Why still create world events when the servers are not able to handle them?

[Jazzhands]

Seriously, do you guys ever read before you post? IT'S NOT ABOUT FPS LAG!!! Op even states so right in his comment!!!

Did you not read the second bit where I ask if he's tested his connection, and how I say "I've never had these issues consistently" and "occasionally I have small sputters of this kind of thing"? while quoting the person talking about his issues? FPS lag was just mentioned more or less as a random note because that's the only lag I get in the situations he was referring to, the literal entire rest of the post was about server latency. So, I have to ask...


Seriously, do you guys ever read before you post? Or are you just bad at it?

[Eurhetemec]

I am lecturing people in this thread the whole about it myself. I'm an IT professional myself (not an expert for infrastructure tho) and believe me, I know what I am talking about when I talk about the difference between FPS issues and lag. Yes, of, if there are 100 people around and everyone spams abilities, I'm not playing at 120FPS, but 50-60 is normal even then.

Good to hear - a lot of people get to shrieking about lag and how it's "not FPS", and then if you actually find out what's going on, you see they have like 20 FPS or less, and their mods are going completely wild and stuff, and it's like, yeah, you don't have 5 FPS or something but I'm pretty sure some of the "lag" is your computer choking this stuff down.

I do think this event was a poor design - stacking everyone on one mob is not great, even with sharding (which I believe is on even for the RP servers here).

I may also be benefiting from 12ms ping and low packetloss and so. Fingers crossed - usually my ISP manages to do something dreadful like a week before an expansion comes out, practically like clockwork. Last time they managed to disconnect my internet entirely for ten days, whilst giving me an incredible run-around because they didn't want to send an engineer out. So I'm just waiting to see if manage some similar trick soon. Last weekend my link went down at midnight and didn't come back up by 2am (but did by 9.30am when I had to work from home, dunno when in there), so that doesn't bode great.

[Valysar]

I've experienced lag only on Bronjahm (for obvious reason)

[Pakheth]

Did you not read the second bit where I ask if he's tested his connection, and how I say "I've never had these issues consistently" and "occasionally I have small sputters of this kind of thing"? while quoting the person talking about his issues? FPS lag was just mentioned more or less as a random note because that's the only lag I get in the situations he was referring to, the literal entire rest of the post was about server latency. So, I have to ask...


Seriously, do you guys ever read before you post? Or are you just bad at it?

Then why mention FPS lag at all when it is not relevant? Or bother to read the numerous other pages where OP mentions what he has tried and shares others mentioning the same problems? Because you very clearly didn't.

Problem here is that people read the title, skim through the OP's comment and don't bother to read the rest of the comments where others clearly states they have the same issue and/or have offered explanation to why it happens.

Because your comment is the equivalent of "have you turned it on and off again?" on a tech problem site where 100 other people have already mentioned it on the first 2 pages alone and you are on page 300.

[Eurhetemec]

This thread has solidified the fact that most people only read the title before they go click the reply-button.

We came to the conclusion that OP experiences server-lag on the first page already, and people still talk about PC's and internet connections...

Yeah, geniuses mutually deciding something is "server lag" and then patting each other on the back about it are very often full of shit.

I've seen it in a lot of games. I've literally had people screaming that they're getting server lag, and that it's definitely not their connection, nor anything else which they're confusing with server lag, whilst I've been in the same game, in the same area, and not getting any of the alleged "server lag". I've seen posts claiming my server was having "terrible lag in Orgrimmar" at X time of day, when I was there at X time of day, and it absolutely was not.

That's not to say that it's not sometimes server lag or the like - sometimes it clearly is, like with Nathanos, multiple times I've seen him hit 0% and still be messing around for seconds or minutes, when the cutscene is clearly meant to trigger at 10% (and usually does). But with the ICC rares, despite being on a full-pop servers, I haven't had that kind of lag, I haven't had any mobs fail to die. I've had mild "abilities won't trigger" lag (for like, 2-3 seconds at a time), which is server lag, for sure, a number of times, but nowhere near what the OP is describing, and only in primetime.

[Mad_Murdock]

Tried to do the classic AV during free weekend. I wondered why there is such a long queue for event during free weekend. Friends said it lags and has same reward as last year.
It did lag insanely much, maybe 3-5 seconds for each cast. Completely unplayable, so I quit after 5 minutes.

