Servers, lag, bitching, and you

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Servers, lag, bitching, and you

Postby Spider on Wed Apr 06, 2005 12:50 am

As many people complain about this, let me explain to you why it does this;

The server you play on, it hosts the entire continent.

That alone is roughly about 500+ players interacting within the environment, npc's, mobs, gathering herbs, all sending and receiving information with the server.

When you get about 100+ players in area, the lag is not that bad until the battle gets started.

You now have the server trying to deal with 100-200 spells/abilities at once in the focused area of the server while still trying to maintain the rest of the continent with all the other players.

This creates a major chokepoint in the game as it was intentionally designed this way.

Why?

In everquest, every zone you entered, you had to load, hence 'zoning'. A server can handle 1 or more of these zones at once. If a battle was to take place, it would only effect that area, possibly a few others that maybe hosted on the same machine.

If wow was designed this way, they could VERY easily fix the 'lag' that happens when major raids fight.

Most of you complain and bitch about the lag without trying to think of the technical part of the problem and the intentional design by the developers to try and make the game as streamline as possible (no zone loading except instances).

So next time your continent starts lagging and you know its because of a raid, you now know why, and that Blizzard had your best interests in mind when they designed this game; streamlined playing, never having to load to continue leveling-questing.
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Postby StormCrow on Wed Apr 06, 2005 4:43 am

actually it was far worse in EQ.

but in EQ you could make yourself nigh immune to spells with gear.

in WoW your still getting AoEd and shit while frozen in time.

eq wasnt made for pvp on the otherhand.

wow was. therefore pvp should be more manageable right?

i remember in DAoC it wasnt this bad, hell in a 100 person fight i could easily wail on casters and single them out amidst the chaos, little to no lag.

DAoC did it right, but they made their game pvp based. not some wannabe best of both worlds
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Postby Cyx on Wed Apr 06, 2005 8:05 am

DoAC had most of it's pvp in a smaller pvp based zone. Guess what? WoW will soon be there too. Let's suck it up and deal with it, and give Blizzard a chance when BG comes out. If that's a lag fest....they are going to have serious issues.

I honestly suspect the delay in BG is reworking their network and graphic engines to optimize them more for large scale pvp. Could be wrong, but the screens and stuff I see sure look pretty full featured.

Let's hope for the best.
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Postby Kreik on Wed Apr 06, 2005 1:46 pm

Plus BG will be its own server.
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Postby SteamedRice on Wed Apr 06, 2005 1:50 pm

in shadowbane was the worst due to the dreaded sb.exe crashes but it got fixed though the lag was as bad.

Ive played Daoc also and when it came to large scale sieging in the mainlands there wasn't any lag compared to wow.

but yea WoW large scale pvp is no fun once the lag kicks in. It was great in stormwind yesterday when we were attacking highlord bolvard until the alliances came, then it became untolerable.

I notice this only happens in areas with guard spawns going crazy but out in the open there is no lag.

heres hoping battlegrounds won't lag but thats doubtful considering they have to limit BG numbers and the size of the BG + elite npcs clashing on both sides in the middle + 100s of alliance + 100s of hordes + summoning airstrikes etc = lag no doubt.
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Postby LrdVoldemort on Wed Apr 06, 2005 3:43 pm

Guys, the servers are a big part of the problem, but I firmly believe a lot of the FPS issues are rendering issues. WoW had about a million polys with a million textures and when you begin to add spell effects, any but the best PCs are going to have problems.

Like I've said before, we need options to turn down some visuals ourselves... more than we do now. Perhaps WE should choose whether we want to see other toon's hats and capes. Think about it, if there are 100 horde and alliance, that's 200 objects/textures we don't have to render. We should also choose whether to see weapons detail or tabards, etc., unless we so choose, too. Also having something like "simple spell effects" maybe using sprites instead of full 3D effects would help too for slow clients. I mean, think about the rendering needed to spin all the skulls in a cloud from a corruption spell. Cool as hell, but it really is tapping our rendering devices.
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Postby Celly on Wed Apr 06, 2005 4:07 pm

Lrdy brings up a good point. In Shadowbane before a big fight it was mandatory you turned spell effects to 0% as it would reduce lag tremendously. They need more options to turn off the pretty visuals that aren't needed in PvP to reduce lag.

Steamrice I'm not sure about you, but in the huge fights I was a part of in Shadowbane I did not lag HALF as bad as I do in Shadowbane. Of course there are probably a lot of technical differences in a player made city and Stormwind, but Shadowbane was at least playable even with spawning guards and at least 100 other players in the area.
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Postby remorsecode on Wed Apr 06, 2005 4:13 pm

And yet, despite the Fps lag, it was hella fun.

How the crap do they do that?

Anyways, I just keep reminding myself that it IS better than back in November, and wait. Then I remember Blizzard's old games (even battle.net itself) - excellent when they came out, but 100x better after even a year of patching and upgrades. With all the jazz they're doing to the servers, it wouldn't suprise me to see a lot of this improve with time.

Besides, do they really need to put a huge emphasis on lagless pvp when there isn't even a system in the game to encourage it yet anyway? I really think we'll see the most drastic improvements when they've given us a REASON to raid Stormwind, rather than now when the only reason we're going there is to be a hot #1 horde 'PvP guild' (nothing wrong with that, mind you).
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