Duilliath

Would seem Healbot rather than Pallypower. Here's a snip of what I caught in last night's raid.

//edit: Snipped the image and replaced it with a link. It was a wee bit huge in size.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

burghy

/script SendAddonMessage = function() end should disable all the communication until the player reloads ui and it's probably a lot easier to convince people to do that.

 

Rustyboy

Just thought I would pass this information on, basically I use a modest computer. Pentium IV 3Ghz, 2GB RAM and Gefore 8800GS Video Card. I have been having all sorts of issues and I've used every tweak I can. Issues range from lagging out as soon as I load up wow into dalaran, locking up randomly while flying or just moving around dalaran when its busy.

I've trimmed down my combat log, tweaked the registry, lowered my graphics down etc. Ever since I been playing games, I've always been told disable vsync because it ruins performance. I realise vsync limits your frame rate etc, so if your on a beast of a machine then disabling it is a good thing, however if your running a low-mid range computer I suggest you try it. I changed the setting and since I have not been getting stuttering or lag outs, its like the game has a new lease on life.

I'm not too sure if this has been mentioned before, although I think most guides say disable vsync. The reason why I think this has made a major impact is that cpu/graphics power is not being nuked because of the un-capped framerate and is now enabling the game to process all those thousands of messages which the client is receiving especially during load up and moving through high traffic areas.

Well it worked for me.

EDIT : FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN NOT READ IE. BELOW, I'M SAYING IF YOU HAVE A LOW/MID RANGE PC AND ARE SUFFERING ISSUES WITH DC'S AND STUTTERING IN DALARAN MAKE SURE YOU ENABLE VSYNC. You also may need to check your video card driver settings as sometimes if can be set to ignore applications from enabling it.

- I'm saying enable it for low-mid range pc's which have major lag/dc issues especially when loading into high traffic areas, it will stop the video choking your CPU so it can process the stuff that causes the bottleneck in the first place.

- Actually enabling vsync is freeing up my cpu.

- Go to a real gaming performance website for people who run the latest machines ie. (TweakGuides.com), disable vsync is always the standard as 99% of the time it does not cause any visible tearing etc. vsync limits your fps at about 30/60, which is bad for a computer which can handle the game at 100.

 

chaud

Disabling vsync is pointless unless you are on a very old computer and don't mind jerky graphics. It limits your framerate while also smoothing it out. Vsync and triple buffering should almost always be on.

AnandTech: Triple Buffering: Why We Love It

 

Brodrik

If your computer can handle the game at 100 fps, then you certainly should have vsync on. At high framerates, vsync just limits framerate to your monitor's redraw rate. If you can only draw 75 frames a second, the only thing a higher framerate can do is give you screens that are part one frame and part the next frame (screen tearing).

The reason vsync off is standard for gaming performance sites is that you can't measure your framerate with vsync on -- your framerate will always cap out at your monitor refresh rate, which makes it pretty hard to do performance comparisons.

 

burghy

It's not as simple as that and it's a bit annoying that the link to an excellent article has to be paired with some hasty conclusions.

First of all WoW is not a game that favors tearing. Also the fps tends to vary a lot and when it happens to be close to the refresh value the effect of vsync is quite brutal. Jumps between 30 and 60 fps at a simple camera turn aren't fun.
Now if you read 3rd page of that article and then the tooltip for triple buffering option in wow (at least in DirectX mode) seems very likely that their implementation is the render ahead queue and not the opengl version with frame dropping that minimizes input lag.

Oh, and vsync + triple buffering won't help you at all if you are trying to get the optimization Rustyboy suggests. Only normal (double buffered) vsync reduces the number of frames rendered which not only lowers the cpu used for graphics but also the cpu used by addons that rely on OnUpdate calls.

 

Rustyboy

Having a discussion about VSync being enabled/disabled is distracting.

- Its also the reason why gamers disable it (primarily first person shooter players), so they can get 100+ fps and better hit registration and to maximize the performance on the computer they just spent $2500 (AU) on instead of being capped at the monitors refresh rate (75 for LCD's). I should also mention I run CRT's which handle up to 120Hz.

I posted this because of the excellent article (<- LINK) posted on these forums about improving performance.

It stated that...

