[Classic] The unacceptable state of Classic servers

Community is a huge part of Classic and as someone who calls Grobbulus home, it will be hard to re-create that feeling anywhere else. It’s not just simply about logging in and playing the game (obviously that matters), but it’s about the community and place I call home. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but I think it’s safe to assume Grobbulus is probably the largest RP-PvP server in all of Classic across both regions. It is unique. If I wanted just another PvP server, I have options. If I wanted just another RP/PvE server, I have options. Grobbulus is unique in what it offers. It’s also, at least according to 3rd party data (that I know we can’t always trust) one of the few remaining balanced PvP servers with a near 50/50 Horde to Alliance ratio - again, something very important for RP-PvP. It offers something unique to both RPers and PvPers alike. A truly unique home.

Even if another RP-PvP server was to be created, that would only solve the short term problem of queues but would create long term problems of essentially separating and dividing such a large and thriving community. The long term damage of that cannot be undone so easily.

I understand the difficulty the Engineering team must be facing with this and as you mentioned, none of the decisions are easy to make so I appreciate you guys giving us insight into the thought process, reasoning and technical limitations. However, as someone with a strong connection to my realm, my community and my WoW Classic home… I simply cannot justify leaving it in hopes to try and re-create that experience somewhere else. I understand this may come across as stubborn, but as I explained above Grobbulus is very unique and it’s a nearly impossible situation to walk away from.

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I totally understand that concern. I’d posit that these moves and consolidations are less aimed at you, and your very well established social circle, at least not at first. This is aimed more at those who are maybe less attached and are merely following the crowd when deciding where to play, or are returning after a long absence and have found their previous friend groups have moved on.

How many threads have we seen where someone says “Just returning to the game. what server is good for Alliance in NA?” and are told “Benediction”. That’s the group we’d like to take the moves first to help with the situation right now. Long term however, we do want to take much more deliberate steps to reduce the chances of this happening again, and we unfortunately need to be a bit heavy handed going forward to prevent any tailspins that inadvertently create other bigger problems down the road. It’s going to take us some time to realize the full scope of what we need to do to correct this, but for now, our best option is to continue with very tightly monitored and targeted FCMs (including potentially faction-locked FCMs, as Kaivax alluded to in another post here) to alleviate the immediate pressure.

I also just want to reiterate this point though; we’ve raised population caps to accommodate mega-realms to the absolute limit of current technology. I’ve seen a lot of armchair server engineers say things like “just add more hardware”, and I can’t stress it or put it any more plainly, the technology to allow more than we have on realms now does not exist. We’ve added the hardware, we’ve optimized as much as we can optimize, and the current demand on these few realms is just too much. Continuing to push our luck and find ways to reach ever higher realm caps has hit a point where we can’t go any further, and eventually something had to give. That something has given and we are going to be taking different approaches to this problem going forward.

The scenario that led us to the situation you described above was a by-product of past us spinning up tons of new realms rapidly to deal with a level of demand that was orders of magnitude beyond anyone’s wildest expectations when we first launched Classic in 2019. Now that we have consolidated down to a nominal amount of realms, we believe we have the right number of realms to support the number of players we expect and then some, without any realms feeling empty.

But again, I understand completely if you feel a pull towards your realm. The scenarios you describe with multiple raid groups full of folks who may raid in multiple teams or with multiple guilds is a very real situation and that’s hard to visualize breaking away from. If that isn’t you though, and if you aren’t completely tied down to these realms, take the FCMs. Please, take the FCMs. Sulfuras is a success story and we believe Eranikus will be as well.

We’ll be talking more about populations on Eranikus and how things are going as time goes by, so please stay tuned as that situation develops in the coming days.

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Based on this response, Am I correct in understanding that Blizzard’s current stance seems to be that established guilds are unlikely to transfer, and they are relying on unestablished players to transfer to make up the difference. If the stance is that returning players will fill these new servers, it makes it even less likely for established players to risk them; Returning players have already shown they are less likely to stick around long-term on average, and when you build a server with the majority of the population with players that have historically left the game after a period of time, that server is likely seen as volatile.

I simply worry that won’t be enough movement without guild participation. In the Faerlina GM discord, pretty much everyone seems resolute that they don’t want to move as they are too entangled, or too worried about long term stability; and I believe there are too many raiders and guilds established on Faerlina to be able to reduce the population to a tenable level without the participation of guilds. Simply put, there needs to be a defined plan and roadmap to ensure the long-term health of servers that are open for transfers or players will not want to shoulder the risk.

