Here's why the server lags and people can't tell what's going on in combat

[Alýsea-azjolnerub]

@Álaric-mirage-raceway

though they’ve gotten pretty good at them now.

Considering BFA is still lvl 50, 130 ilvl in most of its content past 8.0, I don’t know if they’re good, but they clearly don’t care about a good experience for people below max level that do something other than the leveling questlines. Same goes for shadowlands, etc. They could leave the items in their leveling gear power even. They aren’t doing that much. So yeah, I’m not looking forward to a potential squish, because Shadowlands did not launch in a great squished state and neither will Midnight be considering the quality of the current expansion.

@Incisor-moonglade

Let man have dreams, woman.

I don’t think lying to you will do you favours but I hope you get something that makes you happy in either case : D

[Exiasee-eonar (Exiasee)]

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

Ha, I doubt it. Have you actually seen DotA, LoL, and Fortnite? Less abilities and powerups happen in the span of 10 minutes in either of those games than happens in 1 minute in WoW.

I’ll be honest, every snippet of gameplay that is “recommended” or that some friends forward me or that I see randomly on social media is usually of players spamming stuff and performing 200+ apm and large explosions and huge numbers appearing on screen (huge as in size compared to the screen, not huge in value).

[Álaric-mirage-raceway]

i agree i just copy pasted what was said and rolled my eyes at the got pretty good part.

[Someoneelse-xavius (Someoneelse)]

@Ishayo-tarren-mill

Remember, even if you hide these numbers, the server still has to process them and the animations on characters still play. That’s our problem. Right there.

Not exactly. The road to getting those number would be what put stress on the server. One single damage number could be much more complicated that multiple damage numbers.

But hey, we wanted more talents.

@Alýsea-azjolnerub

And everyone does a million numbers.

That’s not how computers work. A number 10 would take the same time a 10 billion.

[Ishayo-tarren-mill]

@Someoneelse-xavius

Not exactly. The road to getting those number would be what put stress on the server. One single damage number could be much more complicated that multiple damage numbers.

Uhm… yes, okay, sure. But most numbers require the same amount of computation - and many of them are created by procs, which require computation twice. First to see if they appear, then again to see what they do.

But yeah, sure - there’s a bunch of procs that aren’t numbers so you’re not wrong, but it’s also nice to see it visualized just how crazy it is, even if it doesn’t catch everything. Everybody already knows about the number of icons on the buff displays - no need to go through that again.

@Someoneelse-xavius

But hey, we wanted more talents.

Big misconception.

Sure, I was one of the people who asked for talent trees, but I didn’t ask to have 3 of them active simultaneously or to pay 1-2 points per talents. The last time we had a system like this, we had either half the talents or a cost of 3-5 points per talent.

Furthermore, a lot of the talents are what I’m sure they like to call “interesting”, in that they do some kind of proc. But back in the day, most of the talents were flat buff to something. It was a power gain and it changed how you played, but it wasn’t a proc.

It would be talents like Lonely Winter or Wintertide, and each of those would have been 5 points, or 10 levels worth of talents, as opposed to now where that’s 3 levels worth of talents and we have more talent points.

Talents like Thermal Void would have been “Icy Veins duration is increased by 5 sec.” and that whole last part with Ice Lances against frozen targets extending it just wouldn’t have been there at all.

There were a couple of talents here or there would caused some sort of procs, but most of them were just lower mana cost or higher damage or shorter cast time or more armor etc. etc.

@Someoneelse-xavius

That’s not how computers work. A number 10 would take the same time a 10 billion.

Depends on the bit width of the processor. Given we all use 64-bit these days, as long as the number can be represented accurately enough in 64 bits, we’re good.

I think Blizzard might have switched to double precision floats on the server side (still ints on our side) to do all their smooth scaling, in which case errors can very easily accumulate at just 10 digits in the mantissa. A single calculation will almost always be wrong by the 16th position. So I think they’re actively trying to avoid billions because I think that’s the point where they worry about losing precision.

It’s okay for bosses with dozens of people hitting them. Nobody can tell. But for a player? Ehhh, not too good.

[Exiasee-eonar (Exiasee)]

@Someoneelse-xavius

That’s not how computers work. A number 10 would take the same time a 10 billion.

I have seen this mentioned so many times, but it applies only on a special case: It only applies on addition, subtraction or multiplication of integer inputs/outputs that are equal in size or smaller than the word size a processor is designed to work with.

Time required to output the division of 2 numbers does depend on position of leftmost “1” bit.
Time required to do calculation with floating-point arithmetic does depend on position of leftmost “1” bit.
Time required to do any calculation with inputs/outputs that are larger than the word of the processor does depend on position of leftmost “1” bit.

The difference in execution time is not large but it is non-zero. It’s not even noticeable easily with our house computers if you write a piece of code of making an operation and then repeating it on loop for 1 billion times, since other factors do matter there, mostly stuff from the operating system.

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Also another tidbit that we were taught when being taught both C/C++ and SQL: If possible, try to make structs/unions and tables have a total length that is a power of 2, even if it wastes some space. It speeds up seeking calculations.