However, there may be people like me who have it disabled and by enabling VSync/Triple buffering I have improved the stability and performance on the 30 odd computers I have at my gaming center dramatically. TBH I not that worried about losing a few frames when I'm raiding, but getting dc'd randomly and having to try and reconnect for 10-15 mins is a pain in the butt.

I'm not particularly interested in the theory craft behind video settings, I do what works and I'm sure there are lots of people who do as well. Its just something to try and I hope it helps someone.

 

chaud

That is for benchmarks and not WoW, I am just talking about wow.

Try turning off vsync and spinning in circles or moving around your camera quickly. It is fairly likely you will see tearing. Input lag in wow isn't really an issue, and if you are worried about the tiny difference it may make, I hope you are doing everything else perfectly, as it has very little impact on gameplay. Apparently you haven't ever had problems with microstuttering either.

What possible reason would you turn vsync off for in WoW (with a reasonable computer)?

 

Brodrik

Regardless of how much you spend on a computer, you won't see more than 75 distinct frames in a second if you have a 75 Hz refresh rate, regardless of your settings. You could have some screen-frames with parts of multiple rendered frames on them, but the effect of this for the player is nonexistant. Human reflexes are tenths of seconds -- just the signal from brain to hand takes about 20 ms.

 

Myrdinn

Does anyone have a clue how to solve that ?
We had a very hard time too this evening regarding this and we were 3/4 chain d/c each time we pulled Gormok...

 

Arghoslent

Something has changed... Yesterday we had completely new people disconnecting, people who did not have ANY problems before. Some of those who DC'ed last time didn't this time. I wonder when my turn is coming.

 

Bluegene

Our guild do suffer the same problem that a few people will randomly DC on Gormok pull, we rarely have chance for full 25-men strength good try on heroic beast. Don't think is related to machine hardware because 1 of the DC member actually has very advance machine (i7-950 or 975?, SSD raid etc).

Anyway i have installed AddonSpamFU trying to monitor see if there is any abnormal heavy spam at the background channels. Normally DotTimer and CarboniteQuest are 2 of the addon that spam much more than others, recently we had a new mage applicant join us, on AddonSpamFU he has this particular spam from GSY, like 5~10 times more than DotTimer and CarboniteQuest, and i cannot figure out coming from which addon he is using. I have notice this GSY a few times from some random 5-men heroic daily pug people too.

Does anyone has any idea which addon included this GSY that spam so much more than others?

 

◊ Bryne

I'm pretty sure GSY is GearScore, a terrible mod that ranks player gear and spams the guild and raid comm channels with that information.

 

• Goatbert

This Gormok disconnecting is driving me insane - we can't get an attempt without 2-3 people DCing with all mods disabled, I'm monitoring traffic with SpamFu, we aren't using rocket poots/pet charge/feral charge/charge etc. Makes attempting it completely pointless. Has there been anything official about this and the Thorim issue?

 

Arghoslent

Welcome to my world mate. We run a script to disable addon traffic, there is almost NO traffic. Yet, we NEVEr have more than 22-23 online during any given attempt. It hurts to be losing against game code, instead of bosses.

 

Gruturistic

To give you an idea of how low it is now, here's a spamfu screenie from about 7-8 pulls. Apart from Healcomm data, the only people with non-insignificant traffic are those who disconnected a few times thus lost the effect of the script command to disable addon traffic (for which I forgot to thank burghy!)



Strangely enough LibHealComm-3 seems to go through regardless of disabling traffic, maybe there's more than 1 function to do it? Anyway as you can see we're down to literally a few hundred bytes, yet people still drop like flies when pulling Gormok.
Being 30+ yds away, facing a wall and staying like this for a few seconds at every pull seems to mitigate but definitely not solve the issue.

 

burghy

Are you making sure the affected people aren't using any software that "hijacks" the network drivers? I remember having issues at good old Thaddius with the firewall module from some antivirus and someone else in guild had same issue due to Ad Muncher.

 

Jayde

Even if it's not Blizzard's fault per se, obviously something has changed and there is something specific with Gormok which causes this to be worse than anywhere else in the game.

We have tried basically everything, having people reinstall, disable addons, the whole nine yards and still experience significant issues on Gormok every week. Some people consistantly disconnect, who cannot seem to find any resolution and others just get randomly disconnected with no pattern to it that we can see.