I’ll be continuing to edit in GM responses of their current stance on transfers in my post above, as I hope we can continue the discussion and find a middle ground that allows even slightly entangled guilds to be more willing to migrate.

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I also want to ask if you have considered free faction transfers as well as character migrations to help these FCM realms (especially the PvP ones) maintain a healthy balance of 50/50?

Limiting which faction can transfer helps, but there might also be guilds/players willing to swap factions if it lead to a better overall experience and a healthier community.

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What about Skyfury, the Fresh PvP server? None of your solutions solves the 3-hour queue problem when there is only one Fresh PvP Realm in the US.

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Well I don’t know if I’d say our that’s our “current stance”, holistically speaking. We have seen established guilds transfer, and hope to see more. I was merely saying, I can understand why you’d be hesitant to move, its a big decision with a lot of ripple effects.

If anything we are hoping that some of the less attached players are willing to move in some larger numbers to help alleviate the current and immediate concerns. It’s not a long term fix or strategy on which we can rely on its own.

We have considered it. Nothing to share just now though.

Trying to chase faction balance with transfers is even more difficult than trying to reduce server population, historically. If there’s any perception that someone will be an underdog, they generally won’t make the move. But, there’s definitely a possibility we will try it. I think if we really leaned into that, we’d want to try and pair it with some sort of incentive to move, which is something we are working on designs for, and talked with a few members of the community council about a few weeks ago in a zoom call. Unfortunately it’ll take a bit of time for that to get fully implemented though, should we decide to go that route.

So the fresh realms are a very unique situation and we want to be extremely careful about adding more realms. Adding a 2nd fresh PvP realm is very very likely to do one of two things:

  1. Lead to both realms being unhealthy in the long term.
  2. Essentially guarantee that one of the two realms becomes the “horde” server, and the other becomes the “alliance” server.

Additionally, Fresh realms are also much more likely to experience a bit of a decline once the game actually launches. Many people are leveling in fresh now during pre-patch but we expect some number of those players to return to their normal established servers and guilds once the expansion launches. This might be a situation where its better for us to weather the storm, as it were.

Lastly, the fresh realms’ total “footprint” of players isn’t nearly as large as a server like Faerlina or Benediction. These established older large realms will continue to swell as folks return who may be inactive unless moves occur, which is a different situation than Skyfury is in. While the queues on Skyfury are long, they aren’t as long as the other queuing mega-realms. If everyone in the queue for Benediction went to another realm, that realm would be queuing as well. That queue is more than double the capacity of the realm. If everyone in Skyfury’s queue went to another realm, it would be a fairly busy realm, but not nearly full. Skyfury and the 2nd realm may not survive that division long term.

Fast reactions to immediate problems are part of what got us here, and while our goal is to get everyone into the game as soon as we can, we also want to make sure Fresh realms are a long term success as well. We want to be extra sure that the only option is to open a new fresh realm before we do so.

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It seems like realm mergers are being avoided as a possible solution long-term as much as they were during classic days. The issue regarding Skyfury seems like it could be solved by having a second realm, and if the population does drop to unsustainable levels, simply merging the realms. Is there a specific reason why this option does not seem discussed?

I ask this in tandem because the main concern I have seen is the risk involved that the new realm of receiving transfers will become underpopulated with time, and be left in a poor state, resulting in a poor experience; if those players considering it were able to believe that the realm would be merged should it get too sparse, it may also remove a barrier of entry to the concept of Transferring.

One of the main concerns I see from Couch-Server-Engineers seems to be that retail works with larger players on a server, so why not implement some of that technology; While I personally don’t think it viable, it may be useful to address that reasoning to help quell some of the negativity surrounding this situation.

Thanks again @Aggrend for maintaining an open dialogue on these server issues, and I hope that this kind of communication becomes a much more regular and reliable part of Blizzard’s policy going forward. This kind of communication may generate negativity to start, but it absolutely gains player trust over time, and the brunt points provided is a very welcome addition to the discussion.

Lastly, I do want to address some of the readers of this forum/reddit; I’ve seen a lot of people who simply state “Blizzard wants our money” or similar comments. I’ve known quite a few Blizzard employees over the years, and I have yet to find one that isn’t truly passionate about their games. Whether you believe that or not, it doesn’t change the state of the current issues, so the best we can do is to be constructive towards a solution as a community and as a team for the game we enjoy. As a community, lets focus on keeping this conversation positive, healthy, and pointed towards a solution, rather than the alternative.

