Posts with tag disconnect

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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You ever reach a point in the game where you just want to throw your arms up in the air, throw in the towel and cease all casting of spells related to healing? I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been there myself on more than one occasion. Not exactly my finest moments, I'll admit. Moments of frustration aren't exactly legitimate reasons not to heal. But as a healer, you'll come across moments in your healing careers where you have to make a split-second decision. Will it be action or inaction? Choose carefully, because the well-being of the raid depends on it. Sometimes inaction (or at least, not healing) is the correct choice. Besides, you might have some druids around that can bring players back to full with Rebirth. (If you're looking for some tips on the ideal usage, here's a guest post I wrote on Rebirth procedures from the perspective of the druid, the raid leader and the player getting the resurrection.)

There appears to be connection problems going around as multiple people are unable to log in tonight, including multiple tipsters and yours truly. It's definitely a widespread problem, as the Blizzard Tech Support team is currently asking for ISP and tracert information over on the official forums while they try to track it down.

While some people are positing that this is a merged battle.net account problem, it's worth noting that we also know of many people, including a couple of our bloggers, are still able to log in fine with a battle.net account. At the same time, some posters in the aforementioned thread are saying that they can log on fine when they use an unmerged pre-battle.net account from a family member or roommate.

Once we get a clearer idea of what the problem is or when it's been fixed, we'll let you know.

UPDATE, 10:30 PM EST: Okay, This is Daniel again, and I can log on with a battle.net account. This is the same one that wasn't working not 10 minutes ago, for the record.

UPDATE, 11 PM EST: It looks everything is working fine again. Play on!

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.

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.

I'm a rather avid raider, putting in a solid 20 hours a week on my Warrior. One of the major things about the time spent raiding is that it can be very precious. There is only so much time that 24 other people, plus appropriate class substitutions, can be available each week. It's critical that the time spent raiding is used well.

Unfortunately, using raiding time well is about as much of a challenge as is downing Illidan. In preparation for this article, I've spent the past three weeks keeping track of the down time in raids. We raid Sunday through Thursday nights, from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. We experience a downtime of about 51 minutes for each raid, which is about 20% of the time. Down time is defined as the time that my character is standing still, not attacking, not moving, and not being MDed to.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not really sure.

Tip #1: Chain pulling

Personally, I do my best at the main tank to chain pull and push the trash through as fast as possible. This works out 99% of the time, however the 1% of the time it doesn't work out can grind the raid to a halt. Case and point: The trash to Supremus isn't too bad, and is a lot of packs where the MT, OT, and Pally tank each have some mobs to tank. There are also some ranged dragons that the Warlocks tank. These pulls can go very fast, and are very predictable. Pulling slowly we can do this in about 40 minutes, while chain pulling each group, we can push through in 15.

Tip #2: Fully self buffed, all the time

It doesn't take much to buff yourself. Every class has some buff they can apply to themselves, be it food buffs, spell buffs, or shouts. The key here is that you can find a minute or two to always buff at least yourself, if not others. Although, it might not always be possible to buff others as you're going along - and that's okay with most raid leaders for trash pulls.

Based on my experiences, and a slew of other folks posting over at the Blizzard Customer Service Forums, it appears many Tier 6 instances are having issues with stability tonight. Half the raid or more is constantly disconnecting at seemingly random points.

Several CMs GMs are looking into the issue – but it is wide spread. This means that it is almost assuredly an issue with the Blizzard servers. Based on testing I've done it is not an issue with addons. After a disconnect, all addons were turned off, and the disconnects still happened.

Stay tuned to HKO Insider for the latest. Hopefully they'll hotfix this one right up.

Updated 11:00 p.m. EDT: Belfaire posted "We're gathering the appropriate info now. I have no ETA on a resolution, only that it'll be [fixed] ASAP." (April Fool's text removed for readability.)

Updated 12:44 a.m. EDT: Belfaire also let us know that Q.A. is working on the problem, though no fix has been announced yet. Seems they are at work on it.

Updated 1:00 a.m. EDT: Potential solution from Belfaire: "Please have your entire raid delete or rename your Interface folder and let me know here if you encounter the issue again. [One] group said that they ran without mods, but if what I think's happening is actually happening, even if one person has [an addon], it can affect the raid."

In addition to authentication difficulties and emergency maintenance on several servers, there are also, apparently, ISP issues that are causing players to become disconnected.  Maybe this is some sort of message suggesting that we should spend more quality time watching television.  Hopefully some of you are having better luck tonight than I am!