Rogues and Stormrage: Two Performance Stories

[Quark]

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?