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Server merges is definitely a rubicon we’d rather not cross, partially because its a fairly risky process, and partially because once we cross that line we can’t really un-cross it and modern-esque connected realms becomes the expectation. While we are choosing to try and chip away at mega realms and push towards dispersing the population, I’d say that there’s nothing really off the table as potential solutions. In addition to what we’ve already discussed, we are pursuing a lot of options and fallbacks for the future behind the scenes.

This is all sort of academic however. Where we are standing right this moment, there are no realms in service that need merges. Aside from a very very small handful of specific realms of the dozens and dozens we have worldwide, every realm has a very viable population.

This is not the case. The issue we have here is also an issue on certain modern realms such as Illidan and Tichondrius when new expansions are released. They have the same realm caps we have. This is purely a perception thing, we are using the same hardware, and backend infrastructure for both games.

Same! It’s part of the reason I’ve been here for 13 years. :slight_smile:

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I am fortunate enough to be able to tackle this problem by flipping my schedule on it’s head. Instead of playing from 8pm I start at 5am, this means I’m able to Quest instead of Dungeon spamming due to slow respawn rates.

  1. Why was it a wise decision to risk overflow by creating only two “fresh” servers for Pre-Patch Launch? Forgive me for my lack of understanding I always thought if you were going fishing it’s best to take a spare rod in case one breaks.

  2. What purpose do instance lockouts (when you’re unable to reset the instance) serve if the server is so full that you’re unable to tag the mobs for any quest?

The respawn timer either needs to become more aware of the number of players in the game and adapt accordingly, or I believe lockouts simply serve as a barrier to participation. It’s definitely a negative experience if you’ve ran all the way to Scarlet Monastery because you were unable to quest properly and then you’ve only got the opportunity to clear the dungeon a limited number of times, you’re being punished for playing well if you clear too quickly.

Feel free to reply everyone, I hope it’s relative enough to the original post!

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I couldn’t post until now but I have a lot to say here.

I’ll be blunt, honest and I will do my best to remain civil in what I’m about to say, because god only knows how much I want to be rude right now.

I am extremely disappointed and angry. The following:

Is blatantly FALSE. The technology and the hardware both exists in 2022. It is not impossible to have a scalable service within a triple A game that can accommodate far more than the current load of players trying to play the game. How do I know? Because I work in this very industry as a Software Engineer in Online Services. I will not let my profession be disgraced like that with these lies. I know the technology that we have today, the one we had a decade ago and I know exactly what the real problem here is…

Blizzard considers Classic as a side project, a cash cow, and does not provide the necessary amount of resources that the Classic project requires. 2 years of Classic, the issue of queues were there at release of Classic and TBC Classic both, it was obvious to everyone that the same issue would just repeat itself for WotLK, not because it’s an impossible issue to solve, but because of Blizzard’s constant refusal to spend the money to provide a reasonable service to their customers.

And don’t pretend like it’s not true either, we can tell, it’s written on the wall in big bold letters.
From automation of silences/suspensions/bans (Proven by streamers), to the complete lack of communication with the community (Over a week of silence on this topic alone!), to the non-existent customer service (Anyone who opened a ticket knows how bad it is), to the lack of updates on features like your new and updated LFD despite the mountain of feedback pointing out the flaws and the lack of QoL features like filtering, resizing, etc., to the last minute everything. Everything points towards this, a barebone team of developers trying their best to make one of the most popular online game of 2020-2022 work. Like trying to build an entire stadium with nothing more than a crew of a few people and a pack of gum.
And I’m not blaming you, or the devs working on classic specifically, I am blaming the company, Blizzard, its executives, its finance team, whoever is responsible for the complete lack of support for this massive game that is Classic.

I am beyond tired of pretending like Blizzard might care even slightly, that we might get something, ANYTHING, that could be more than the complete bare minimum for a service we pay 15USD a month, that asked of us to spend 25USD per character to fix the issue of our characters being stuck on completely dead realms rather than offer a sensible solution a year ago. When you offered bulk character transfer to retail but said “tough luck” to classic and told us it was single transfer only. How incredibly insulting!
How in the world can I, or anyone, not think Blizzard is purposely treating Classic as nothing more than a joke, than a money printing machine, that you have anywhere close to the amount of developers a project like this actually need.

