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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsWintergrasp lag a big issue after patch 3.1
by Mike Schramm 
May 6th 2009 at 9:00AM
Zarhym has got some answers to the widespread problem of lag in Wintergrasp after patch 3.1 the other week. He says Blizzard figures the problem is simply population based -- there are many more people playing in the battleground than there were before the patch. For that reason, they're having trouble coming up with good solutions: the battleground is designed to be non-instanced, and that's why a lot of people like it, so putting a limit on the amount of people in there is not the way to go. Hardware isn't a solution either -- Blizzard's hardware is already top-of-the-line, and not only would upgrading it take a while anyway, but my guess is that most of the lag issues come not from Blizzard's side, but from the connections between players and them, which they may not have any control over anyway.So yes, we're more or less out of luck -- as long as Wintergrasp is extremely popular (and even Zarhym remembers the naysayers before the release with a smirk), there will always be a certain amount of lag in there. There are a few good suggestions floating around the comments thread -- one is that Wintergrasp should always be conquerable, which seems like it would keep down on the flood of people, though of course there'd be other issues if that were implemented.
At this point, Wintergrasp lag may just be something we have to live with. Eventually, you have to think the population will drop back down, and then those of us still in there will enjoy lag-free battles again. But Blizzard has taken on quite a goal trying to do non-instanced PvP full of vehicles and towers without any lag at all.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, PvP, Battlegrounds
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 4)
Joe May 6th 2009 10:24AM
If the issue showed it self only in Wintergrasp you'd have a point
Only thing is that it's on all places where there are more than a few players in Northrend , Dalaran being the most obvious one.
Dala has allways been busy , it's not busier now but lag went up big time.
Jon Do May 6th 2009 10:35AM
I have seen the same thing as Joe - Dalaran lag is worse, especially in prime time. For a while after 3.1 I was randomly suddenly lagging in Northrend; I couldn't find a pattern to it. And almost daily server restarts indicate a major problem of probably either memory leaks or hung processes.
I've never been in Wintergrasp except to do the raid and to do the fishing daily. But even if WG is 200 v. 200, that's nice, but back in the day I'd queue for AV and there would be more than 5 AVs (40 v. 40) going at once every evening.
If its reasonably fun and heavily incentivized, people will do it (not exactly rocket science here). Also, I'd have to wonder if Blizz is gloating over Arena participation, too...
dpoyesac May 6th 2009 10:29AM
I know that some of the ungodly lag is downstream, at the client end -- when my brother and I BOTH try to enter WG at the same time (on the same connection) the lag is even WORSE and one of us usually D/Cs.
But the lag get noticeably WORSE the moment WG starts, and it gets worse all across the zone -- minor 5-, 6- person skirmishes at the southern workshops suddenly lag out as soon as the timer kicks in.
This makes me think the lag isn't just OUR connections, but is primarily all the extra information associated with tracking the quest objectives such as 'Slay Them All'. 3.1 was supposed to ensure that everyone who does damage to a vehicles gets credit for 'Stop The Siege' -- my guess is that the changes to the tracking for that have caused the post-3.1 lag Zarhym is blaming on us.
Lianne May 6th 2009 11:02AM
They need to fix this lag issue...
The other day we (the Horde) lost a WG match because of the lag. There were 15 seconds left, the door was busted down....and then everything stopped. No one was able to click the artifact because of the lag (there were several people in the room right next to it, myself included). The lag didn't break until around 20 seconds AFTER the match ended. I sat there for a good 30 seconds not knowing if we had won or lost.
Very lame. -_-
Jay May 6th 2009 11:15AM
Reduce the amount of honor per match and make them more frequent.
Superthrust May 6th 2009 11:35AM
I have been saying since vanilla wow, and will continue "Blizzard should take OUT the rez timers when you die, if they want to effectively promote world pvp and all that."
