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Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Quark - 08-24-2006

Warning: some of this is speculation. It fits all the observations I have made, and is probably true, but that doesn’t make it 100% fact. Take everything with a grain of salt, critique the weak points, and add in your own observations.

We all know this game has had performance issues. I won’t call it lag, because that’s an oversimplification. Any server that was there on release knows this; any server that has had 5 raids in BWL at the same time knows this. Despite what it may seem like at times, we also know Blizzard has tried to fix these issues. Here are two stories of the consequences arising from these attempts.

Part 1, Rogues: Talent review aside, 1.8 was the heyday of Rogues. Why is this, you ask? Everything worked! There were very few bugs on the Rogue side, and Vanish was in its best state ever. Unfortunately, this was also a time where Blizzard was running out of ideas for how to improve overall performance. The quick fixes, like enforcing standards so that Blizzard’s UI and AddOns like CTRA weren’t spamming twice the necessary information, were long gone. They needed a way to reduce communication between server and client as much as possible, because every message sent between the two is CPU time to write the message, network time to send the message, and even more CPU time to read and interpret the message. Client/Server communication became the new god of Blizzard’s programming, and it seems nothing in the game is safe from spending time on the altar.

1.9 was released, and it was pretty much the worst time in Rogue history. So many basic skills and talents simply stopped working, and it didn’t stop there. Minor patches and major, up through 1.11, would fix and break more skills left and right. Between 1.9 and 1.11, here are all the things I can remember changing:

Seal Fate: Combo points were not awarded. Fixed so now combo points have a delay until they’re added.
Ruthlessness: Delay until it is added.
Relentless Strikes: Would proc even on failed finishers. Now fixed.
Finishers: Make the hit sound/graphic when they miss.
Vanish: Is less reliable in general, and specifically can be broken just by autoattack.
Blade Flurry: Positioning requirements went nuts for awhile, then mysteriously went back to normal.
Sword Specialization: No longer is instant, there is a slight delay between proc and free swing.

The delay involved in Seal Fate and Ruthlessness is still there, and probably always will be. Blizzard claims Vanish works “98%” of the time, and don’t care that it was working all the time before; it has been sacrificed to the god of network code. Finishers remain broken, thus leading to many annoyed Rogues who used sound to determine whether or not their Kidney Shot landed.

Let’s go into more detail about Sword Specialization, though. As things stand, it already was an inferior “1%” talent. Because it resets the swing timer to 0, instead of actually giving a “free” swing, any time your special attacks or offhand weapon procs it, you’re losing any downtime your mainhand weapon has already used. If your MH is 2.7 speed and you swung 2.6 seconds ago, an OH proccing Sword Spec doesn’t help much. So what changed? There’s now a delay to the “free” swing. It takes a small amount of time to actually trigger. Besides a general decline in DPS, this leads to two other bad side effects:
1) Timed right, a sword spec proc is nonexistent.
2) Stuns and similar effects can lead to nullified procs (again, timed right).

The “1%” talent is more realistically a 0.3-0.6% talent due to both its inherent flaws and the changes to server/client communication.

Temporary Item Buffs lasting between zoning was a great boon to rogues. Game-changing it actually was not. It was, however, a fix to one of the most annoying elements of playing a Rogue. We’ll only briefly mention this wasn’t worked on until after Oils were implemented. Then Blizzard announces near the end of 1.12 that they’re removing the fix. Given reason? To reduce server stress, of course. There are two angles to take from this. It’s possible Temporary Item Buffs were horribly designed in the first place, and so different from Player Buffs, that it really does cause stress on the server. It’s also possible that even Player Buffs cause this stress on the servers, but since that has zoned since the game was released, it is not an option to sacrifice it to the network gods. Which one is it? Only Blizzard knows.