It's not even a world event but an instanced area with limited players.

It is odd. I did the event a number of times and people were complaining of lag and being unplayable, but I didn't have any real lag at all. I thought maybe they were just oceanic players or something. Seems to be more hit or miss. That's excluding the groups were I get put on some other server were my World ping goes up to 400. Normally I'm at 35

On the flip side, Tiagarde Sound can be rough at times, I keep meaning to make a video of me doing the calligraphy WQ, were you draw a circle. When the lag is bad,I can make a perfect circle, but when the result comes in, it will show I drawed a square or triangle like shape. Oddly, I haven't ran into that problem in Zuldazar

[Jazzhands]

Then why mention FPS lag at all when it is not relevant? Or bother to read the numerous other pages where OP mentions what he has tried and shares others mentioning the same problems? Because you very clearly didn't.

Problem here is that people read the title, skim through the OP's comment and don't bother to read the rest of the comments where others clearly states they have the same issue and/or have offered explanation to why it happens.

Because your comment is the equivalent of "have you turned it on and off again?" on a tech problem site where 100 other people have already mentioned it on the first 2 pages alone and you are on page 300.

I mention FPS lag because sometimes that's simply how conversation work? People kind of like, share their experiences and such when talking about similar situations, even if it's not directly asked for. Is this something you've literally never experienced? Are you a mountain hermit?

I'm not going to read through 8 pages of a thread to respond to the OP, that's a huge waste of my time. Do you read through all 800 pages of mega-threads before you post? If he already did what I asked, then he can respond with "Yes" and I'll say something like "Cool glad you didn't jump to conclusions and start hating on Blizzard for something that isn't in their control like people absolutely love to do all the time especially on the internet and especially especially on MMO-champ." I'm not even trying to defend Blizzard, their shit's whack, I just hate people jumping to conclusions.

[exochaft]

Yeah, geniuses mutually deciding something is "server lag" and then patting each other on the back about it are very often full of shit.

I've seen it in a lot of games. I've literally had people screaming that they're getting server lag, and that it's definitely not their connection, nor anything else which they're confusing with server lag, whilst I've been in the same game, in the same area, and not getting any of the alleged "server lag". I've seen posts claiming my server was having "terrible lag in Orgrimmar" at X time of day, when I was there at X time of day, and it absolutely was not.

That's not to say that it's not sometimes server lag or the like - sometimes it clearly is, like with Nathanos, multiple times I've seen him hit 0% and still be messing around for seconds or minutes, when the cutscene is clearly meant to trigger at 10% (and usually does). But with the ICC rares, despite being on a full-pop servers, I haven't had that kind of lag, I haven't had any mobs fail to die. I've had mild "abilities won't trigger" lag (for like, 2-3 seconds at a time), which is server lag, for sure, a number of times, but nowhere near what the OP is describing, and only in primetime.

I've mentioned it earlier, but the issues more likely have to do with the sharding tech than the old concept of servers. On a high/full population server, it's not uncommon that you'll be in different shards than your friends and guildmates. Sometimes you can get lucky and have a smooth or empty shard, sometimes the shards have issues. Once of the easiest 'fixes' to most suspected server lag issues is to hop shards, works almost every single time for me. Even before the pre-patch rare killing in Icecrown, it wasn't uncommon that a shard would get lagged out due to world bosses or events, where you have MASSIVE amounts of people suddenly entering and exiting shards. The Battle for Nazjatar is a great example where you could get sometimes minutes of input lag due to the amount of people in the shard... and if you leave that shard to an empty one all your lag disappears. It's something Blizz has come out and talked about being an issue in their blue posts and interviews before.

Now I'm not saying hardware and internet can be an issue, but when it comes to WoW it's pretty easy to tell the difference when it happens only when certain parameters are met. That being said, add-ons can be a huge factor, especially if you run a potato rig. Addons like Raider.io and Weakauras (not necessarily the addon itself, but the WA's you're running) can give you massive performance hits, and turning them off goes a long way towards if someone experience choppy graphics, frame rate losses, and so forth. Out-of-date and bugged addons can also cause massive performance hits, but usually you'll see an FPS drop if anything.


