I’m not sure what lead Blizzard to this, whether it is a conscious decision or rather management stifling engineer voices in the company, but the way class design is right now makes the game not playable in MMO settings anymore.
Have you tried having a 20v20 fight in Korrak’s Revenge recently? Absolutely unplayable because of the lag. If you tried the same thing on the classic era servers, it would be pretty much lag-free.
Anybody that has taken a first year computer science university class understands why.
Half the damn classes have a dozen pets, every class has a ridiculous number of damage ticks per second from various dots, procs, automatic spell effects etc.
Every time a spell effect occurs, the server has to send it to all the clients (players).
If you have 10 players casting AoE at 10 other players with 1 tick per second (and vice versa), that’s 200 bits of information per second that has to be sent to 20 players = 4000 bits of information per second to be sent by the server
If you increase this to a 20 v 20, this number already rises to 16000 messages per second to be sent by the server.
128000 messages per second for a 40 v 40.
This is known in computer science as a O(n²) problem, or I guess you could even call it O(n³) for the case of AoE.
No amount of server hardware will help. How can Blizzard keep adding more and more pets to classes, as well as more and more procs, dots etc that will inflate this number a whole lot, knowing that the game is a MMO?
My wish would be Blizz/MS making a new modern engine that’s able to handle all that and is optimised for today’s computers, and transferring all data over to it to make it a seamless transition without impacting players.
But that’ll never happen.
As it stands, WoW is a horrid Frankenstein abomination.
I’d argue that one of the primary issues is the amount of (short-lived) modifiers, not perse dots/procs/etc. Each modifier is dynamic (value), with a variable duration (thus update abilities on the fly), can stack with other modifiers, and can be affected by members in your party/raid.
Take a WW monk (just as example) and hit a target dummy. Then keep an eye out for your buffs. 2 rows (default UI) minimum. It’s absolutely mental.
Just cut the crap with all these short-lived dynamic modifiers and complicated trinkets/weapon effects/… Just stop, redesign, and make specs deal their majority of the damage from their baseline rotation and abilities.
And then it would be nice if the majority of the abilities could NOT trigger super fancy flashy AOE like visual effects. Really nice, but please, every time two raids meet at Hangar … it’s pretty much unplayable.
It did feel a bit weird when Blizzard presented Hero talents and they were basically like:
“Here’s more visual clutter added to your classes that’ll tank your game performance and make the game look like late-game Vampire Survivors on drugs. Enjoy!”
The word pruning probably still causes some WoW developers to get anxiety and panic attacks, so no one in the company dares suggest anything except adding more visuals and procs to classes.
But yeah, the gameplay is becoming pretty degenerate, because there’s just so much going on. Even when you play solo and you are fighting a damn squirrel and you look at your buffs and see the myriad of procs that have all just magically triggered from lord knows what, it’s ridiculous.
It’s not Spiritborn levels of stupid, but we’re getting there.
Special shout out to getting attacked by 20 ponies in Epic Battlegrounds because the enemy team is loaded with Death Knights. What sounds so epic in its description looks so childish in its execution. “Oh no, a Death Knight and his My Little Pony army is going to lag me to death!”
My problem with voidweaver when I play disc is that the stupid thing covers/obscures swirlies on the ground. Like, why do I need to see the effect. Why can’t I turn it off.
It’s killed me several times because I haven’t been able to see swirlies because they’re covered/obscured by the rift.
Blizzard do seem to hate simplicity. Professions had to be convolutionised as simply learning a recipe, collecting some materials and clicking Craft was not convoluted enough.
I’ve been taking out some alts for doing the Headless Horseman for the pet. Most alts I barely know what to do anymore. I just load the starter talents and hope that whatever buttons happen to be on the Action Bar do enough damage to avoid being kicked.
Classes are bloated and constantly changing. And there is no in game way to go learn how to play them. Exile’s Reach could be expanded and made accessible all the time as a tutorial. I’d like to take my druid there and learn a bit more how to play it.
Hands down the worst game change for me, I cannot stand the new crafting system. I still don’t understand what was wrong with the old one. It was clear, straight forward and useful.
Nowadays I get a headache just trying to figure the system out, nevermind gathering the mats. I feel bad for the new players who have to deal with this mess, they must be so confused.
At some point of time I started to think that I am just too old already…
I cannot track all my numbers and procs and chances to proc a proc that gives a 5 second buff for certain skill, but only if it used after another skill that proced 10 sec before that etc…
But seems I am OK, just the game critically overloaded by visual and numerical mess.