Other classes? Don’t think you’re immune. Paladin’s SoC and Warriors Sword Spec suffer from the same flaw. Druids, remember your Furor bugging out every patch? It’s from Blizzard trying to make their code more efficient. What class skills will break next? Which bugs are deemed acceptable, assuming an increase in performance? We can only find out every patch day.

Part 2, Stomrage: Stormrage has been a server since the beta days. It was a release day server that suffered from the bug that reported incorrect population counts, thus boosting its population. Come prime time, every night, every action would have a delay to it. Inevitably, Eastern Kingdoms would crash. Or the instance servers would crash. They would come back up to less performance issues that would slowly reappear as people logged in again. Stormrage was one of the servers upgraded in the very first hardware upgrade, about 4 months after the game was released. Post-upgrade, the performance problems were nearly gone.

Fast forward quite awhile, when some guilds start taking on BWL. Razorgore, Vaelestrasz, and Nefarian became notorious for killing the instance server. With only a few groups in BWL, everything would slow down and become nearly unplayable. When Blizzard released the patch with the biggest network optimizations, there was an immediate impact on performance. It was much, much better than before. But then something else happened … more guilds came to raid BWL and AQ.

Our server’s growth simply outpaced anything Blizzard did to make the game run smoother. Slowly but surely, however, the repercussions of the performance issues changed. It went from a constant delay, where everything would have a set delay from half a second to 5 seconds depending on how bad it was, to spikes. Everything would seem fine for 10 minutes, then you’d get hit with 15 seconds of nothing. The server catches up, and 30 people in your raid group are dead.

Stormrage, unlike many other popular realms, never was able to transfer. Blizzard simply waited, and waited, and waited. Two guilds left Stormrage to find better havens -> they completely rerolled. Five or so other guilds waited until pay transfers came out, and let all their members be gouged by Blizzard to transfer to a better realm. Some guilds simply disbanded. The Horde side of Stormrage was particularly gutted, losing all Nefarian killing guilds.

Now comes the fun part. Stormrage supposedly received two server upgrades while these guilds were abandoning the server. When the chaos had settled, the issues seemed to have mostly disappeared. Sure, there were some times that things happened, but I bet that is true of every server out there. The question is, was it the upgrades or the bleeding that made the situation better? We will never know.

Maintainance time for 1.12 comes around, and we find that Stormrage is again on the list for upgrades. For those keeping track, I believe it makes 3 in 5 weeks. What is the verdict of this upgrade, which is supposed to be our final upgrade coming for the Burning Crusade expansion? We’re back to square one. Everything, no matter where you are, has a delay. Kidney Shot might take you half a second, or it might take you five. There has been no relief from the problems. There has been no indication that relieve is coming. The server upgrade for The Burning Crusade has been an utter failure. It easily made performance the worst I’ve seen since my first two months of World of Warcraft -> and I’ve been here since the beginning.


So ... what do you think? Worthy of the general boards?

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Lissa - 08-24-2006

Quote:Maintainance time for 1.12 comes around, and we find that Stormrage is again on the list for upgrades. For those keeping track, I believe it makes 3 in 5 weeks. What is the verdict of this upgrade, which is supposed to be our final upgrade coming for the Burning Crusade expansion? We’re back to square one. Everything, no matter where you are, has a delay. Kidney Shot might take you half a second, or it might take you five. There has been no relief from the problems. There has been no indication that relieve is coming. The server upgrade for The Burning Crusade has been an utter failure. It easily made performance the worst I’ve seen since my first two months of World of Warcraft -> and I’ve been here since the beginning.
So ... what do you think? Worthy of the general boards?

Just a note on this last bit Quark, I'm not sure it was the hardware upgrade that is causing this issue. I think with the change to cross server PvP you're seeing two issues here. Prior to 1.12, when we got the two upgrades, we had a couple minor issues that got worked out quickly after each upgrade. This latest lag really started when both the patch went in and the hardware was upgrade on Tuesday and I am still leaning towards the patch than the hardware on this.