For instance, I have disconnected with Icehowl at 20% or so two weeks in a row. Same timing, exact same point in the fight. The game allows me to reconnect more or less right away, and I do not have trouble on any other fight other than occassionally on Anub as well. I don't think I had disconnected mid-raid in over a year prior to 3.2, and have had it happen at least 5-10 times in the last 3 weeks.

All I can say is that from our point of view we have tried various tactics with basically no success. So either there is something floating around there that nobody has noticed yet (seems unlikely at this point) or Blizzard needs to patch and fix something. Every guild on our server has said the same thing, that they have to deal with at least 2-3 disconnects on Gormok every attempt.

 

Casstor

I looked at these things a bunch last night, and we did an hour or so of experimenting. We had healers turn their healing addons off entirely, and then, one-by-one, turn them back on. Initially, when they got turned off, the d/cing issue stopped. As we slowly brought the healer addons back on, the d/cing did not re-occur. We were baffled. Then after a half hour of playing normally, the d/cing started happening again - about every other fight.

Every day I do this fight, it is someone new who d/ces. There is seemingly no connection.

Also, it is worth noting - right before the player disconnects, (i.e. at the beginning of the fight) guess what's going on in the addon channels? The answer is: Nothing.

My bet is that there is something wrong and unstable with the fight itself server-side, and that Blizzard simply isn't going to fess up about it until they have a fix ready. Going through the motions with this fight when the odds are good on any given pull that we'll be down a dps or two is one of the more frustrating experiences in raiding for me.....

 

Shandara

Our people also get random d/c's more often, not always connected to fighting Gormokk.

I run WoW from an SSD, so load times are extremely fast. I've had a few instances where I'd have no latency problems, slowdowns, just generally fast playing and suffered a D/C. Logging back in takes less than a second with WoW on the SSD and the connection to the login-server and world-server seemed to have no problems either. I can usually just continue play even during raids without dying.

This is what others in my guild/friends report as well. Play is fine without undue lag but they just get kicked from the server. No amount of addon fiddling has brought relief to this.

WotLK Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

 

◊ Cadfael

That may be, but it may also be something else. As far as I know there are things like invisible (de-)buffs, that serve as things like markers. They never show up in the combat log nor do you ever see them in the client. Also your addons don't see them. Yet they are information transferred. It isn't so much that addons really cause the problem, it's more that the addons worsen it with their information transmissal.

I can't actually speak for this specific case since I stopped raiding hc pre-Ulduar, and now only do a bit of PuG's and none ever took me into TotC-25 with the char I've been playing a bit casually since. But if you really want to try to solve this puzzle, I would start with the combat-log and try to see if you are having aura-pulses that wear on and off people massively that cause some D/Cs. Like people getting pushed to the edge of the arena and thus losing and reaquiring paladin auras all the time and such things. That can also cause massive buff gain/fade events broadcasted to everyone and cause problems at people with what I would describe as bad network connectivity (for the lack of a better term).

"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through with the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there were some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."

 

◊ atomics

This is a nice page with a lot of Windows Vista registry and network tweaks that may help peeps also:

SpeedGuide.net :: Windows Vista / 2008 Tweaks

 

• Praanz

Is there any similar script to stop receiving addon msg's?

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire.

You have not to move out of the fire, it will be nerfed soon.

 

Tanoh

No, you will always receive messages as the server will always send them to you. Only way to fix this would be if blizzard added some option for it, as the server has to decide if it's going to send you things or not it can't be solved on client side.

It's similar to: You can chose to not speak to people, but you can't chose to not hear them speak to you (unless you use some special aid, albeit as simple as hands over ears)

 

Lambourne

I had this exact issue, normal ping times but random DCs in random locations (during raid encounters, during heroics between pulls, standing around dalaran doing nothing etc) and I could also log back in immediately.

This thread helped me solve it: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> *FIX* Constant Disconnection Issues *FIX*

Turns out it's caused by a corruption of the game's data files, namely patch.mpq and patch-2.mpq (in the data subdirectory). I moved them to a separate folder and had the repair tool redownload and repatch everything overnight. The new patch.mpq I got wasn't even the same size as the old one so I have no idea why blizzard's repair tool didn't pick this up in the first place. My old (bad) patch.mpq was 3.911.336 kb, the newer correct version is 3.910.853 kb (euro English version, probably the same as US version)

Since I did this fix I disconnected once, in about 12 hours of playing including 3 raids. Before I was getting disconnected at least once per hour, so for now I'm calling it fixed.