Network connectivity -- Blizzard side

[Lissa]

I was whispering TD last night when he noted he'd lost his first HC character due to a drop. I noted to him that I've seen really bad connectivity with Blizzard in D3. I've done a number of things to improve latency further than I already have with my connection (FiOS) so I typically pull in latencies in the 40ms or less range in various games (I've seen 12ms in a couple on occasion) yet am constantly seeing 180ms to 200ms latency with D3. Anyone else seeing these large descrepancies in their latency between D3 and other games? Seems with all the money Blizzard has between what they rake in each month with WoW, what they've pulled in between SC2 and D3, they'd have a better network than this for D3 and b.net as a whole.

[Mavfin]

Rock solid here. I've been disconnected a total of twice since the first two days.

Ping's a nice solid 80-90, vs 60 for WoW and 35 for Rift.

I do have AT&T for my ISP, and I think they do some of Blizzard's clusters I read somewhere? Don't know for sure.

[MMAgCh]

Overall, I'm getting around twice the latency on US servers when playing D3 as I do playing on D2 USEast (300+ msec for D3 compared to ~150 msec for D2), which does have the effect of rendering multiplayer not really worth the while. Even SP can be tricky under these conditions, so Europe is where I find myself playing any fragile ranged characters. (Once – once – I experienced a D3 game in which my latency was a solid 150 msec, to my lasting surprise. Too bad it never happened again!)

Granted, latency is usually fine when playing on the geographically appropriate servers for me, but it's still quite remarkable how much better I fared playing D2 on US servers than is the case with D3 now.

[Elric of Grans]

In general, absolutely terrible; worse since 1.0.2a. That is pretty standard fare for Aussies, however. I get an average latency of around 500ms, though I have had peaks lows of 150 and peak highs of 2500. Desyncs are standard. Since 1.0.2a, I also periodically get their weird issue where latency seems normal, but animations are all missing frames. I normally play the game at an easy 60FPS (vsync on), and this issue does not seem to be related to particular enemies, numbers of enemies, or zones; it is entirely random. Someone else I know gets this same issue, even after turning the graphics down to minimum.

[Trevan]

Blue post on subject:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5...?page=3#46

The latency indicator in-game is not a simple ping like most games, and is actually a full process of the game sending an action to the service, the service processing it, and returning it to the client. This means that the latency indicator actually gives a more accurate account of what the experience is for game data, but in comparison to other games will seem high. We're more interested in issues where there is actual performance degradation, and certainly there may be, but the in-game latency number is not a simple ping and therefore shouldn't be used literally as a measurement against performance elsewhere.

[Roland]

I was whispering TD last night when he noted he'd lost his first HC character due to a drop. I noted to him that I've seen really bad connectivity with Blizzard in D3. I've done a number of things to improve latency further than I already have with my connection (FiOS) so I typically pull in latencies in the 40ms or less range in various games (I've seen 12ms in a couple on occasion) yet am constantly seeing 180ms to 200ms latency with D3. Anyone else seeing these large descrepancies in their latency between D3 and other games? Seems with all the money Blizzard has between what they rake in each month with WoW, what they've pulled in between SC2 and D3, they'd have a better network than this for D3 and b.net as a whole.

D3 takes into account more than just network latency. They stated this somewhere (I read the post from a link at the LL), and that's the reason the "latency" is higher than in other games. It's supposedly NOT a connectivity issue on Blizzard's end, or even the client's end. It just factors more into the equation than a simple ping test between you and Blizzard.

[Lissa]

Blue post on subject:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5...?page=3#46

The latency indicator in-game is not a simple ping like most games, and is actually a full process of the game sending an action to the service, the service processing it, and returning it to the client. This means that the latency indicator actually gives a more accurate account of what the experience is for game data, but in comparison to other games will seem high. We're more interested in issues where there is actual performance degradation, and certainly there may be, but the in-game latency number is not a simple ping and therefore shouldn't be used literally as a measurement against performance elsewhere.

D3 takes into account more than just network latency. They stated this somewhere (I read the post from a link at the LL), and that's the reason the "latency" is higher than in other games. It's supposedly NOT a connectivity issue on Blizzard's end, or even the client's end. It just factors more into the equation than a simple ping test between you and Blizzard.

Even if they are doing processing on the packets, overhead should not cause a 4 1/2 to 5 time increase in the latency between the client and server. Twice I can see, more than that, something is wrong in their model. Blizzard can try and sugarcoat it, but seeing that kind of change in latency, even with processing, tells me they've not optimized something (either in their routing or in their server side code).

[BellaStrega]

The only time I really notice latency issues is when my latency spikes into the red. Unfortunately, that happens far more often than it really should. Given how many inferno deaths are due to such spikes, it's a safe bet I'm not touching hardcore.