First, the PTR did not have the ability to check cross server instancing due to the nature of the PTR. If you look back at the PTR forums, there is no comments of lag issues like this which are being across a large number of realms (although there are some that are not seeing this). As such, to me it looks like the issues we're having with lag the last couple of nights is due to the cross realm PvP and not due to something going wrong in the hardware upgrade. Blizzard couldn't really test the effects of cross server BGs in the PTR so that fact that we're seeing these issues as population increases during prime time hours. (It starts just before 8 Eastern/5 Pacific and goes to around 2 Eastern/11 Pacific although it starts decreasing around 11 Eastern/8 Pacific.)

Second, with this patch a lot more people are logging in to see if it's worth playing WoW again. More people logging in means more the server has to deal with. Compound the number of people logging in with an untested feature, cross server BGs, and you have a recipe for increased latency.

I see the issues SR is having as compounded by the above to issues. I don't see it as a hardware upgrade issue. The cross server BGs were untested and that is what I think is the real culprit here. One thing that I did notice last night, once the WSG cross server BG instance server died, a good amount of latency disappeared. I think this directly correlates to the problems we're seeing with latency. The cross server BG code isn't optimized and tested and that is causing the problems.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - MongoJerry - 08-24-2006

Quote:Maintainance time for 1.12 comes around, and we find that Stormrage is again on the list for upgrades. For those keeping track, I believe it makes 3 in 5 weeks. What is the verdict of this upgrade, which is supposed to be our final upgrade coming for the Burning Crusade expansion? We’re back to square one. Everything, no matter where you are, has a delay. Kidney Shot might take you half a second, or it might take you five. There has been no relief from the problems. There has been no indication that relieve is coming. The server upgrade for The Burning Crusade has been an utter failure. It easily made performance the worst I’ve seen since my first two months of World of Warcraft -> and I’ve been here since the beginning.

So ... what do you think? Worthy of the general boards?

If you post this part on the general boards, you will be hounded mercilessly for not knowing that all the servers are experiencing horrible stability and lag problems with the new patch. Tichondrius has not had any hardware upgrades, and the new patch has been horrible stability-wise. We finally had to call off our Naxx raid last night after an hour and a half of beating our heads against the wall. (We also tried to kill Patchwerk and Anub'Rekhan, but beating our heads against the wall accomplished just as much and didn't involve repair bills).

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Kevin - 08-24-2006

Quote:If you post this part on the general boards, you will be hounded mercilessly for not knowing that all the servers are experiencing horrible stability and lag problems with the new patch. Tichondrius, has not had any hardware upgrades, and the new patch has been horrible stability-wise. We finally had to call off our Naxx raid last night after an hour and a half of beating our heads against the wall. (We also tried to kill Patchwerk and Anub'Rekhan, but beating our heads against the wall accomplished just as much and didn't involve repair bills).

Yeah, every server is bad. Well actually Terenas is about the same as it had been for the last 3 to 4 months, but now everybody seems to be running the same as that poor destroyed realm. Terenas was actually performing better than Stormrage last night. It's been a while since that happened. :) But yeah this isn't just a Stormrage issue. I do understand the point Quark is trying to make, if this is supposed to be the last work that SR sees before the expansion, please revert it back to some other state that was better off than this. :)

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Quark - 08-24-2006

Quote:If you post this part on the general boards, you will be hounded mercilessly for not knowing that all the servers are experiencing horrible stability and lag problems with the new patch. Tichondrius, has not had any hardware upgrades, and the new patch has been horrible stability-wise. We finally had to call off our Naxx raid last night after an hour and a half of beating our heads against the wall. (We also tried to kill Patchwerk and Anub'Rekhan, but beating our heads against the wall accomplished just as much and didn't involve repair bills).

