08-24-2006, 08:47 PM
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.