Posts with tag connection

No one likes high latency, least of all someone playing an MMO that can demand reaction time the way World of Warcraft can, especially in raids. But even out in the world, latency can be a killer. So when people started reporting issues with connections to World of Warcraft soon after patch 5.3 launched, it got a lot of players noticing. In a six page forum thread there's been a lot of lively discussion of what's going on - whether it's on Blizzard's end, or somewhere between the computers of the affected players and the Blizzard servers. If you remember the Lagpocalypse post, you know how complicated these issues can get.

MVP forum poster Lissanna posted an interesting walkthrough of her own attempts to find the culprit today, and explained why despite some forum poster dissatisfaction that it is indeed helpful to run a traceroute and pathping and post the results to the tech support forums, since it gives Blizzard an idea of who to talk to about these issues. If they don't know who's being affected, where those people are, and more importantly where the issue is physically located there's not much they can do to help.

So if you're having the same problem, giving Blizzard as much information as possible is definitely helpful in terms of getting this sorted out. I've seen people in my raids disconnect on every single boss so far while I haven't had the issue at all myself, suggesting the problem isn't on Blizzard's end but is out there somewhere in the path the data takes between Blizzard and the players. Hopefully it can be solved soon.

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Many people, including myself, are having troubles logging in. The error we are getting is that the login server is busy and to please try again later. As the message states above, Blizzard will inform us at 1pm PST of any further details.

Those of you who are able to get in, we salute you! The rest of us will wish we were in-game, starting our Feast of Winter Veil activities.

We'll keep you up to date of any further developments.

Update 2:29pm: I and many others are now able to login. No official update at this time. Also, authenticators had nothing to do with it.

David Perry is one of those game developers who doesn't do anything small -- he started out with a company called Shiny Entertainment, responsible for great old games like Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah, and the Enter the Matrix movie tie-in game, and nowadays he's moved on to the MMO market, where he's developed all kinds of crazy ideas (including, we're not kidding, a dance MMO). This is the kind of guy who has ideas and chases them down.

His latest idea is a system called Gaikai, a "game streaming service" that allows players to jump right into any PC games they'd like, no installation or hard drive space necessary, online. There are a number of services like this springing up lately, including the much-discussed OnLive, where instead of depending on your local hardware to render and produce the game you're playing, you just send and recieve information with a remote server. As you can see above, Gaikai is focusing on PC games, and anyone who's planning on running a PC gaming service has to include World of Warcraft. Starting at about 6:00 into the video above, he shows off a version of WoW that requires no installation or loading at all; just sign in and play.

Eyonix is now reporting, as an update to yesterday's update, that Blizzard has resolved the issues with Comcast. So to quote the late, great Douglas Adams, "anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem." Which is not quite true -- Blizzard tech support and Comcast are probably still happy to listen to your issues (assuming you can get through their phone system), but the major outages from this weekend are reportedly solved.

There are still three stickied threads going in the technical support forums, so you can possibly find help or more information there if you're still having issues: Eyonix encourages anyone still having a problem to go there.

I'm on Comcast here in Chicago, but I didn't have any issues connecting this weekend (save for the fact that I was offline for half a day yesterday due to an unrelated computer error I had). Still, though we're not sure just how widespread the problem is, there were definitely some players suffering from lag and disconnects. Hopefully the problem is cleared up for good.

Snowman Eyonix posted an update to the ongoing Comcast issues on the forums today: he says that Blizzard is talking to Comcast about the problem, and that they may have identified the problem in a third-party network between the affected folks and Comcast themselves. He says work on the issue is ongoing, and that while they don't have an ETA, he'll let us know when there is more to know.

We don't know if the "third-party network" includes those Los Angeles datacenters that were being blamed earlier, and to be honest, we don't even know how widespread the problem actually is. A few of our writers are on Comcast -- most of us haven't had any problems at all, though one of our writers in LA is experiencing lag and the occasional disconnect.

We'll keep an eye on Eyonix's thread and let you know if anything changes. At this point, it seems the problems are known and Blizzard is doing what they can to solve things.

Users of Comcast and Verizon are experiencing technical difficulties today in their connectivity to the game. They are experiencing this in both connecting to the actual game, and then maintaining a good connection once in the game.

Blue poster Claudiog is seeking more information from the community on the technical support forums. In particular he's looking for traceroutes from affected users. Head over to their forums (ignoring their own ads) and help them out if you're struck with these issues.

Some users are stating that the Los Angeles datacenters are the culprits for the connectivity issues. However we want to caution users that Blizzard has made no official statement about their datacenters.

Fresh from the news bulletin upon login is an announcement of rolling restarts for a handful of realms this afternoon. At 12:00 noon PDT the realms of Dreadmaul, Caelestrasz, Nagrand, Aman'Thul, Barthilas, Thaurissan, Dath'Remar, Frostmourne, Khaz'horoth, and Jube'Thos will be going down for restarts.

Many people have still continued to experience connectivity issues and major lag since patch 3.0.2 dropped nearly two weeks ago. Instances seem to be a particular problem with people not being able to zone in, getting disconnected upon loading, or generally having issues with mobs and other objects appearing correctly.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more realms added to this list today, and perhaps some extended maintenance (if not an outright patch) this upcoming Tuesday.