Pray tell me, why have you not updated your game code to follow the basic standards of online services in the twenty twenties. Why in the past two years of Classic has Blizzard not spend the resources necessary to make this issue never happen on the release of the most anticipated rerelease of the decade.

Why are we playing Classic Reforged? (As in Warcraft 3 Reforged for those who missed the reference here)

I know, you can’t fix your code in such a short amount of time for WotLK release, it’s too late now, that much is obvious, I know how long it takes to make changes. Even if Blizzard magically had an epiphany and decided to provide infinite amount of resources to Classic development, you wouldn’t have the time now. But, for the love of all that is holy, we are tired of being treated like nothing more than walking wallets, second class citizens, by your company when all we ask for is for the service we pay for to receive the amount of support it deserves, the amount of support it NEEDS.

Sincerely,
A disillusioned customer who still remembers the quality service of 14 years ago… when WotLK first released.

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I feel the need to clarify something since the reaction from the community about my post seem to misunderstand my position (A lot of people questioning my legitimacy as a Software Engineer) and I don’t want Aggrend or anyone on the Classic Dev team to misunderstand my position either.

In no way am I saying that it would have been cost efficient or not for them to have updated legacy code to function with modern online technology. The only ones capable of making a cost-benefit analysis on this are Blizzard devs themselves.
I don’t know what the Classic’s code looks like, I don’t know how hard it would be to update said code to support more modern online tech, I don’t know their hardware, I don’t know their finances, I don’t know anything of what they are doing behind closed curtains.
There isn’t anyone alive on this planet, no matter their credentials, that would know about that except for the ones who work on the game itself.
What I do know however is that the statement that the tech doesn’t exist is false. Regardless of what the cost would be, there is a solution, one that may or may not be worth investing into. WoW Classic has its own set of challenges to deal with, and that is the dev’s job to figure it out, but challenges doesn’t make something impossible. You can argue that on a cost basis it could be considered impossible, but now we would just be playing semantics.
And sure, perhaps I shouldn’t read it so literally, Aggrend most likely meant it as “there is no technology/hardware solution to this issue in the current context, timeframe and/or associated cost”, but this is exactly why I had a problem with that sentence.
Because it just feel like a cop out.

This is completely beside the point I was trying to make either way. The point is that this is just another issue on the long list of issues and the only commonality between those issues is that the amount of support provided to Classic is just too little.

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Its not that the tech to solve the massive queues doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Its call connected realms. Its called cross-realm play. Its called phasing. Its called Shardding. Blizzard faced these same problems 10 years ago, and fixed them with the tech that’s still on retail today.

The fact is that the classic community has made it very clear that they reject this approach. They want old school realms. These queue problems come with the territory. You can’t realistically have one without the other.

To the people who are asking to “just add more capacity and more layers”, how does letting another 100,000 people into your server help with building a realm community? The entire point of having old school realms was to foster a sense of community by keeping the realm populations small enough that you recognized people and could build a reputation. Increase the population of your realm that much and in essence, you have the same thing as a retail realm.

We need to decide as a community if we want true old school realms and are willing to deal with the queues, or if we want to embrace modern load-handling things like connected-realms, phasing, shardding, etc and have low queue times.

THAT BEING SAID…

Blizzard is also not helping by being so stingy with free realm transfers. Greed is contributing to this problem. Blizzard could easily just open up free transfers to all players and let the community sort itself out for the next couple months.

Blizzard could easily offer a 1 year free transfer-back if you transfer off of a mega server. This would give players the confidence to transfer off, knowing that in 6 months they can go back when the population dies down, if they don’t like their new home.

Blizzard keeps saying “Trust us, transferring to a new server will be fine! You’ll have just as much fun there!” OK. Put your money where your mouth is and give us the free transfer-back. If we love it so much on our new server, we won’t use it anyway.

As far as I can tell, its simple greed and the desire to sell transfers that is preventing this from happening. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that every blue post dances around this part of the issue.

Its also just bad business sense. Right now blizzard has lighting in a bottle with the launch of Wrath Classic. This moment will never happen again. They have millions of players interested in coming back to WoW, and they are squandering it by delivery a terrible user experience. And for what? The hope that they might sell a few more server transfers?

Capitalize on this moment. Give players what they need to play, and you will hook way more into long term subs. See the sunk cost of server transfers sales as an investment in long term gains and good PR. A player who pays $15 a month and gets free transfers is more valuable than a player who quits in frustration.