When it comes to internet issue, it can act very much like server lag issues... but in order for that to happen you need to basically have all of your bandwidth being used in order to see an effect in WoW, since WoW uses hardly any bandwidth. For example, if you're running Steam in the background with no bandwidth limit, and you're downloading massive updates for extended periods of time, your WoW experience can suffer and appear like server lag. If you have actual ISP/backbone issues between you and the Blizz servers, the higher latency, packet loss, or spotty connections can also appear like server lag.

It's pretty common that people can just blame server lag when it's one of these other causes, especially if that person isn't used to diagnosing such issues and seeing where the problem lies. However, when it comes to the scenario the OP describes, it's more likely a server/shard issue than any of the other problems given how predictable and widespread the problem is among the player base.

It is odd. I did the event a number of times and people were complaining of lag and being unplayable, but I didn't have any real lag at all. I thought maybe they were just oceanic players or something. Seems to be more hit or miss. That's excluding the groups were I get put on some other server were my World ping goes up to 400. Normally I'm at 35

There's sometimes issues where US and OCE get put together into the same large scale BGs (happens in the epic BGs, especially Ashran), and it causes massive server-side lag or even disconnects. I've had it happen with M+ groups, as well, and it's always either the OCE people or the US people that experience massive lag in the instances. My assumption would be that the servers sometimes have issues trying to coordinate the information between all the players with widely varying latency, and that information processing can get really slow to the point the player experience is affected.

[Mad_Murdock]

Seriously, do you guys ever read before you post? Or are you just bad at it?

What kind of testing would be required to satisfy your requirement that it's not a end user problem? I could post my Speedtest.net numbers showing I'm getting a 465/21 D\U. An ingame screenshot showing my ping is home 35 world 35. I'm always open to the problem being on my end somewhere, but outside of this exact circumstance I just don't have any reason to think it's a my end problem

I did more testing last night, were I disabled all add-ons\mods and set my graphics down to 1 (vs my usual 10). Turned off advanced combat logging, turned off Optimize network for speed. and still about 5 secs into Combat, all key presses started taking 2-5 secs to respond. Once combat ended, everything went back to normal.

[Swnem]

I had hoped that with corruption gone and smaller numbers that it would improve, but it really hasn't.

Nathanos has been the worst. It's always super laggy.

[Satelliteyears0o]

I've killed dozens of rares and have experienced no lag. Ryzen 2600, amd 570, 16gb of cheap ram and a budget ssd. It's prob a you problem.

He means actual lag: latency. Meaning your hardware has nothing to do with the issue its the server that cant handle all the data being thrown back n forth from all the players in the same vicinity.

[Pakheth]

I mention FPS lag because sometimes that's simply how conversation work? People kind of like, share their experiences and such when talking about similar situations, even if it's not directly asked for. Is this something you've literally never experienced? Are you a mountain hermit?

I'm not going to read through 8 pages of a thread to respond to the OP, that's a huge waste of my time. Do you read through all 800 pages of mega-threads before you post? If he already did what I asked, then he can respond with "Yes" and I'll say something like "Cool glad you didn't jump to conclusions and start hating on Blizzard for something that isn't in their control like people absolutely love to do all the time especially on the internet and especially especially on MMO-champ." I'm not even trying to defend Blizzard, their shit's whack, I just hate people jumping to conclusions.

Most of the the time I actually do got through most of the pages because then I avoid sounding stupid if it has been mentioned already. And if I don't read every page I at least check the last few just to see what the conversation has evolved into which usually indicates if the original queery has been answered already or not. Saves me a lot of trouble.

[kaminaris]

A bad internet connection would cause lag everywhere the player goes, OP is referring to zones where world-events occur.

The difference is the game can be fluid and MS can be good until you go to an overcrowded area where server-lag settles in.

Not really. Bad internet connection is not necessarily visible with low data flow. And "good ping to google" doesnt mean you have good routing to blizzard servers.

All it takes is one bad routing node that fucks you up.

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/7870

Blizzard even have a tool like this:
https://us-looking-glass.battle.net/

So people thinking that its just server issues may be wrong too.

[Baneto]

Yeah, geniuses mutually deciding something is "server lag" and then patting each other on the back about it are very often full of shit.

I've seen it in a lot of games. I've literally had people screaming that they're getting server lag, and that it's definitely not their connection, nor anything else which they're confusing with server lag, whilst I've been in the same game, in the same area, and not getting any of the alleged "server lag". I've seen posts claiming my server was having "terrible lag in Orgrimmar" at X time of day, when I was there at X time of day, and it absolutely was not.

