Downing the Lag Boss
January 13, 2010 7 Comments
I try not to use this forum as a medium for ranting, but this is getting beyond annoying.
/Cast Rant Rank 1
As much as I love 3.3, there are times when it’s making the game very much unplayable. The same may not be true for your server, but for Mug’thol at 6:30 server on a Tuesday, getting any serious raiding done is a nightmare. Enter the Lag Boss…
For weeks without fail, my raid group will have around 100ms latency until the clock strikes 6:30, and at that point it shoots up to (and sometimes past) 2000ms. The server just can’t handle the strain of all of the raids going on at the same time. It’s been a long time since Mug’thol had a queue, so it’s not that we’re overpopulated. With Blizzard making raiding availible to all while still keeping the encounters fairly complex, the number of instances running at the same time with all of their mechanics and all of the player’s abilities going off is obviously more than the instance server can handle.
Last week the lag was so bad that we wiped twice on Airship and gave up. In addition to it taking forever to down the adds, the healers couldn’t adjust to the 6 second delay between people taking damage and their heal going off. We came in on Thursday and one shot it like normal; the latency was back around 100. This week we cleared past airship, and the moment we hit Saurfang, the latency creeped up. 500. 700. 1400. 2000. We tried to give it a go, but to no avail. We even regrouped 30 minutes later to see if the lag went away. It didn’t, so he’ll die on Thursday.
Another instance of the Lag Boss is Dalaran. It was laggy before, but it’s certainly much worse now. Don’t get me wrong, I love the random queue system. However, not ever needing to actually take the time to get to a dungeon means people park themselves in Dalaran and you can’t really see the street anymore. I’m fairly sure that it was never designed to contain as many people as it does now, and it shows. Being in Dalaran during peak hours is by no means as bad as it is on patch day, but it’s noticably slower than it was in 3.2.
Blizzard, please either add more servers or find another way to fix the problem. Losing half of my raid time to lag is not fun. I don’t want you to nerf any of the ICC bosses, but I’d love to see a nerf of the Lag Boss.
/Stopcasting
– Sam
Slice and Dice 
perfectly worded rant…totally agree with all of it.
6.30-9.30 pm server seems to be the prime time for people to hit the raids on Mug’thol. We follow Sam’s group 1 almost always within 1 hour, give or take 30 min, and have not had the same problems as mentioned above.
Now, last night, we had a few issues with lag on the way to ICC and one or two of us were still having trouble inside, but not to the extent that it made raiding impossible.
A word to Dalaran: I am glad that Blizzard is not planning on having a Sanctuary in Cataclysm. That will take players back to their home towns and take away the crowded thing that we know is Dalaran…
Lag boss hit us too on Marrowgar and Airship. The lag was so bad on Airship that even before we started, my latency showed ~160s, i activated my jetpack to shoot me 10 yards in front, well the server jumped me backwards off the ship. The airship would randomly disappear under my feet during the fight, being melee, made the jumps back and forth rather interesting. We got to Festergut and had to stop from tanks dying and people not getting inoculates due to lag.
The lag has been so consistently bad the past three weeks that my guild has shifted our entire raid schedule. We now to 10 man ICC on Tuesday instead of 25 man.
Cadfael over at Elitest Jerks did a post a while ago dealing with the issue of “chain disconnects”.
http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/cadfael/302-fixing_chain_disconnecting.html
There is also a great thread on the official WoW forums started by Rantic that goes over some GREAT tips.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20143779109&sid=1&pageNo=1
Every time the lag monster attacks our raids we all revisit these and often are able to find the problem and move on.
Hope it helps!
I’m shocked about those raiding times tbh 🙂
On Aggramar-EU everyone starts at 20:00, basically across all guilds with a few going half an hour earlier.
Oh wait, I need to put that as 8pm, right? 😉
Still weird, so many of us make it home from work just in time for the 8pm raid…
On n’a pas eu la saison, nous voulions à l’année dernière’, a déclaré Kaepernick.