Blizzard walking into a server disaster?

[WatcherZero]

I hope im not the only one that got a bit worried during the PVP panel. when describing wintergrasp they were saying how they wanted it to support everywhere from 40 players to 200 becuase the amount playing would fluctuate. Then at the end of the panel one of the audience asked an extremley good question!

At the moment if theirs a large raid on a city theirs server lag and massive instability, would wintergrasp not cause the same problems putting large amount of combantants in the same non instanced place?

And the blizzard reply was: no, we are adding a few things so that players even with slow computers will be able to handle lots of people in the same place at the same time.

BLIZZARD COMPLETLEY MISSED THE POINT!
if you have a 200 man raid on a city and 200 defending the server experiences massive lag in that place and as far out as the neighbouring zones, and it is almost guarenteed to crash, taking down the whole continent. The infrastructure just cant handle those numbers. If you have wintergrasp im sure it will be perfectly fine on small-mid servers, but on the larger servers you may see upto 400 vs 400, and with no way to limit the numbers the servers going to be crashing all the time and taking the whole of northrend down ruining everyone elses play time.

[MrBCorp]

Yeah I suppose one way they could do it would be to instance it.

[mmorpg man]

Blizzard will figure something out, they always do. have faith

[det]

....they were saying how they wanted it to support everywhere from 40 players to 200 becuase the amount playing would fluctuate.

BLIZZARD COMPLETLEY MISSED THE POINT!....if you have a 200 man raid on a city and 200 defending

So who missed the point? Blizzard talks of 40 - 200, you talk about 400 ^^

And the blizzard reply was: no, we are adding a few things so that players even with slow computers will be able to handle lots of people in the same place at the same time.

The infrastructure just cant handle those numbers.

Well then..they should have asked you, I guess..because apparently you know their server infra structure better than they do.^^

If Northrend is on a new server, as Outland is different from the Kalimdor and EK servers..who says they cannot avoid the old mistakes?

[clevins]

det,

I think they did miss the point though - the question was about SERVER side performance and stability, not client side. And, while it's easy to say
"They know what they're doing, they'll handle it" there are certainly cases today where they demonstrably haven't. If 18 months after the last expansion these issues still exist... why believe that it will be magically handled in WotLK?

it's a good question and is one of the things that will determine Wintergrasp's success - if people decide to check it out but it's crashy and laggy some will just move on to the next thing and not bother.

Personally I doubt it will matter on my server - 3:1 Alliance and a PvE server. There will be some action the first few weeks and then it will be like Halaa.

[WatcherZero]

we quite regularly (read once every couple of months) have city raids on our server, and they can quite easily reach 200vs200 (or more since theirs usally 6-8 raids aside and hard to count the number of defenders not in official raids), and its always total disaster.

[det]

Hmmmmmkay...guess I do have faith because my realm had terrible lag and DCs..longer downtimes and offline times about a year ago and it got fixed.

[tylrdiablos]

WatcherZero - I think you bring up a good point.

The past week since the new Season gear has been a bit dodgy for the server I play on. (Frostmane EU.)
We've had the Arena's go down at least 3 times and the Battlegrounds have been down 5 (maybe more) times.

Latency (MS) times have been higher than usual too but that could be down to my ISP (VirginMedia) being poor.

[tylrdiablos]

I can't seem to edit my last post but here's a screenshot to prove just how bad the BG's are at the moment.

Elapsed Time: 48 minutes. Very annoying. (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3084/2623144820_d18d34a8de_o.jpg)

[Wartro]

Yeah I suppose one way they could do it would be to instance it.

Like Warhammer is doing for their RvR I assume.

[det]

Yeah I suppose one way they could do it would be to instance it.

Is that still world pvp or doesn't it make another BG ....and possibly with queues...

[Wintrow]

I assume they could use the City of Hoeres system:
- ppl zone into a certain instance of Lake Wintergrasp until it's reached it's capacity
- After that a new copy is generated and ppl start getting added to that one
on top of that:
- parties zone into the same copy
- you can switch copies to meet up with ppl

[WatcherZero]

Thats how instances/battlegrounds work now anyway.

[Pharoahe]

Guys its been said before and at WWI this weekend, the zone is NOT instanced.
I play in one of the oldest and most populated EU realms, and Im pretty confident this zone should be ok for lag. Being fairly big and open will help. A similar example is Isle of QD recently. Any time a new phase would be starting 100s of Alliance (and similar numbers of horde) would be on the Island. Although it was a bit laggy (sometimes more so) this was mainly due to people all standing on the same spot...and it not being that big. I think size will help, it wont be confined as many cities can be.

Recently WoW Insider radio show did an RP event with over 200 people showing up, it went pretty smooth.

[WatcherZero]

its not just the number of people, its the fighting of each other that does it. For example Hellfire peninsula at the start of BC had hundreds and managed reasonably fine for the first few days with no lag, then people started (only limited 20-30 people) ganking outside of towns and even with half the people of before it was considerably laggier.

[Pharoahe]

Yeah but you have to admit the servers are alot better in the last 18 months. My realm used to have awful periods of lag (even got a free days play once), and this is no longer the case.

[WatcherZero]

ahh, see my realm was one of the realms that had a major upgrade for the BC launch, so from our perspective nothings changed

[Netevolution]

The system hardly works as it is(down atleast once a week do to "maintenance") and then we have Kalgan! Thats enough to bring wow down without even trying!

[surodat]

yeah. it's down every tuesday... it's so predictable. almost as if it's scheduled. wait...

[WatcherZero]

I think he was being sarcastic

[Pharoahe]

I think he was being sarcastic

Well its boring, see as half the posts he makes are about Kalgan...