I had heard mixed reports of server status since 1.12, actually. Maybe the clusters with less problems are not the ones that lack upgrades, but the ones that simply have smaller battle groups / less PvP going on. Hell, some guilds were able to get to the bugged Thadius, so something ain't even with the servers.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Mavfin - 08-24-2006

Quote:I had heard mixed reports of server status since 1.12, actually. Maybe the clusters with less problems are not the ones that lack upgrades, but the ones that simply have smaller battle groups / less PvP going on. Hell, some guilds were able to get to the bugged Thadius, so something ain't even with the servers.

Yeah, I would lean toward the patch, Quark, not the server. The patch is magnifying stuff with the larger population on SR as compared to some other realms, IMO.



Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Concillian - 08-24-2006

The server issues have been covered, I experience similar issues on Terenas, I don't think it's a Stormrage isolated thing.

As for the rogue review, I am loving 1.12. I've had a lot of fun PvPing with my rogue in the last couple days.

Yes the kidney shot miss is annoying, but it's hardly something I'd go crazy over.

Vanish does work most of the time. The one time I saw it fail in the last couple days I was able to land an immediate kidney shot on a rogue who used vanish, probably simultaneous latency issues. I guess I see the issue, but it doesn't bother me so much.

Maybe I just haven't dealt with the problems long enough or don't get frustrated as easily. But it's nice to play in PvP and feel like I can do something with what is comparitively pretty darn crappy gear (check rogue profile, my gear sucks). And the talent review and my current spec has allowed me to feel that way. Maybe it's a little of oldmandennis' observation on the XBGs bringing out the noobs too.

But I never felt as functional in PvP with my much better geared warrior than I have the last couple days with my rogue. The warlock, well, it's a warlock, so yeah, she does pretty well in BGs too.

Probably the most annoying thing that I face in BGs is when someone comes riding at me and I try to either Sap or Cheap Shot them. Sometimes I can be repeatedly pressing the respective button and they ride right through me. My combat log states "not in range" repeatedly >_<, but I understand that this is likely a latency issue that cannot be fixed with current server hardware, and I guess that's why it doesn't anger or frustrate me too much.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Ruvanal - 08-24-2006

Quote:I see the issues SR is having as compounded by the above to issues. I don't see it as a hardware upgrade issue. The cross server BGs were untested and that is what I think is the real culprit here. One thing that I did notice last night, once the WSG cross server BG instance server died, a good amount of latency disappeared. I think this directly correlates to the problems we're seeing with latency. The cross server BG code isn't optimized and tested and that is causing the problems.

I have to agree with this. I had gone over to Terenas to play for awhile and had nothing more than its normal level of lag; at first. Near the time I was needing to log off however, I noticed that the latency and lag effects were starting to mimic what I encountered on Stormrage. Since the population profile of Terenas seems to favor a peak time that more closely corresponds to this, I suspect that was when the players started using the battlegrounds the most.

A few points that I did notice while still on Stormrage before leaving was the almost inordinate amount characters that were logging off and back on quickly in the 'lurkers', 'mageychat', 'meat' and guild channels. This amount of activity I would normally only see for a few minutes near the start of one of our raids, but this was going on almost the whole time I was there. Add in that the chat lags almost always corresponded to when I would see a burst of those logoff/logons. I suspect that they are handling the characters heading into a joint battleground by doing a specialized move that closely corresponds to the toon actually entering and exiting their realm (with the battleground acting as specialized realms unto themselves). Throw in the number of charaters that getting 'logged back in' to a real at the BG host cities where they will all need to have all the local charaters information updated to their client and their arrival information sent to all other players near them, and that is network information disaster in the making. Not to mention the ding the item server will be under for the first few days as massive numbers of players are getting a quick view of a large quantity of items that is no longer cashed after the new patch cleared it.

