The Burning Crusade: Lag and Instability
by Chris Miller 
Jan 17th 2007 at 10:00PM
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.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Khallah Jan 17th 2007 10:19PM
My realm has seen some instability, but overall has been running reasonably well.
Raptoro Jan 17th 2007 10:23PM
Well, it sounds like you guys are on a bad server. I constantly run at 20-30ms (doesn't hurt that I run off a T3) on Anvilmar, and people seem very helpful overall.
Mike Schramm Jan 17th 2007 10:34PM
Yeah, what server you on, Chris? I'm on Thunderhorn, as I said yesterday, and since we're high pop., things are insane. It's unplayable at peak hours for sure, between the camping and the lag.
But last night I played for a little while offhours, and it was much more manageable. I'm guessing as people move up into their 60s this weekend, things will thin out a little more.
klinko Jan 17th 2007 10:34PM
Same as #1. Some lag, but no disconnects or crashes so far.
And as a lock, I had the same problem with not being able to grab mobs. I say had, because I learned from what I saw and adjusted to it. Simply stand in the spot where the mob spawns. You'll get it most of the time no problem. And it that does't work, AOE does. I actually enjoy the massive groups of people at all the quest locations. It makes most quests really really easy, especially the ones that don't require killing anything. And finding a group is no problem. I'd say the only problem I've had is the organized Horde/Alliance groups that spend all their time ganking lone Alliance/Horde. Though it's not that bad considering what it could be.
chris Jan 17th 2007 10:47PM
I'm actually on Alleria. And I'm a n00b. one day I'll figure out how to log in here to leave comments :(.
Blacksabre Jan 17th 2007 10:47PM
You are so busted, Chris. :rofl:
Black
Lewisham Jan 17th 2007 11:00PM
Blizzard could have avoided a lot of the trouble if they released the servers they claimed they would do. The Oceanic players are (rightly) up in arms, and the lack of any new RP-PVP server has also annoyed a very large minority of the player-base. I suspect at least some of the population density (Coilfang, released just two days ago, is now queued) if they had actually released enough servers, of the right types, on the day.
Salin Jan 17th 2007 11:05PM
Mug-Thol is on it's knees right now, dsc's about every 10 minutes or so.....
dfv Jan 18th 2007 1:45AM
My wife spent 30 minutes on the other side of the portal last night before bailing out. It was crowded, slow and laggy, so she joined me (lvl 57) in Winterspring and Western Plaguelands (which were nearly empty) and quested. The nice thing was that she was getting plenty of rested xp on level 54-58 mobs without the slowness or competition on the other side of TDP. I would argue she did better back in Azeroth for the amount of time spent. This will change within a week or so, but it's worth considering for now.
Elo Jan 17th 2007 11:41PM
How is Lothar ? We have a free transfer to Area52. Decisions, decisions.
Windshadow Jan 17th 2007 11:48PM
I am having a fantastic time taking my new Squid Hunter and Belf Hunter to lev 5/6 since the game came via Amazon and UPS at 4 PM today... I was having a hard time on my old server Malygos...the lag once I got in was unreal! almost 2000 the worst it has ever been for me... but then I decided to start fresh on a new server and I am having the most fun I have had in months on a new server with no twinks etc... Exodar seems to be very stable lag is under 200 at the worst and over the next month I plan to take one of each class of the new races to say lev 16-20 to get a total feel of them before picking one of each to be my dual mains... and yes I might not make them Shaman and Paladin! Shocking I know!
With me it is all about the sightseeing and the fun of questing and levelling not about end game raids and who has the most uber tier set... so if neither of my final picks makes it to 70 in a years time that will be fine with me... the fact that they say that it will be several months before transfers are allowed is what pushed me to jump to the new server... the other nice thing is that for the first time I will be on an east coast server
So if you see Blood Elf's with varations on the name Windshadow or Draenei with varations on the Name Duart on Exodar say hi!
Pie Pants Jan 22nd 2007 10:18PM
Our server (Jubei'Thos) has been a little strange.
Lag in Outlands last night was bad, as it was everywhere, but not unbearable. I could still kill stuff and (usually) tag it before anyone else.
As soon as the lag started to get better (in fact, it got great about 11pm server time) blizz call in the rolling restarts. We then get stuck at 'Error retrieving chararacter list' for half an hour.
