I don’t often post on the US forums. Live servers essentially slow to a crawl when more than 40 people are in the same area, with some time ago a GM intervening to stop a raid on the Horde capitol in BFA. Privately hosted vanilla servers which we can’t name have video evidence showing well 100+ people in the same area fighting, a very recent one with little lag, infact.
Some questions.
Why is the server tech so poorly functioning for Blizzard?
Does it have to do with spell batching?
Are their cloud servers just bad?
How can we expect quality if we’re going to experience what we do on live?
Why can hobbyists achieve this and they cannot? Are they not concerned it will make private servers retain many players?
Thank you very much in advance, apologies for poor english.
It has to do with the type of servers they have to an extent. They run off of a cloud based server which allows them to have systems like crz and sharding and such. It’s super efficient it just can’t handle what a physical server could handle. I’m sure there’s more that goes into it on retail that makes it so laggy but I’m not an expert by any means.
The lag? No. Spell batching is cause by how the server use to collect data to and from your computer. Basically it would ‘tick’ and every second it ‘ticked’ it would send and receive data so things like you fearing someone while your stunned would be possible.
They aren’t bad they were just a modern solution to modern problems for wow. We will see how they hold up with how classic is played. I’m confident
I mean there has always been and will always be lag on mmos. It just depends how frequent it is. And tbh, the real vanilla had server lag ALL the time. Patch days were sometimes unplayable no matter what zone you were in.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Blizzard wants to connect classic to their modern systems. But their modern systems run off the modern client. This gives classic behind the scene systems that will make it better. Such as blizzards anti-cheat, bot detection, ddos protections, bnet integration and things such as that. If they wanted to go the ‘authentic route’ they would have to get physical servers that have to be maintained physically, and they will be vulnerable to all these exploits that they have fixed over the last 15 years. Another thing to consider is private servers only have to manage one single server. Blizzard is going to have a much bigger issue of maintaining these possibly hundreds of servers and they have to plan to maintain these for possibly a decade or more.
The (sharding) tech is functioning reasonably well. It just wasn’t designed with the obvious to players) use case that is being talked about in mind. It was designed to address an issue on a different end of the spectrum.
Spell batching is not related to the issue.
The Cloud servers aren’t bad, so much as they’re minimally provisioned in the interest of minimizing costs.
The Devs have made it clear they understand sharding as implemented in retail is very much not welcome.
They also agree that there are many aspects of Vanilla(and Classic by extension) specifically that make sharding highly undesirable, both from a design as well as a game play perspective. (World Raid bosses are very specific examples they specifically cited, Rare Spawns are another. But there are certain other quests such as Stitches, which are also diminished by being sharded. Tarren Mill and South Shore being sharded also are obvious Classic “no go” items.)
As such, they’re going to have to operate Classic servers on a “wider” set of parameters than what Retail servers have been set for previously(or find some new approaches on the back-end for having “shards” interact with each other). This may actually ironically result in Retail gaining benefits from Classic in a round-about way. Although in many respects, it looks like BfA is already forcing the Retail team to address many of the back-end issues that could impact Classic on the modern infrastructure even before Classic starts being beta tested.
Honestly though, I suspect most shards are virtual instances existing on a piece of hardware to start with, so it’s more a factor of how they’ve been doing their VM “Shard” provisioning for retail than anything else. They basically have metrics that say the Retail Shard “VM” scale is appropriate for 9X% of “the normal player use case scenarios,” and that’s good enough for their network operations team, and more particularly, the people in Finance. If you’re one of those less than 10% of use cases, too bad for you… If you’re playing Retail. And capital city PvP raids are probably less than a 0.1% use case over the past many years for retail. Ergo, a GM appearing to stop someone when they tried to do it.
Thank you both very much for the explanation, we don’t get much blue posts or discussion on the EU forum it’s mostly arguments about certain things.
What prompted me to post more anything were several videos, if I could get in to detail or link them I would but I don’t think it is allowed? I hope the team has watched some of them… they are eye opening. It is better to see once than to hear hundred times.
Edited 2. Obviously there are some arguments to be made much better ones than I could type from other players I could probably dig for some of those argument videos, it is just those two videos in particular, I posted after seeing them is my meaning.
I imagine the problems Blizzard has with large numbers of people comes from a number of things like: Spell details, textures that react to players, servers trying to shard people around and phasing tech.
From what I saw from people streaming the Classic demo they had a good number of people in one area with the dueling events and it seemed like the server was running smoothly.
Hopefully this is something that they are able to get figured out because its a bit lame that in a MMO you cant have a more then 40 people in one area without the servers crashing.
I will say that I recall when the Wrath pre patch launched this wasnt really a big problem. I recall going from city to city to kill the faction leaders for the achievement and there being well over 100 people in one area with minimal problem. I recall lagging because my computer was really bad but the servers didnt seem to have a problem and they didnt crash.
The server only handles data, and checks for in/out of boundary conditions(among other things, no doubt). It isn’t trying to render squat. Those are client side problems.
The server does, however have to deal with action * number of players in range of the action’s AoE + number of players able to SEE the actions in progress.
They don’t have the pre-Wrath provisioning where a particular area has enough resources available to handle 90-some% of what players may throw at it.
The shards are provisioned with enough resources provisioned to handle 90-some% of what players “typically” go about doing, circa Cataclysm.
The era of regular capital city PvP raids had passed long before then. I know on Mannoroth by the time Wrath was around it fell out of favor because even with the resources available to the servers then, it typically crashed the continent server. Which wasn’t fun to anybody but the griefers. So Capital City raids became the exception for player activity, not the norm, so not something they were going to design for anymore. Even if it was part of the Vanilla game design.