That's not to say that it's not sometimes server lag or the like - sometimes it clearly is, like with Nathanos, multiple times I've seen him hit 0% and still be messing around for seconds or minutes, when the cutscene is clearly meant to trigger at 10% (and usually does). But with the ICC rares, despite being on a full-pop servers, I haven't had that kind of lag, I haven't had any mobs fail to die. I've had mild "abilities won't trigger" lag (for like, 2-3 seconds at a time), which is server lag, for sure, a number of times, but nowhere near what the OP is describing, and only in primetime.

But its exactly what is happening to OP and many others in the thread, does that fact anger you?

Be happy that it doesnt happen often to you, but obviously a lot of players are affected.

Not really. Bad internet connection is not necessarily visible with low data flow. And "good ping to google" doesnt mean you have good routing to blizzard servers.

All it takes is one bad routing node that fucks you up.

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/7870

Blizzard even have a tool like this:
https://us-looking-glass.battle.net/

So people thinking that its just server issues may be wrong too.

Its hard to pinpoint for a layman, but I think its fair to assume it has to do with sharding and servers.

[Accendor]

I've never had these issues consistently, I get FPS lag because I play on a shitty laptop but I can still do everything just fine in it, even on patch launches and such. Occasionally I have small sputters of this kind of thing but its like 1-2 seconds and pretty rare.

Just out of curiosity, have you done any testing on your own connection? Or do you just have "good internet" so you assume it isn't your connection falling behind? It sounds like it's an incredibly easy thing to recreate, which means you can test stuff pretty easily.

Don't wanted to bring this up, but yes, as an IT professional myself, I made sure its not my personal internet connection

[Pawpurr]

I've noticed huge network lag spikes, not in world events or rares, but actually in WOD levelling content. And only there. Other folks were complaining about it in general so I know it just wasn't me. Could it be that WoD is so preferred for levelling that and popular that the servers are not given the correct resources to support it?

I don't know about world events in IC though, they seemed to work fine for me.

[Segus1992]

It is a bit unique because anything that can be taken as criticism towards Blizzard is met with an army with pitchforks.

I dont know if many other game-communities are this defensive about their game, its amusing from time to time.

For some reason it is very common with MMOs. FFXIV is the same or worse, as well as BDO.

It's strange, because a widespread backlash would lead to them improving their services.

[Jazzhands]

What kind of testing would be required to satisfy your requirement that it's not a end user problem? I could post my Speedtest.net numbers showing I'm getting a 465/21 D\U. An ingame screenshot showing my ping is home 35 world 35. I'm always open to the problem being on my end somewhere, but outside of this exact circumstance I just don't have any reason to think it's a my end problem

I did more testing last night, were I disabled all add-ons\mods and set my graphics down to 1 (vs my usual 10). Turned off advanced combat logging, turned off Optimize network for speed. and still about 5 secs into Combat, all key presses started taking 2-5 secs to respond. Once combat ended, everything went back to normal.

These are basically surface issues. In my original post I talked about things like how your connection hops between servers to reach your destination, you aren't directly connected to Blizzard's server, and it could be an issue with one of these or something.

It more than likely is a Blizzard thing, but when there are other potential options I see no reason not to ask if they've been explored.

[kenn9530]

I've killed dozens of rares and have experienced no lag. Ryzen 2600, amd 570, 16gb of cheap ram and a budget ssd. It's prob a you problem.

Its 100% a server issue, the server just cant handle when too many are in one spot let alone all the animations, if your on a dead server then you shouldnt have issues but when 40 plus chars are killing one rare then everyone has the same issue.

Its just a fact blizzard have done nothing to fix the issue, it happens every expansion launch where the game is unplayable and a lag fest until the population is spread out more.

An easy fix to the problem would be in certain areas that have this issue reduce the amount of players per instance and spread the load among more servers.

[salate]

Yeah, there is a delay when 100 ppl fighting against another rare. It's been for a decade already.

I dunno, maybe netcode or something with "too many skills, too many people, too many stuff" so, network flood and stuff. You know when you've got 100mbps internet, but one download can uck up whole network for family and friends around because you've taken all traffic inside your network.
Maybe blizz servers cant hold such capacity.

and im not an expert for sure