and see if it's the reason, so you know where to work on to solve your problem.

Not to play without it forever.

It's the nature of any testing.

[Deleted]

And I thought the 100-120ms drop in latency could be chalked up to my new wireless router and receiver

[Pantelija]

http://www.wowbash.com/image-18123.html < win

[Keosen]

Did he really say people should disable their firewalls because they might affect latency? Gotta be shitting me... I guess they need to increase Authenticator sales.

Why?
Turning off the firewall while playing will don't make any difference protection-wise.

Actually if you are a user that doesn't click every flashing bullshit that promises you 1million dollars or following links from "ridicouslyNamedSender@@blizzard.com" you are safe even without AV or firewall.

[Fela]

Way to rip off Penny-Arcade's Dickwolves comic DA!

Was my first thought too

[Deleted]

Did he really say people should disable their firewalls because they might affect latency? Gotta be shitting me... I guess they need to increase Authenticator sales.

Firewalls, particularly software firewalls, can and often will "batch up" the traffic going either way, and then check a number of packets all together. While this may mean that the firewall itself will use less CPU/be more efficient, it can cause a sometimes massive increase in latency due to this batching operation. This is because the packets that are sent/received are not sent on instantly, and may instead be checked as a big batch, say, every quarter of a second, for instance. Taking that example, and allowing for 50ms to process all of the packets gives an instant increase of 300ms to your latency before anything has even left your computer. Not to mention you may get the same delay on the way back in.

While ok for non-time sensitive applications like web/media streaming (with appropriate buffering), for games, where sometimes a few milliseconds can be all the difference, this is a very bad thing.

While it is not appropriate in all situations, playing without a firewall as a test can be a useful indicator of whether or not your own firewall is actually causing such a problem.

[ZeroWashu]

I don't know what they did, but recently many in my guild and I have even seen it on LFD runs with people from other servers have been getting game freezing lag. I am referring to pauses of ten to thirty seconds. We have gotten theses spikes in open areas, most recently being Crucible, as well as instances.

The most interesting part is that it does not affect all servers in a battle group. In two runs we had one or two people totally unaffected - however in both cases neither was the tank and they reported near instant aggro when other people reported being stuck. It was like those affected didn't matter anymore.

Reminds me of the good old days in Ultima Online during its release where we experienced what many referred to as the Chesapeake two step - take two steps and stop - take two steps and stop (named for the server)

[jlrm365]

"Yes, we really did roll back that change for something that negatively affected less than 1% of total users. We really do care about providing the best environment we can."

Am I the only person who recognises the contradiction, there? F*** the 1%!

The sooner those "per client" tweaks can be patched in, the better.

[FishHead]

Yes, we really did roll back that change for something that negatively affected less than 1% of total users. We really do care about providing the best environment we can. We do things like this frequently.

We may wish it were otherwise, but if we tried to send and receive less data we wouldn’t be able to provide the immersive, complex, top-notch gaming experience (most people) have come to know, love, and expect from Blizzard Entertainment. I wish there were some way to do both, but there really isn’t, at least with today’s technologies. Either we can provide an intense environment that over 98% of people who play WoW have no problems with, or we can lower our standards to unacceptable levels and try to get that extra ~2% in, as well.

Boy, they really like to toot their own horn.

Here I am, 6 months later and Blizzard still hasn't fixed my 5000ms+ latency. I wish I could spit on this blue through my monitor.

[Jaerin]

Wow seriously ripped of PA almost completely.

Was this a demonstration of how to do the comic without being offensive or just demonstrating how to plagerize?

[Katana Angel]

I don't get this. They changed the requirements of the bandwidth in an attempt to improve on latency, which actually caused folks to have increased latency. This Brian guy is suggesting that's because their systems/internet couldn't handle it.

Problem is my latency, connection, and everything else have been fine, and always has been. I've always had about ~150ms connection. I've got a mid-range cable internet connection, and I still saw lag so bad that it prevented me from raiding on those nights after they "fixed" the issue. Those two nights I couldn't raid at all because it was take a step, try to heal, nothing happens, 20 seconds later everything catches up and the tank is dead.

I'm just so, so confused. If they're trying to suggest that people with crappy connections were the ones that saw the issues with this change, I'd like to disagree. Hell, the person running really bad DSL in our raid group didn't see any lag! This is all so backwards on my end.

[Throrion]

Boubouille, the guy goes on to elaborate;

The number of affected accounts was not in the hundreds of thousands. It probably wasn't even in the thousands. It is much closer to a few hundred, if that much. All percentages and numbers applied are referring to North America, only, not our global user base. That doesn't make it 'less important'; it just makes the impact footprint smaller.