To me the clearly did not think through some of the repercussions that this method of getting the characters into and out of the battlegrounds would cause. Or the number of players that may be added to the PvP crowds with the lure of acceptable wait times to start a battleground. I suspect that this will not get fixed till the take the battlegrounds off line (to confirm that is truely the problem). The next thing they will need to do is some sort of spread out phased transition for getting players into and out of the BGs. Basically a potentionally longer time in the transition to and from the BG, but hopefully in a way that does not add to the players irratation at a delay. Another option is to also allow more points of access to the BGs than their current list; something like at every inn.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Watto44 - 08-25-2006

Interesting stuff about the changes to Client-Server communication. Ever since 1.11.2 (possibly 1.11.1, I was away) was implemented I have been seeing semi-random but always looming disconnection issues. Interestingly, this is when Furor started to "lag" (it being broken aside). Previously - including 1.11 - the rage/energy gain from furor was instant, however it now seems to be related to the global cooldown.

Given that the continues to lag - and that Blizzard have been made away of this many times - one can only assume that these changes are here to stay. Furor I can live with, but please tell me why your patches have ruined my connection.

A very interesting read Quark, although I would probably let it lie for a week to see what happens as things stabilise. I have no doubt that skill delays will remain once the dust settles, at which point the post will be more pertinent.:)

(NOTE: This is not a problem issolated to me. Many people have exerienced it. Firewalls, routers, network connections, mice in exercise wheels have all been adjusted as per tech supports advice to no avail. It appears to be something about the way the packets are being sent. I miss one and disco.)

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - MongoJerry - 08-25-2006

Tichondrius was pretty stable tonight. We were able to take down a record five Naxx bosses tonight, going one extra boss farther than we had planned. We had a few hiccups and bouts of lag early in the evening (6-7pm), but for the most part, things were pretty stable.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Quark - 08-25-2006

Quote:Tichondrius was pretty stable tonight. We were able to take down a record five Naxx bosses tonight, going one extra boss farther than we had planned. We had a few hiccups and bouts of lag early in the evening (6-7pm), but for the most part, things were pretty stable.

Yes, SR stabalized too, for the most part (one really bad hiccup). Hopefully they continue to improve the software. So that'll mostly go.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Delc - 08-25-2006

Quote:Tichondrius was pretty stable tonight. We were able to take down a record five Naxx bosses tonight, going one extra boss farther than we had planned. We had a few hiccups and bouts of lag early in the evening (6-7pm), but for the most part, things were pretty stable.
We couldn't get past Razor the lag was so bad in BWL.:( Best attempt was 10% and a 10sec lag spike after which we had no warriors.

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - TheWesson - 08-25-2006


Gilneas has always treated me well, perhaps because I play from the west coast (9pm PST) and Gilneas is an east coast server --

-- except that for a long time we've had large delays (5-30 sec) looting anything (even the mailbox) at around 12am PST (3am EST). Doing other things (even combat) still seem to work at that time, though, as long as you haven't tried to loot anything recently.

I figure maybe the mailbox, corpse looting, etc are controlled by a separate database server, which gets backed up 3am EST every day. I dunno ...

Strangely, the 3am EST loot-lag cleared up for a few weeks, and then came back recently, around the time of patch 1.11.

This problem is especially bad for warlocks, since shadowburn and drain soul "loot" shards, putting a new shard in your backpack. If I'm in a raid, and I cast shadowburn for extra DPS at around 3am EST, and the mob dies with the shadowburn debuff on it, I'm effectively out of the game for the duration of combat.

thats my data point.

don't ask me why WoW thought Gilneas would be a good place to put me.


Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Brista - 08-26-2006

Quote:Probably the most annoying thing that I face in BGs is when someone comes riding at me and I try to either Sap or Cheap Shot them. Sometimes I can be repeatedly pressing the respective button and they ride right through me. My combat log states "not in range" repeatedly >_<, but I understand that this is likely a latency issue that cannot be fixed with current server hardware, and I guess that's why it doesn't anger or frustrate me too much.

Try Distract

Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories - Quark - 08-26-2006

Update: Stealth is a new victim of the client/server changes. It's purely cosmetic, but no longer do you start walking like you are stealthed immediately. You waddle like you're under a slowing effect.