Funny you had the problem with both Draenei zones and Outlands though. With all the lag in Outlands, I went and rolled a Draenei - no problems, apart from the usual camping quest locations.
rpotor Jan 18th 2007 12:44AM
I'm on the EU-Ragnaros server and what you generally describe in your post (quest mobs camped, kills "stolen") holds true here as well. Except the server restarts. All in all we seem to have a stable server, altough it's being restarted "to address stability issues" right as I write this. However during prime time it hasn't happened so far. We experienced major lag only on launch day prime time, though that might obviously happen in the future too.
As for dealing with it, first I was furious and thought I'll leave WOW for a week at least, but then I started rolling with the crowd. And if we view it in another light it's actually adds another challenge to the game. I see a quest mob spawn I start running towards it, but would that warrior charge it before me? You never know, but you can bet on it safely. Anyway actually it is still possible to complete the quests, you just don't have to sweat over it. If I miss a mob, I'll just do circles in the quest area and eventually I'll get lucky and a quest mob spawns right in front of my nose. Surely it's not that fast leveling but hey, so I'll be 70 one day later, big deal. The one thing that is wonderful however which I noticed is that Horde and Alliance seem to be peacefully coexisting. I had a few times when Horde had actually helped me when the going got rough with a mob. Sure, that rogue sapped me while I was picking up an egg over at Razorthorn Trail, but he didn't kill me. So I just say it's competition and there'll always be another egg to pick up.
Whoops, this got a bit long, sorry. :-)
Sylythn Jan 18th 2007 12:55AM
I haven't had problems with the blood elf area - except for the named kill quests. And those, I generally send random invites to anyone standing around waiting for the spawn - just so I reduce the competition.
Outland has been too crowded and laggy for me, what with every 60 on Elune out there. Some of my guildies have been having success running the instances out there - since they're on the instance server. But for me, I'll give everyone a month or two to clear out of the starting Outland areas before I try and go in there.
Thankfully I'm east coast, so if I log in right after work, I don't get queued. But I've been hearing that by anywhere from 8-10pm est, Elune's got queues of 500-700. They've opened up free transfers off and threaten a realm split if it doesn't work. Considering I'm a member of the server's largest guild and their sister guild - I think I'm safe as far as staying on Elune is concerned.
Sabriell Jan 18th 2007 2:23AM
after reading this im so glad i got my mains changed with the free transfer! no lag no crash FTW
Thijz Jan 18th 2007 3:17AM
I started one of the new EU servers called Anachronos. And i'm having a great experience so far. The noobs are annoying (where are Solanians belongings!?) and i hate the cocky paladins but so far it's far better then the beta's that were actually quite boring...
Joshua Ochs Jan 18th 2007 3:31AM
Queues on Hyjal, and I'm having major framerate problems in parts of the Hellfire Peninsula (Honor Hold is just painful - less than 5fps at times!), but no lag issues, and no crashing. I don't think I've *ever* seen a server crash. Of course, until last week I hadn't seen a server queue, either.
andy Jan 18th 2007 4:53AM
laughing skull EU, albeit a horrible gank of a server is running smoothly.
The spawn overcrowding was clearing up at about 11pm gmt on release day and now its just moderately busy. ran both instances last night in about 2 hours then logged off as my guildies were'nt around.
loving the expansion tbh.
Bartholemues Jan 18th 2007 5:01AM
My server has been ok. No crashes but I do get randomly disconnected quite a bit (and can log back in instantly so I'm not sure what that's about). The spawn camping is just as bad as described in your post, it's quite difficult to get mobs as a paladin since I have no real instant range attack. I usually charge the mob and hit them with a crusader strike to make sure I get the kill but even then I get beaten to it by range classes some times in super crowded areas. I do enjoy it though in limited quantities ;)
Ran Strat last night to get away from HP for a bit and it was sooo easy with three of us at 61 with some new TBC gear (smallish guild of non-raiders). I was the only healer as a ret spec paladin and we cruised through it.
Natali Jan 18th 2007 5:29AM
Kilrogg-EU is holding up pretty well in the Belf starting areas... but the Outlands is still pretty busy (ie: laggy, stressful and full of people questing). Nothing like running up to the Pools to see nothing but corpses. And then dying as they all respawn around me :( I went to visit the new city however, and it was almost deserted, so I had a good time running around learning the layout.