Is blizzard lieing to its players about the lag issues?

[Acanthus]

Im about to post this on blizzards support forums, but i want to make sure i have a good reason to before doing so. Im just a certified network technician with a whopping 2 year degree, but it appears to me that blizzards technican staff is outright lieing to their paying customers about a lag issue thats leading to 10000 pings for every player on many servers with high load.

They are making everyone post traceroutes, but the traceroutes look great usually 60-100 pings all the way to the last hop, which is their datacenter. After the last hop at the datacenter all the addresses are masked, so the rest of the traceroute times out. This proves that the problem is on blizzards end does it not?

------------------------------------ The post im about to make ---------------------------

Im going to try go about this as calmly, and level headed as possible.

Everyone experiencing the server end lag issues on many servers experienced this immediatly after patch 1.8.

This problem appears to be directly related to the load of the servers, as demand increases and we get closer to peak times pings begin to rise, then culminate in the disaster that is an unplayable server from about 3PM EST to 1AM EST.

You have us posting traceroutes, which for some the blame can fall on ISPs. Now as someone with some experience in this field, i can tell you that traceroutes reveal nothing to me about this issue, other than the lag lies on Blizzards internal network.

I am sure you guys are aware of this, because after everyones last pingable hop (at&t located at 12.128.192.126 which is your datacenters WAN line if im not mistaken) the pings are still good. Its somewhere inside the masked pings at your datacenter(either the servers themselves or some kind of internal networking bottleneck) that this issue lies.

From a technical standpoint it appears obvious to me that the issue lies at Blizzard, and not in anyones drivers, ISPs, modems, hardware, or elsewhere.

From an ethical standpoint, if you guys are still not admitting theres a problem at blizzards servers, please debunk what i have just posted.

 

[Reel]

Who is telling you this information? Their PR people are disaster control spin doctors. They frequently lie to cover their (and their employer's) ass. The backend people are much more upfront but most of the new guys they have hired for their WoW support team were never candid. While beta testing the game, I found that the only people you could count on for reasonably reliable information were Ogre or one of the lead developers. Most of the people who posted on the forums were misleading or outright lying. However, don't expect them to really care what you post. You could make the most amazing expose on their practices and post it to their forum and odds are good it won't warrant a response from them. If you want to cause trouble, call them up and make them escalate you up the tech support people.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Reel
Who is telling you this information? Their PR people are disaster control spin doctors. They frequently lie to cover their (and their employer's) ass. The backend people are much more upfront but most of the new guys they have hired for their WoW support team were never candid. While beta testing the game, I found that the only people you could count on for reasonably reliable information were Ogre or one of the lead developers. Most of the people who posted on the forums were misleading or outright lying. However, don't expect them to really care what you post. You could make the most amazing expose on their practices and post it to their forum and odds are good it won't warrant a response from them. If you want to cause trouble, call them up and make them escalate you up the tech support people.

I think ill do both.

Yes it is their support staff, handling thousands of pissed off customers, and telling them that its their drivers or ISP having issues, and having us post these traceroutes and pointing at 153ms hops and going "theres your problem, call your ISP", then some poor saps believe and call their ISP and get told they dont have enough memory to run the game and come back to blizzard support...

Its a vicious circle of bad support.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Blizzard has the worst IT staff in existance. Sony's Everquest 2 Maintenance takes a fraction of this time. Their servers never lagged or randomly crashed in the 4 months i played EQ2. I even played on a heavy pop EQ2 server. The low pop WoW servers had far more problems with server lag (my ping was <100) and disconnects.

 

[Schadenfroh]

And yes, nearly all of the ?blizzard posters?, tech support reps, GMs, etc. are laced with lies, deceit, misinformation, and good old fashioned stupidity.

 

[Acanthus]

can anyone else verify that this is very likely the case? and the high pings are on blizzards end?

A typical traceroute looks like this on the support forums:

hops 1-16 good 15-100 pings

at hop 17, 18, or 19 (depending on location, ISP, etc) is blizzards WAN line, 12.129.192.126 which still has a good ping.

every hop after that times out (masked IPs)

The most damning evidence of all though is the fact that they run fine at 3am when the server load is low, and as soon as a decent playerbase is on, the lag begins.

 

[Azraele]

To quote Blizz...."working as intended" or "we are aware of the issue, and thank you for your patience."

In UBRS last night we had several deaths directly related to lag.

 

[Leper Messiah]

There is a reason I stoppped playing WoW. Everytime I got to Iron Forge, *BAM* Lag. I've seen Lineage II Free shard servers run better than that...

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Azraele
To quote Blizz...."working as intended" or "we are aware of the issue, and thank you for your patience."

In UBRS last night we had several deaths directly related to lag.

Its so bad on burning blade we couldnt do Molten core, we are one of the top 20 guilds across all servers. (we do MC on alts, with 32 players...) we wiped on rags with 40... 4 times.

7000-14500 pings

 

[HardcoreRobot]

everything that comes out of blizz is sanitized by their pr machine. even previously posted "interviews with the developers" were loaded with crap you know a developer would never say. its a real shame, considering their clientele are likely to understand and maybe even appreciate the difficulties they are having. whatever though, blizz will continue to treat its customers like children and people will pay and play anyways...