Vaneras over on the WoW EU forums put up a post today listing Blizzard resources for WoW players when the patch drops tomorrow. While the post doesn't say "Patch 3.0.2 is tomorrow" it does have the title "10/13 Patch Day Paradise!" But the fact that 3.0.2 is dropping tomorrow isn't really anything new.

The Blizzard resources he provides includes an FAQ on connection and patching issues. Topic covered include being stuck on connecting, having problems with your firewall, game version validation, corrupt patch files, blizzard downloader issues (see our patch mirrors for a quick and easy solution to that), and general patching advice for your operating system of choice.

He also points out the technical support phone numbers (US EU), but usually the fastest solution is to post on the technical support forums (US EU) and you'll get a response very quickly from a fellow player or from a blue.

Thanks to Trevor for the scoop

The opening announcement on the game is currently letting us know that realms will be down for maintenance tomorrow from 5:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. While the realms are going to be down, we are not expecting patch 3.0.2 to drop.

Earlier last week it was announced that 3.0.2 would come when season 4 ended. Season 4 was announced to end on October 14th, and thus we are all expecting patch 3.0.2 to come on October 14th.

However if for some reason it starts raining cats and dogs and the patch does drop, we'll let you know. But I wouldn't count on it.

A news announcement on the login screen is letting us all know that AT&T, the people who provide data center service to Blizzard, will be performing maintenance tonight from 12:00 a.m. EST until 5:00 a.m. EST.

This will likely cause problems with both being able to login to the game and stay connected. This is an odd maintenance announcement, and one that I don't recall seeing before.

Hopefully this will not develop into anything more serious – such as extended network outages or other such issues.

Many of us with cable internet connections are well aware of the problems that arise when cable companies specifically block certain applications, such as the recent problems with Comcast blocking Bit Torrent.

It looks like there may be a similar problem with Time Warner and Roadrunner Cable, as many of their customers have found to it difficult to impossible to play due to lag and latency issues for some time, reports the New York Post.

To some extent, both TWC and Blizzard have been blaming each other for a while, with Time Warner claiming they have done nothing to block any packets or traffic related to World of Warcraft, and Blizzard pointing out that all of the players on the east coast with these problems are Time Warner/Roadrunner cable customers.

It's difficult to say if Time Warner is being genuine in their confusion, since other ISPs have lied about similar issues in the past, but there are signs they are taking this seriously. They have contacted Blizzard's ISP, and players are saying that they have been contacted by Time Warner representatives looking to fix the problem.

Seeing the issue making it into print media, perhaps, will give them the extra initiative they need to get it completely sorted.

I've been what you might call and internet junkie for about 15 years. I remember the old days of 2400 baud dialup. Highlighs of that era include bulletin boards, IRC, and elm for email. At this point I could not imagine life without high speed internet. Data transfer for WoW during playtime is minimal, but I had no idea that some people use dialup for WoW. Kaikais of Azgalor asked the general forums today how far one could go on dialup.

He says that he's reached level 70 and is now faced with the challenge of gearing up his characters. His concern is being able to seriously raid or PvP with such a connection. Some mentioned that they have either experienced dialup themselves or have had raid members that relied this type of internet connection. Many reported lag and limitations with Ventrilo, most seem to be getting along alright on an old school connection.

Good news, everyone! Several realms are up and running, with more coming online shortly I'm sure. This means you can get your World of Warcraft fix for the week starting now. And lets be honest, for any serious WoW player the week starts on Tuesday afternoon when the servers go up, and lasts until Tuesday morning when they go down.

There is no patch 2.4.3 on the live servers yet - expect that in the next couple of weeks. Additionally, if there are any server stability issues to report on throughout the day you'll see a couple posts go up here.

Happy Tuesday!

And for the record, I've been wanting to use Buddy Christ in a post for a while, but haven't been able to find an excuse yet. Him seeming all happy for something (like the realms being up) felt like a good enough reason for me.

The thing I love most about summer is the thunder storms. Forget the constant days of 90 degree weather making my apartment bake even when the air conditioning is on, it's those storms rolling in with lightening striking a few hundred feet from me that I love. My guild-mates are going to love that too, especially when I'm raiding with them.

We've had our first couple weeks of this in game, and already I've heard "Be right back, Tornado," from some guildies living down in Kansas. Luckily everything was okay and no one got hurt, but the fact still remains – we lost our head Mage for 30 minutes, and that's 30 minutes of our life we can't have back!

While a Mage having to take a break in the middle of raids isn't a show stopper, having the main tank (my role) go offline is. I've had the unfortunate situation of having that occur a couple days ago. The computer I was raiding on wasn't plugged into my UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply), so I was disconnected from everything when we lost power for about 30 seconds. However with a bit of tinkering around, I was able to put myself in a situation that lets me stay on even when the power hiccups.

A blue poster on the forums today announced that the updates to Blizzard's websites are now complete. These updates have caused all of Blizzard's sites to work either poorly or not at all for the past few days.

They were doing these updates to provide greater security and new features. While we might never know what the new security aspects are of the site (we can guess at stronger encryption, etc...), we expect to see some new features on their site in the future.

Personally I'm glad their update is done. My credit card recently expired and I had to put in a new number, but wasn't able to because the site kept messing up. However this afternoon I was able to update my billing information without a hitch. Back to the multi boxing for me...