Seriously...it all started in 1.9. When AQ came out, and the pvp points were there, everyone bum rushed. Albeit there was alot of alliance, but thats another rant for another day. Anyways, people were FLOODING silithus. No geysers to be found. So, you had to run around ALOT and find one or wait. But, you could pvp with alot of people since they auto flagged. If you died in a heated pvp battle, you had to wait, an increasing amount of time. Once it gets to 2 minutes, it get tedious and seems no longer fun for some.
Second attempt at world pvp was Halaa...now, i still go take halaa. What halaa did for me was give me a chance to pvp while leveling on a 63+ character, and get some rep and awesome gear while i was at it. But, this idea was quickly shot away due to the fact that if you died in a large scale halaa battle (which they were awesome at some times on my server), you had to wait a day and a night to respawn. Not fun.
Also, taking out the world pvp timer would be promoting all world pvp. Sure, when players are being camped and someone finally gets someone down, and they insta spawn, it might be an issue. But the help and joy that this would bring to players would most definitely outweigh the problems.
Bigsilly May 6th 2009 11:45AM
So, you think there is really this many people suddenly interested in PVP....OR The populous of WG has increased due to the introduction of a new free loot boss handing out T8?
Wonk May 6th 2009 11:53AM
You can't hit what's not there, and in WG that's more often the case. How can you defend when the player/vehicle you swung at is inside the keep and you are still attacking his lagged-out image outside.
How many times will the game be lost due to lag? I've given up... it ends up a bad comedy and with you the fool.
rawr May 6th 2009 12:12PM
Its really bad on arthas, the beginning of the match it starts out OK and just little by little gets bad to the point where usually about halfway through you cant do a damn thing.
I dont buy that its out of thier hands. It wasnt this bad prepatch, obviously they did something and need to fix it back.
Seakochs May 6th 2009 12:13PM
Has someone at Blizzard actually profiled the client and servers during a period of extreme lagginess? If population is the problem, Blizzard have some algorithm that scales worse than linearly with population, and that's bad.
tutti May 7th 2009 3:24AM
I believe the best you can do is polynomial, as the information about each player's actions or movements needs to be sent to every other player. Calculating what happens should be linear, but sending this information out, which is probably the problem, will be polynomial.
Also, I doubt it's the character names, titles, armor etc that's the problem. That has to be sent once each time the character becomes visible to your client, and from then only what changes needs to be sent. I'm guessing it's the combat events causing the problem. Blizzard's combat logs are very extensive; anything that happens is sent to every player in the vicinity, including who did it, what they did, who they did it to, whether they hit, how much damage they did, how much damage was resisted or blocked, when it happened etc. Even the simplest things, such as a tick of a DoT, a talent proccing or a buff fading will be sent. And you get this for EVERY player that's visible to your client. They don't need to be in your raid group, they don't have to be on your side, your client knows all that. If there are 100 people in the fortress and everyone gets all this information about everyone, there is of course going to be some lag.
To get an idea of how much information this is:
/run function g() print(arg2) end;if not f then f=CreateFrame("Frame");f:RegisterEvent("COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED");f:SetScript("OnEvent",g); end
Run that macro once, then get into a large scale Wintergrasp battle. Every time any combat event is sent to you the type of event you got will be printed to your chat frame (the details won't be printed).
This is how you turn it off:
/run if f then f:UnregisterAllEvents();f=nil end
Not all of this was meant as a response to Seakochs, some of it is just general information. :)
Svavarl May 25th 2009 6:51PM
Sorry for answering about 20 days after the answer was posted.
The flaw with tutti's theory is that the lag happens despite being in southern WG where there's almost no activity. Players positioned there shouldn't theoratically get combat log information from players at the fortress. Since the lag happens in southern WG too it could be safely assumed that the problem isn't based on combat log traffic on the client side. It does, however, not disprove server issues in that regard as the server could be too busy sending combat information and delaying other tasks which need to be done on the server side.