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: HardcoreRobot
everything that comes out of blizz is sanitized by their pr machine. even previously posted "interviews with the developers" were loaded with crap you know a developer would never say. its a real shame, considering their clientele are likely to understand and maybe even appreciate the difficulties they are having. whatever though, blizz will continue to treat its customers like children and people will pay and play anyways...

It really is a shame, they have a great product and their IT team cant keep it running smooth.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: HardcoreRobot
blizz will continue to treat its customers like children

Most of their customers are children. Well, at least that is how most of the people in WoW act.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh

Originally posted by: HardcoreRobot
blizz will continue to treat its customers like children

Most of their customers are children. Well, at least that is how most of the people in WoW act.

So true.

As for posting this on the official WoW forums, well, don't bother. About 99% of the dumbasses there will simply say "/signed" or some B.S. like that. Another .5% will call you a liar, and the last .5% may, just may agree with you...

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Cheetah8799

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh

Originally posted by: HardcoreRobot
blizz will continue to treat its customers like children

Most of their customers are children. Well, at least that is how most of the people in WoW act.

So true.

As for posting this on the official WoW forums, well, don't bother. About 99% of the dumbasses there will simply say "/signed" or some B.S. like that. Another .5% will call you a liar, and the last .5% may, just may agree with you...

I dont really care about what the community says, im just hoping they friggin do something.

 

[CVSiN]

not really having any issues on gorefiend at all..
not even in IF with 100 people standign around are we getting lag like you describe.

MC is not lagging out either

 

[Quixfire]

Is this a recent concern or an over a period of several months issue?

Blizzard reduced the latency across most server prior to the 1.7 patch. After that patch the lag return to the point where you almost could walk through IF near the AH without running into a wall. They repair that issue with the 1.8 patch but only to have it return over the last weekend. Yesterday they posted a notice stating they are aware of the concern and are working a solution.

 

[Leper Messiah]

Why don't they do the smart thing and actually spend the $15/month we're spending to lag, and actually buy some servers and/or bandwidth. Common.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: CVSiN
not really having any issues on gorefiend at all..
not even in IF with 100 people standign around are we getting lag like you describe.

MC is not lagging out either

Thats framerate youre talking about, not latency.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Quixfire
Is this a recent concern or an over a period of several months issue?

Blizzard reduced the latency across most server prior to the 1.7 patch. After that patch the lag return to the point where you almost could walk through IF near the AH without running into a wall. They repair that issue with the 1.8 patch but only to have it return over the last weekend. Yesterday they posted a notice stating they are aware of the concern and are working a solution.

Its been really bad since 1.8 came out. So a full week now.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Leper Messiah
Why don't they do the smart thing and actually spend the $15/month we're spending to lag, and actually buy some servers and/or bandwidth. Common.

hey come on now, they're only raking in $20mil a month in subscriptions its not like they could just add servers to the cluster and completely eliminate the problem for very little relative cost (extreme sarcasm)

 

[rickn]

I don't have much of a problem. my latency seems to spike around a lot. I heard that Blizz uses AT&T for their backbone. If so, that would probably explain it.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: rickn
I don't have much of a problem. my latency seems to spike around a lot. I heard that Blizz uses AT&T for their backbone. If so, that would probably explain it.

yes, they do, but this issue seems to be server load on "high" population servers.

perfect example:

This poor guy is getting 1000-10000 pings

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms homeportal.gateway.2wire.net [172.16.0.1]
2 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1
3 13 ms 15 ms 12 ms bras8-l0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.184.84]
4 12 ms 11 ms 23 ms dist2-vlan50.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.97.67]
5 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms bb2-10g2-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.42.102]

6 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms bb1-p13-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.191.57]

7 12 ms 12 ms 13 ms bb1-p4-0.crsfca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.41.5]
8 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms ex1-p14-0.eqsjca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.41.10]
9 13 ms 20 ms 14 ms sl-st20-sj-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.223.242.81]
10 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms sl-st21-sj-1-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.67]
11 15 ms 15 ms 14 ms 144.232.9.206
12 19 ms 19 ms 18 ms tbr1-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.189]
13 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms gar3-p360.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.157]
14 23 ms 23 ms 24 ms mdf1-gsr12-2-pos-7-0.lax1.attens.net [12.122.255
.254]
15 25 ms 25 ms 25 ms mdf1-bi8k-1-eth-2-1.lax1.attens.net [12.129.192.
250]
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.

he has a friggin 25ms ping to blizzards WAN.

 

[dirtboy]

Originally posted by: Leper Messiah
There is a reason I stoppped playing WoW. Everytime I got to Iron Forge, *BAM* Lag. I've seen Lineage II Free shard servers run better than that...

My roommate had that problem until he upgraded his computer. Now he has no lag in IF.

 

[CKent]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Blizzard has the worst IT staff in existance. Sony's Everquest 2 Maintenance takes a fraction of this time. Their servers never lagged or randomly crashed in the 4 months i played EQ2. I even played on a heavy pop EQ2 server. The low pop WoW servers had far more problems with server lag (my ping was <100) and disconnects.

Too bad EQ2 sucks

 

[cmdrmoocow]

On a university network connected by a pair of T3's, we've managed to avoid this problem. It might have something to do with the backbone that we're connected to being corporately related to Blizzard or some oddball thing like it.

I'll post a traceroute later tonight if you're still interested.