Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories

[Lissa]

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.