Blizzard, you are losing control of the narrative again, and the community is turning on you. Make good, change the narrative back to a positive one and make the launch of WotLK a celebration not another moment of embarrassment.

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This is going to another long post. Sorry.

I’m not taking any sides with what I am about to post (though it may seem like I am), but simply I am trying my best to take an educated guess as to what problems Blizzard is facing and deducting a (possibly wrong) conclusion from what Aggrend posted.

I’ll start by saying that I too am a Software Engineer with many years of experience working on complicated and diverse systems. I currently work on Self Driving/Autonomous Vehicle systems for one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world. To say that we need highly optimized code that can processes thousands, if not millions, of actions in a short window would be an understatement. Scalability is insanely important for us. If our systems fail, people could be seriously injured or worse.

Now you claim to also be a Software Engineer, but seem to have overlooked the constraints and limitations Aggrend mentioned in his post. I personally don’t feel our profession was disgraced, but instead some insight was given on the challenges Blizzard is facing. As an SE, I personally am intrigued by complicated problems. Isn’t that why we got into the industry? (jk it’s the money, obviously)

Given those constraints and limitations, it’s very believable that a viable solution does not exist (a solution beyond “just download more RAM 4Head” or a full on re-write). If those constraints and limitations were lifted? Then who knows. I am sure there is an ideal world somewhere in which the most perfect solution exists. A world with unlimited time and resources. However, as an SE you should understand that the ideal world with unlimited resources doesn’t really exist…

But maybe a solution does exist… We were also kindly informed that Classic is using the same infrastructure and technology as Retail, but Retail doesn’t see this problem too often. Trolls in General Discussion will say it’s because “everyone quit retail lol xD” but in reality it’s because the population is more spread out across hundreds of realms as opposed to like 4 and things like Cross-realm, sharding etc make it easier for the back-end processes of the game to handle millions of transactions. However, the Classic community has been very vocal about not wanting this technological solution. So then maybe given this constraint, the solution doesn’t exist? Can’t have your cake and eat it too.

You also mentioned the word Triple-A, implying that you are comparing to other games? WoW is very unique so it’s really hard to compare it to other games. I’m speaking from purely an engineering standpoint. Obviously every game is unique, but you would be surprised to learn that a lot of games use very similar technology when it comes to solving their problems. However, those solutions won’t necessarily work for WoW.

Let’s go over a scenario really quick based off what Aggrend described in regards to the persistent database that the entire game sits on, something any engineer could quickly imagine and then realize… oh yeah, this is complicated. (Oh btw, I might be wrong with all the small details but this is my guess on how things work in WoW).

You’re doing dailies and a new creature spawns in the world. Let’s say you’re playing a Mage and you cast a Frostbolt at this creature. A few things need to happen here. First of all, everyone in render distance of the creature needs to be sent a bunch of information regarding this creature (stuff like health and mana pools, geolocation information etc). Now when you cast your Frostbolt, information is sent from your client up to the server and then back to you. This information could contain things like how much damage your Frostbolt is going to do. But oh wait, we live in an open world where stuff like this needs to be broadcasted to hundreds(thousands?) of players at once. But oh wait, there’s hundreds of players at once doing the same thing to hundreds of different creatures or even other players across dozens of zones. Now all of a sudden you have thousands, if not millions, of transactions being written to a database somewhere concurrently. And given the nature of WoW, all of these need to be in near real time or the game play experience diminishes very rapidly.

Do you see how quickly the problem becomes exponential? Do you see why the database quickly reaches it’s limit when the concept of a mega-server exists? As Aggrend described, this is why queue times exist. There are software and hardware limitations to all of this. It’s like being stuck in traffic on your way home from work on a Friday evening. There are only so many lanes on the highway and there are only a finite amount of cars that can fill up those lanes before the average speed limit starts to drop, eventually leading to a full on traffic jam. Yeah the city/state can add more lanes, build more highways… but that takes time and resources. We all complain about not being able to merge onto the highway, so it’s natural to complain about queue times too. I’m not defending queue times. I hate them just as much as the next guy.

Now before people start arguing “but other games do it with no issues!!!” I will say that’s a fair statement, but that’s not always true either. Have we forgotten the FF14 Endwalker release that quickly? Anyone ever do the Eternal Battlegrounds in GW2 before? World PvP in ESO? Lots of lag and server stability issues, all the time. This problem is not unique to WoW. It’s the nature of MMO’s. Has anyone ever played an MMO that had 100% server up time with no lag, no stability/performance issues and a 100% perfect experience? Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t demand perfection. We absolutely should. We’re playing $15 a month to play the game… we should be able to play. We have every right to complain. But we should also realize that we don’t live in an ideal world and stuff breaks.

