Epic bg lag and where it came from

i have played this game for years on various computers and servers on both ally and horde.
having come back a few months ago i can’t do (your post contains words that are not allowed:SHlT) in 40man groups without lag killing my computer, i had one comp fry completely and am about to uninstal wow to keep my new comp safe.
i see alot of people with lag issues in epic bg’s and wonder when this started, and what blizz is doing to fix it.
i feel it has to be a server issue but not everyone is affected the same though many are affected greatly.
does one need an 8 thousand dollar computer to run this game or just move closer to blizzard server farms.

i’m not looking for computer advise from those without this problem( i know that it should be working and have google that has already suggested anything you will).

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I’m pretty sure the problem is server side.

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I noticed this (massive lag) the last 2 epics. Going to stick to regular as it’s not worth it.

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It is. WoW servers used to run on dedicated boxes, so for example all of Bleeding Hollow’s continents and instances ran on their own dedicated server hardware in a datacenter somewhere. This was great for large form PvP since dedicated boxes have a ton of headroom (CPU, RAM, etc), so handling 80+ players in one location wasn’t all that difficult.

At some point a few expansions ago, Blizzard converted WoW to modern cloud architecture, which basically means that no server has dedicated hardware any more… they’re all virtualized “slices” of dedicated machines. This is much more efficient, saves a ton of money, and works well for 90% of the game (dungeons, raids, questing, etc) but falls flat on its face during spikes of high demand like you have in epic BGs.

But the architecture switch alone isn’t the cause of the lag all by itself. The other big factor is the sheer amount of crap going on in modern WoW combat – in an epic BG you’re looking at ridiculous numbers of AoEs, cleaves, procs, and physics from the players. Worse, everybody and his brother has pet(s) of some kind now, which add several tens of onscreen units that multiply the number of interactions to be calculated. In short, a 40v40 today is vastly more resource intensive than a 40v40 in Vanilla or even WotLK.

So if you combine the reduced capacity with the flustercluck of interactions in a 40v40 you get a server being brought to its knees. Only way to fix it would be to either beef up the capabilities of virtualized servers (likely prohibitively expensive) or to redesign classes and combat to be less insane.

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The weird thing too is at the start of BfA I don’t remember fighting the lag so much in eBGs. Seems like it kicked in around 8.2 (??) and has gotten worse in 8.3…

It’s almost like we, the players, pay them millions per month in sub fees alone.
Good luck trying to convince anyone that proper servers are too expensive.

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Replacing servers would take about 3 days if we go by last time.

Players would revolt.

They’ll forget about it a week later after they find something else to betch about.

Whether you believe me or not is your own business, but as far as I know the economics behind cloud infrastructure are built around the assumption that the server shards will be mostly idle most of the time – it breaks down quickly and in fact can become more expensive than the old style dedicated server boxes were under extended periods of high load.

It really depends on how Blizz has things set up, though. If a new shard (server slice) is spun up for each battleground, it’s probably not a huge ask to have epic battlegrounds be allocated larger/more capable shards – large group world PvP would still be screwed, but at least epic BGs would function correctly. If on the other hand battlegrounds pull from an existing pool of small shards shared with other parts of the game (instances, world phases, etc), then our chances of getting epic BGs more resources is very low.

I wouldn’t mind if they tone down combat a bit, or at least the spell effects, it can be hard at times in epic bgs to see what’s going on with everything blowing up essentially lol, the lag it causes certainly doesn’t help either.

Yeah, I’m not convinced that so many AoEs, cleaves, pet storms (e.g. wild imps), etc are really necessary for classes to feel good to play and they make the battlefield a spell effect soup on top of stressing the servers. The cost/benefit ratio there doesn’t make a lot of sense.

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The amount of server lag in Isle of Conquest is borderline unplayable. I don’t remember it ever being this bad.

I don’t know if the other epics are just as bad, since I stopped queuing after one game, but that’s actually ridiculous in a game we pay monthly for.

Is it weird that i don’t really lag much in epic bgs? Im curious if it’s people computer or addons. Only time i get a bit of lag in bgs is when they have that northshore vs southshore epic bg

only time i ever lag in this game is
hanger fight which it seems almost everyone lags in
Tauren mill vs south shore and again everyone complains about the lag in that 1
and battle for naz when alliance decide to form 6 raids in 1 shard

ashran i lag sometimes but not really as bad as those 3

av and wintergrasp dont lag at all

Epic BG lag is multi-component, so it’s absolutely possible that some see more lag than others. In my case I had huge latency problems in epics that turned out to be mostly caused by DPS meter and enemy tracking addons – basically anything that tracks players has potential to add a crapton of extra latency in BGs.

After turning those off in epics I still get some lag, but it reaches unplayable levels a lot less often.

It is virtually impossible to do anything in the large battlegrounds, the entire raid always freezes and nothing is happening, sometimes i can see the chat but on the battleground itself people are not moving for long periods of time and everyone has the same problem

But I’m looking for a ‘WORLD’ of war-craft. Like I saw in the MOVIE. (j/k. Never saw the movie).

Even during wod in Ashran so many people had freezeups during battles that they’d just yell at us to keep pressing buttons. I joked that my laptop went from frames per second to seconds per frame during fights.

Being from Australia , Playing on OCE realm i often see lag in BG’s , EBG’s , Dungeons and even raid it all depends on the host server !

example OCE host i usually have 12-17ms latency on Americas host i usually see 200-400ms latency .

I also drop graphical quality to a bare minimum in EBG’s just to keep a steady frame rate !

I’m regularly having to relog, to ‘kick’ myself from BGs, to get decent latency. Doesn’t happen in world or dungeons. Just BGs. Obv they never have taken it seriously, 16 years on.