So his lengthy report only refers to a very niche audience in the US. They still claim that there's nothing wrong in Europe and the rest of the world. Might want to clarify that.

[Nixxen]

I don't get this. They changed the requirements of the bandwidth in an attempt to improve on latency, which actually caused folks to have increased latency. This Brian guy is suggesting that's because their systems/internet couldn't handle it.

Problem is my latency, connection, and everything else have been fine, and always has been. I've always had about ~150ms connection. I've got a mid-range cable internet connection, and I still saw lag so bad that it prevented me from raiding on those nights after they "fixed" the issue. Those two nights I couldn't raid at all because it was take a step, try to heal, nothing happens, 20 seconds later everything catches up and the tank is dead.

I'm just so, so confused. If they're trying to suggest that people with crappy connections were the ones that saw the issues with this change, I'd like to disagree. Hell, the person running really bad DSL in our raid group didn't see any lag! This is all so backwards on my end.

They changed the way the client and servers handled packages, sending them more often in smaller packages.
This in turn can "clutter up the package queue". In other words, too many packages are sent, "smart" firewalls/routers/W.E. cluster up those packages and send them as a larger package instead of many small ones - at a slower interval than the game itself sends them. This will cause lag and in some cases disconnects due to loss of too many packages.

The change they applied will show you if you have set up your connection well. If it doesn't work, either your LAN or your ISP is not set up correctly. Granted, you can't do much about your ISPs set up other than bitch and whine at them, but if enough people do it they will bend over for the masses.
Your own LAN on the other hand is each persons own responsibility to set up and maintain.

However, if everything is set up correctly, you will notice better ping times(latency) than you had before the patch.

I advise checking the entire thread. It has quite a lot of insight on how to approach the changes that are coming.

[bloodwine77]

"Yes, we really did roll back that change for something that negatively affected less than 1% of total users. We really do care about providing the best environment we can."

Am I the only person who recognises the contradiction, there? F*** the 1%!

The sooner those "per client" tweaks can be patched in, the better.

I don't see a contradiction. I assume you are talking about how they are not providing the best environment they can for 99% of the playerbase.

However, they only recently tweaked their bandwidth/latency stuff. It is not as if they took something away from the 99% that the 99% have been using for months or even years.

That 99% of the playerbase has been doing just fine for over 6 years. I think we can wait a little bit longer for Blizzard to figure out what went wrong and try to improve the experience.

My point is that the playerbase didn't lose anything, we just haven't gained anything yet.

[bluspacecow]

I'm not into trusting the latency monitor in-game, however. I feel it's incredibly inaccurate, the reason is why is that I'm actually on a bank alt in the middle of Stormwind City's Auction House (Trade District one, not the Dwarven District one) and am getting a "Home" ping of ~1200-1400ms and a "World" ping of ~4000-6000 ms. Sounds high, right? Here's a picture.

The reason I call this inaccurate is because it's certainly not taking me 1.2-1.4s to chat or 4-6 seconds to use the Auction House. I get false readings like this all the time and am never quite sure why, could be since I use an SSH Tunnelling Service (WoW Tunnels, as mentioned above) or could be something completely unrelated.

I'm in New Zealand myself and don't get these figures

133/156 is mine IIRC. Just recently had my account and port upgraded to an ADSL2 type connection tho. In Hamilton roughly 1 km from the exchange

It's possible it could be an interface issue. Have you tried taking the cliched 4 folders out of your wow folder ? IE The interface , wtf and both cache folder (one in Data folder and one in wow folder)

Also trying using this cvar :

http://www.wowpedia.org/CVar_bgLoadThrottle

[DarkZero]

For some time, just after 4.0.6 launched, I was having some latency issues. Instead of my usual 250ms, it was up to 700-800ms. It was pretty annoying, but I dismissed it as an unusual lag issue. I wonder if it's related to this...

[Darangen]

Yes, we really did roll back that change for something that negatively affected less than 1% of total users. We really do care about providing the best environment we can. We do things like this frequently.

People who think that Blizzard provides terrible service needs to take this bit into consideration.

Then again, 1% of the millions of people playing this game is an awful lot of players. Like, more than many other MMO's have playing their game total.

Yeah, and it only took them about 6 months to do so. Awesome customer service!

[Layuth]

Yet another list of problems where Blizzard is not at fault in any way. Perhaps I should delete my WTF, Interface and Cache folders.

[Asrialol]

I for one is really glad Blizzard does things like this. I for one is currently playing on Edge/2g/3g Mobile network, since I'm in the military at a place without public internet. The last few days I've been playing with 70ms, while it's usually at 300-800.