As far as non-MMO games are considered, it’s not even worth making the comparison because it’s comparing apples to oranges. Games like Overwatch, Call of Duty etc are session based games and should never be compared to an MMO. Yeah, Call of Duty doesn’t have queue times even though millions of players are logged in at once. Are they all interacting with each other at once? Nope. It’s sad that people have even tried to make this comparison.

One last point… Take something simple like changing your avatar or banner in Call of Duty, Overwatch, League of Legends etc… A lot of that is handled client side. If I go and change a spray or select a different skin, none of that information has to be sent back up to the server in real time (like in our Mage casting Frostbolt scenario) unless I am ready to join a multiplayer lobby. It’s like when you “Like” a post on Facebook. Sure, the front end does some magic and you see the thumbs up button light up and it shows you have “liked” that post, but because so much of the load is distributed to the client side, it doesn’t matter if it takes a few extra seconds to get to the back end.

What I’m saying is, in WoW we don’t have the luxury of allowing things to be delayed like that. When an action occurs anywhere in the world, the transaction of client → server → client(s) needs to be in real time. A situation very unique to WoW.

If WoW was written from scratch in 2022 would the engineers make different decisions? Yeah probably. But the fact is that it’s not written in 2022. The fact is none of us here have any idea what the code base looks like, what their tech debt is or what hurdles they have to overcome. To come out here and imply that they are giving us false information or lying about their situation is just… immature. And I don’t mean that solely directed at you. We as a community should be better at not devolving important conversations into trolling because we didn’t get an answer we like.

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With all due respects,
I find your post rather condescending, saying this to me as if I didn’t know what client-server was or the basics of game development and insinuating that my post was devolving the conversation into “trolling”.

But I understand why people are skeptical, so let me lay down some technical stuff to hopefully put some minds at ease here so we can focus on the whole point of my rant rather than write novels on how difficult it is to be a game dev.

I’m going to correct you on your scenario.

1 - The client isn’t going to tell the server how much damage the frostbolt did, that’s just giving cheaters a free pass to send false information to the server, like telling the server that your frostbolt did 1 billion damage.
Might even break your server if some smarty pants decides to send a value larger than your value type and you don’t have the proper error handling for that. In multiplayer games, a lot of the work is done by the server and very little information is received from the player. (Emphasis on the bolded part here)
This in turn means that you also don’t have to send much more information to the player than the character position and the numbers for the client to use for the UI (Like how much health your target has, how much damage your frostbolt did so the combat text and log can show the right number, etc.)
Furthermore, when it comes to database, you could queue the data on the server as to not be spamming database requests. Good example of this would be metrics, you don’t just send metrics to the database whenever you have one, you queue them up and send them in bulk because they are far less important than gameplay data.

2 - You don’t broadcast to players in realtime, that’s just completely unrealistic. You broadcast on a tick of whatever timer you set. It’s why players aren’t synchronized with one another, what you see is an afterimage of other players.
You can see that in action when using Line of Sight in PvP. Try having someone cast a spell on you and hide before it ends. Ask them where you were standing when they finish casting the spell, it’s not gonna be where you see yourself on your own screen.
If there is one thing game developers are good at, it’s cheating, because you have to cheat to make something look good when in reality it’s just an illusion. Like how only the front of an asset get rendered while the back isn’t, or how older games uses doors and hallways as a way to load and unload rooms from memory.
This also ties in with #1, you can cheat by having both the client and server do the damage calculation so that the client can show you a number before the server even tell the client what really happened and if they don’t match, server’s value takes priority and the client adjust.
This can allow less messages sent from the server. Sending information in bulk is more efficient than sending it one at a time.
So no, it doesn’t have to be in “near realtime”.

See, here’s the thing… If we’re going the comparison route, yes, WoW has to deal with far more traffic than a game like LoL does, but on the flip side, it doesn’t have to be as precise as LoL needs to be. WoW can cheat in far more places than LoL can. You don’t get to just delay information in a game based solely around e-sport and milisecond gameplay like LoL.
Apples and oranges, yes, but WoW isn’t unique in how complex its challenges to overcome are.