Since we are in a discussion about polynomial and linear, I'd think the process of sending combat log information is linear (or better). Those terms describe how the complexity of processes/calculations increase as the variable grows. When there are 100 players, each action by a player sends the information to the 99 other players in the area. Adding another player, the information is sent to 1 extra player and so on. It would suggest that the process is indeed linear (or better). I have at least yet to see a plausable explaination as to why it wouldn't.
As to other ideas why WG lags, I'm not completely sure and I think my guesses would be pretty pointless without knowing more about the inner workings of the code and/or how the servers are set up to handle WG.
Lynx56 May 6th 2009 12:35PM
I've experimented with the different aspects of so-called lag. As others have noted it's unplayable with 200+ people on the steps in the final push. With those same 200+ people on the steps, though, the game runs as smoothly as any ordinary quest or raid when fighting the dozen or so players at the southern towers. This tells me the problem is entirely on the client side, and perhaps not even the client program itself. Trying to render a few zillion polygons per second (players, vehicles, spells, background as you move) may just be asking too much of current PC hardware. I've long scoffed at the dated visuals in WoW, but clearly there are limits. If you want a fun WG experience, broaden your horizons beyond the all-out melee in the main courtyard. Get 2 or 3 friends and form your own separate group with a single objective (e.g. hold the east or west workshop, down the towers, etc). You'll have your own little "premade" and can define the BG in your own terms.
Blkangus May 6th 2009 12:55PM
Having a PVP zone with no population limits is the most idiotic thing Blizzard has ever done. The playability of the game is key to PVP - lagging out and losing WG due to it completely compromises the whole idea.
They should make WG be a LARGE raid based battleground - like AV but with some larger number per side (say 120 or 3 full 40 man raid groups). Make it instanced, and you remove all the residual zone lag that happens whenever a particularly busy WG is taking place. There would still be plenty of players in the BG to make it exciting and different from all the other BGs - but with a definite player quantity so Blizzard can design around it more successfully.
As it stands, no matter how much anyone tells me they enjoy it - WG is a failure.
Thander May 6th 2009 1:18PM
I think they should just have it be an ongoing battle throughout the day like all the other world pvp objectives. I always thought WG would be like AV was in the old days. Having the battle start at specific times is basically instancing with no limit on players. A constant battle would probably cut down on the number of people by a third or more.
The top fortress can be horde or alliance and another bottom fortress for the other side. Players can talk to an NPC in their fortress to enter the vault. They need 10 tokens from killing enemy players before the NPC will teleport them inside. If the fortress is conquered, have it reset in 20 minutes so people wanting to do vault don't have to wait too long.
ezmode May 6th 2009 1:47PM
Since 3.1?? People really thought that WG has been playable before 3.1?? I havent had a decent WG battle since the 2nd week Wrath was released when there wasnt enough 80s to lag the damn thing out. Its been aweful since day one, it was aweful lag on the beta ptr as well. Instance it. Please.
Luisette May 6th 2009 2:25PM
Wait, they won't instance it because that somehow puts a limit on who can join? What about the instanced quests, the Dead Zone when you corpse-release... hell, even the DK starting area? Those surely don't have a participation limit.
I'm really not seeing a problem. Sure, it'll take some creativity, but that's what we're paying them for.
Spearhawk May 6th 2009 2:32PM
"Learn to live with the lag"....No
Rather shut the whole thing down until you find a better solution for it. Can not have an area affecting entire region or entire game and then ppl to just "learn to love it" and move on, thats not how things work. You find out whats wrong, fix it and THEN move on....
Zamboni May 6th 2009 2:50PM
They've already taken measures to control the lag on our server. Blizzard simply remove the Horde portal in Dalaran, cutting the Wintergrasp population in half. By the time the Horde can fly to Wintergrasp, the battle is already over.
I expect that some point, Alliance and Horde will have separate battlegrounds to cut down on lag.
bszota May 7th 2009 6:19AM
you do know that they moved the portal 15metres to the left in the room next to where it used to be right ?
I'm imagining you stood at the top of the steps by the Horde Warbringer crying about a lack of portal...
Just turn left....