[MORE NEW INFO] Client-Server Desync/Bad Character State

It sure would be nice to know if blizz is even attempting to fix this problem or is it time for another mass exit of players due to there lack of care. I came back after 6 month leave to play again to return to more issues that seem to go untouched and seems its time to quit for good…

This is happening nonstop on my WW monk. I died and rezed, the world was still grey but the mobs were attacking me. I also am not generating Combo points until said creature dies. Has blizz talked about this at all?

The closest to a response that we’ve got was Ion saying that server stability is their engineer’s top priority right now, although I suspect that is more referencing the actual lag and disconnect issues people have been facing especially over on the Oceanic servers lately.

Since this problem does not seem to be related to server stability or latency and is the result of weird interactions, I don’t think this is very high on their radar.

In fairness, most/all? of the threads I’ve seen are just reporting the same symptoms over and over. I haven’t seen any other way to replicate the issue on-demand aside from the one I discovered, and that information was posted right before the weekend. If someone else published other ways to replicate it, it’s buried because I’ve been looking for more information to consolidate here.

It’s really frustrating that this issue is so pervasive but please everyone try to be patient with them. Debugging something so obscure without the ability to reproduce the bug on demand is a programmer’s hell - I speak from experience there. It may happen fairly frequently to some of you, but it’s happening rarely to others, and if it’s a problem that might not crop up for hours of playtime (it is!), it’s nigh impossible to test fixes.

So if anyone else has found methods to reproduce the bug with fairly consistent regularity, please share as much detail as you can. It’s worth noting that there may be various triggers to enter this bugged state, and the method I’ve found might not provide enough information for a broader fix.

This has been happening to me since the current patch dropped: mounts, usually the water strider, fail to appear, and actions which usually take the toon out of mounted state no longer do (combat, interacting with nodes, &c). Wiping everything in retail, per the Support instructions, did work… briefly.

This is very tiresome, particularly for gatherer toons, and I hope Blizz is able to isolate and resolve the issue(s) soon.

Just wanted to add that it’s not affecting only chars that use the point systems. It happened last night on my Arms warrior and Ele shaman.

I can’t remember where I was on the warrior, it was somewhere in the vanilla zones. I was able to break the bug state by taking a flight path (aka swimming animation with no mount) out of the zone. Interestingly, the swimming animation only persisted while I still was in the zone that the bug popped up in. As I flew (swam) , when I hit the zone boundary, it spontaneously changed from the swimming animation to a proper flight path mount.

Later in the day, it happened on my shaman in the Creeping Grotto on the Broken Shore. Hearthing to Deliverance Point (same zone) wasn’t enough. I had to hearth to Dalaran (new zone) to clear the bugged state.

Hmm, was the issue fixed when you landed after taking the flight path?

I’m not entirely surprised that something changed when you cross the zone border (that’s a part of how we can reproduce the start of it even), but I would definitely be surprised if the game behaved normally when you landed. If that’s the case, I’m wrong about my assumption that your character needs to leave the world - it might just need to change instances.

Is that character on an RP server or a CRZ cluster? If it’s on an RP server that leaves me with a bunch of questions - if it’s a server that uses CRZ, then I think all that might be needed to fix the issue is a shard/instance change after all.

Funny you ask.

When I “landed”, I stayed stuck on the mount for about 25 sec with no NPCs or players in sight. Once the 25 sec passed, I finally dismounted and everything around me spawned in. Was it related? Not sure. That’s also common behavior of standard lag. But it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

But, I didn’t try anything after landing. I immediately jumped back on the flight path and returned to where I just left. When I landed there, everything was back to normal (no lag on the landing and the character functioned normally. When it happens next, I’ll try messing around a bit before returning.

Normal server (Aerie Peak).

There is a distinction between lag and desync, though one can cause the other sometimes. These problems are definitely desync.

With lag, the server knows where you are and what you are doing, it just takes a long time to get back to you when you do something.

With desync, the server literally doesn’t know where you are or what you are up to. Your client still does, but since (for efficiency) the client typically only sends “he moved two steps east” “he clicked on the herb” messages back to the server, the server can’t relocate you until you do something really major - like “he just landed at Flight Point X”.

Why we’re suddenly getting lost so easily can only be on Blizzard’s end. Several potential culprits but none of us know the architecture to really pinpoint it. But more anecdotal information (especially what can fix it for individuals) can help the devs investigating.

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Definitely, I think there’s a lot of people quick to blame lag just because a lot of the problems are manifesting as client-side bugs that could be misconstrued as lag. The average player is probably not very familiar with client-server interactions and don’t often recognizes the nuances between client behaviors and server enforcement of such.

An example of a subtle detail is how the game treats an attempt at using an ability that requires combo points. If your client thinks you have 0 combo points, it won’t even query the server when you click the ability and does not even try to consume the GCD. Likewise, if the client thinks you have combo points when you actually don’t, you ping the server to consume the combo points, triggering the GCD, and then then it is forcibly reset and nothing happens when the server replies with “wtf u talking about, u don’t have combo points lol”.

Meanwhile if the client thinks you have even a single combo point, you can invisibly generate combo points and, because the client is not stopping you from pinging the server to use your finisher, you can use your finisher at 1 client-combo point, and the server will recognize that you have more and react as expected. Your client is still probably in some state of a mess, but the server is reacting as it should.

The bug isn’t quite that bad. You can still move around and that is correct client and server side, and the world behaves mostly as expected. Mobs aggro from correct distances, and so on. If it was a complete desync, you would be standing in place server-side until the server could verify a new location.

I think this is less a total desync and more that there is some various flags or character states that are getting mismatched.

It reminds me more of issues addons have when they try to manipulate a protected element while in combat. The UI gets locked down heavily during combat and trying to do something that is forbidden causes lua errors, wonky frames, and all sorts of other very bizarre behaviors depending on the mod. I very heavily doubt that this is even remotely the same, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the client is trying to do something that it isn’t allowed to while in combat and throws everything else out of whack.

" We would, for example, click on a herb node and it would take an extended period of time for that activity to generate a result. Meanwhile everything around us in the environment was behaving normally - which became old very fast when that lag became active in combat, which it frequently did. So whatever the effect is, it has no impact on the wider game but purely on your individual character."

I’m running into the same issues. Been happening since the last patch, every day, in the afternoons - except I didn’t have it this weekend. It’s similar to a Giant Lag but everything around my Toon seems to be working just fine. Flight path flying with no flying mount. Go to mount my steed and I move fast with no mount. Button shows I’m on the mount. Fighting mobs gets nowhere. No damage from either me or the mobs. Click to pick up something and nothing happens until (maybe) several seconds later. I can even see other players fighting, seeming to be doing just fine. My Latency and Framerate are just fine when this is happening. Very frustrating!!!

Still a thing–Bump