WoW Releases Raid Info

[El Gallo]

I was using "lag" in the broader sense that it is often used by MMO players.  The biggest "lag" problem on most EQ raids was "graphics lag".  To satisfy the pedantic techies, I should have said that the low population cap and instancing will decrease lag, while the stickfigures decrease graphical hiccups or whataver terms pedantic techies use for the phenomenon that caused clerics in EQ raid guilds to set their clip plane to zero and stare at the floor while counting out their spot in the CH rotation.

[Soukyan]

I was using "lag" in the broader sense that it is often used by MMO players.  The biggest "lag" problem on most EQ raids was "graphics lag".  To satisfy the pedantic techies, I should have said that the low population cap and instancing will decrease lag, while the stickfigures decrease graphical hiccups or whataver terms pedantic techies use for the phenomenon that caused clerics in EQ raid guilds to set their clip plane to zero and stare at the floor while counting out their spot in the CH rotation.

The word you are looking for is framerate. Most "lag" problems occur when the PC hardware cannot render the graphics quickly enough resulting in a degraded framerate. Some game engine optimizations can help with framerate in the way of occlusion culling and lowered poly count, etc. but the game engine cannot overcome the limitations of player hardware.

Network latency between clients/servers certainly becomes an issue in large scale encounters as well because the servers need to be able to calculate and communicate exponentially better as the players involved increase. Network latency can cause rubberbanding and other "laggy" symptoms.

[Romp]

Quote:
my biggest worry about raids are that it's going to mean that being uber at PvE will actually be more important than being good at PvP when it comes to pvp.


Level based pvping probably always means this.

not really, not in Shadowbane for example.  But when you have uber mobs that drop uber items and no looting in pvp then yes you will pretty much always get this.

[Trippy]

EQ had both graphics lag like El Gallo mentioned and server lag where server updates were delayed big time. The problem with the old EQ UI (dunno if this is still true) is that when your framerate started to lag, your UI responsiveness lagged as well -- that's why you had to stare at the floor for things that required critical timing like casting in a CH rotation. The other problem was if you packed too many players too close together, the server would start lagging on its updates back to the client, meaning text messages, HP updates, etc. would all start to be delayed, sometimes by minutes. This was really noticable in places like ToV where somedays you would have 300+ people in that zone and where the break in spots for all three wings are close enough to each other that the server had to send updates of all characters to everybody else. Once the groups got further apart, the problem diminished.

[HaemishM]

Not to mention that in EQ, up until Velious I think, there were no server-side filters on text messages. So, for instance, a player could turn off the display of text messages like "other people's hits and misses" but it was client-side: the client would still RECEIVE those messages, it just wouldn't display them. The server would still have to send out every one of those messages to every client applicable. So not only did you have the graphical framerate problems in raids, but your and the server's bandwidth was getting choked as well. Once server-side text filters were added, lag on raids went down an assload.

Any game which releases nowadays without server-side text filters is just crazy. DAoC had the same problem at release, I think. Shadowbane didn't add the server-side filters til late in the beta, I think, and it didn't help anyway, because the client was shitty, and the one-box "Big Iron" server solution didn't automagically work as well as they thought it would.