Is it a simple fix? No, I never claimed it was, my claim was that it was doable, because it is. The question wasn’t whether it’s worth doing or not, because only the WoW devs themselves can answer that question.
If they find themselves stuck with too much constraints from the whole #nochanges, then perhaps they should communicate this to the players and tell us what the options are, not wait until the problem is causing major service degradation and preventing players from playing.

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I never said the client is telling the server how much damage something did, I said somewhere along the route of client → server → client that calculation is done. You should re-read my post. We don’t work on WoW so all we can do is speculate. You’re just picking convenient talking points to pick apart that fit your narrative rather than actually trying to understand the large scale problem at hand.

Also it’s likely not true that very little information is received from the player. A lot of information HAS to be received from the player. Your movement in the world relative to other things, what spells or abilities you are casting/using, item usage etc. There is A LOT of information going from the client to the server, and vice versa.

I’m not even going to get into point #2. There is just too much to write about.

In any case, this is a pointless argument. I even as much said that a lot of what I said about the trolling etc was not directed solely at you, but the community as a whole. It was your choice to take it upon yourself and feel attacked by it. The part about you claiming we have been given false information or lies? Yeah. You did that.

It’s okay to just read something from a neutral perspective once in a while and not take things so personally. It’ll go a long way.

Anyways, have a good day. :slight_smile:

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https://web.archive.org/web/20141019021233/http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/13087818929?page=6#114

I’d say that’s pretty “near realtime.”

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Thank you!

This was a great find and a great read. Guess I wasn’t too far off in my assessment then. 1ms seems pretty near realtime to me. :slight_smile:

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Yes, but that is just one aspect of the game. Spell batching needed to be handled faster but it doesn’t mean everything is handled at that rate.

Again, I don’t know their code, I can only speak from an outside perspective here, but I doubt stuff like the chat system for example is working on the same loop as ability usage.
And he didn’t go into details on how the ability system work, nor should he, so who knows what kind of hack/cheat they do in that code to optimize it.

Take mounts inside building as an example, how you can ride them for a seemingly random amount of time inside a building. If you hit a movement key, you are more likely to get dismounted early, that right here is a proof that they have several layers of response. Some happen every few milliseconds, other happens every other second. Movement itself seems to be on a slower loop than abilities, going back to my LoS example from my post.

You’re not running the whole game in realtime and even abilities I doubt they are really processed in real time, just really really fast and decoupled from the rest of the game to prioritize them, might even be done on a case by case basis.

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Time to reboot this thread now that WotLK is live and the queue problem has only gotten worse.
What’s the plan now Blizzard? :rage:

Queues are worst than in pre-patch and we still can’t get a sensible solution offered.

If you want people to transfer, you need to provide guarantees that we can come back to our server WITH our character names once the servers dies back down.
Because right now, most people would rather take the queue than deal with blindly using your free character transfer that has no guarantee that we won’t have to deal with the same issue that led us to transfer to megarealms in the first place.

Lock character creation entirely on megarealms (Even for people that already have characters on those realms) to avoid people taking character names that aren’t theirs and give a guarantee that once the servers dies back down that we can freely transfer back.
I will not pay to transfer my characters ever again, nor will anyone I know, I have friends that would rather quit than deal with any of this, guilds are being broken apart, and I will not blindly take your half arsed solution without a guarantee that I won’t get burned by it, nor will the majority of people I have spoken to.

Your company deserves absolutely 0 trust from us that you will do the right thing for the players, so the least you can do is provide some accountability for us to hold against you should you fail to provide what is even the bare minimum you should be doing for the players.

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It’s been a week and we still have 0 word from you Blizzard.

Queues are still unacceptably high and you still won’t make any changes to your current failing plan to fix the issue. You won’t speak to the players about it either, too content to just ignore the issue and hope it goes away by itself and people forget about it in a month or so.

Raids are coming out soon, guilds won’t be able to do the raid because part of their guild can’t log on, most people on the mega realms couldn’t even level to 80 because of the service they pay for being unusable with no reasonable solution to deal with it.

This was unacceptable a month ago during pre-patch, it is beyond unacceptable now, I don’t even have the vocabulary knowledge necessary to describe just how horrifyingly bad of a company you are. We’re closing in on a month and a half of this non-sense and STILL you won’t offer the players anything reasonable, STILL you remain silent.

I mean, just look at Benediction queue since WotLK launch:

Absolutely ridiculous.

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