More warcraft stuff. Tuesday nights are raiding nights, so … surprisingly, on Wednesdays I’m still thinking about warcraft.
So, one thing Blizzard doesn’t really warn you about is the hidden boss in every encounter… Latency.
There are a few fights that are very latency driven: Frogger, which is … well, old style Frogger, but with slimes. (It’s not actually CALLED Frogger, and it’s not technically a fight, or a boss — just annoying slimes that move across the screen like semi trucks, and if they touch you, you die.) And Heigan, a fight I actually really enjoy, but if you’re lagging too much, you’ll get eaten by lava.
My latency last night SUCKED. It wasn’t consistent either… most of the time I’d be fine, and therefore lulled into a false sense of security, then all of a sudden I’d be dead and wondering why. Oh… lagspike. Huh.
Case in point: I never, ever die on Heigan. Except, at one point, we get a transition to phase 2, I run over to position 1, and get ready to go. Huh, I think. This is taking longer than usual… and I’m about to say something to Nick when all of a sudden everything catches up, I’ve got a faceful of lava, the rest of the group is two lava walls away. I start running like hell and trying to bubble so I can get out of this mess, but it’s too late: Dead.
Fuck.
Second case: Frogger. Ever since I figured out the “stay close to the slime on the right” trick, it worked like a charm. I don’t die in Frogger. And, actually, I didn’t technically die while doing Frogger the first time. But then when I had to run back into Frogger to rez someone who DID die, and my attempt at getting back killed me. Crap. Again, had to be latency driven — I was exactly where I always am…
Third, most annoying case, since it caused a full wipe and not just my pride to be injured: Grobbulus. So, Grobbulus is a big abomination who drops big puddles of poison behind him. So, the tank kites him slowly around the room, letting him drop his poisons with nice big gaps in between them. The reason for the gaps is that he also periodically injects a random player with a mutagen that, after a few seconds, explodes and drops a new poison.
Having poisons in the middle of the room is bad. There’s a lot of movement in this fight. So, the gaps behind Grobb are there for people who’ve been injected to run, drop their poison, then run out. Easy peasy. We usually have one or two poisons dropped in the middle of the room, especially toward the end of the fight when they start coming fast & furious, but the concept is pretty simple. I usually call out who’s got the mutagen on our voice server, so people have no excuse for not noticing.
Except… I lagged out. Nick & I both got hit with a heavy lagspike (not good — I’m a healer, he’s the main tank, both of these are fairly important roles) … and he managed to recover, but I got disconnected. Crap on a stick.
So, took me a minute, but I got back in, and miracle of miracles: I wasn’t dead. Wow. So, I continue where I left off, and I get a mutagen. No problem, I run for a perfect spot, the debuff clears, I run out… and then I die. Wait. WHAT? What the FUCK? I was at full health a second ago!
I check my combat log, and sure enough, I took a bunch of poison ticks that never appeared on my end. I’m still staring at my combat log in disbelief wondering how I could have taken poison damage from something that wasn’t there, and all of a sudden the poison cloud pops up on my screen. Oh, there you are. Sure enough, the rest of the group wiped shortly after.
It’s surprisingly difficult to avoid things that YOU CAN’T SEE.
Screw you, Latency Boss. You may have beaten me this time, but I will beat you in the end!
The topic of latency & boss / raid encounters has come up in the MMO blogosphere recently. Relmstein weighed it in (IMHO correctly) as a design issue:
http://relmstein.blogspot.com/2009/01/should-developers-design-raids-around.html
In Blizzard’s defense, I was experiencing worse than usual latency. There’s no reason they SHOULD design around that. If I get disconnected midfight, I probably SHOULD die. (The fact that I didn’t was nothing short of a miracle.)
And… hell, I think fights like Thaddius DO take latency into account. There’s a good 4-5 second “freebie” time when the polarities switch before you start taking damage. Since it only takes a second or two (if you’re on the ball, which you should be) to get into the right position, there’s an extra 2 seconds or so of “gimme” time. Might not sound like much, but when you really only have to move 10 yards… as long as you’re not experiencing CRAZY lag, then I think that’s perfectly reasonable.
And crazy lag, I’ve found, is pretty rare. I run a pretty low-end computer, albeit I have a decent connection. I suspect someone connecting overseas, for example, would have less luck. (And I remember the cries from the Australians before they got their own servers.)
Still, I would rather Blizzard keep designing interesting fights that require coordination, timing, and half a brain — I *love* the variety of awesome fights in Naxx. The occasional lagspike is annoying, but with standard latency, none of the fights are impossible … ok, except maybe Frogger. :D
Well it’s also been a problem on some of the overpopulated servers where latency has been an issue server-side.
But also to be fair to Blizzard, they display pings clearly in the interface. In other games it’s sometimes an obscure option, or worse in Warhammer they don’t give any sort of ping / latency info at all (which frankly, I found irresponsible, it’s like a free out when the server is having troubles).