I remember praising this game back in the good old days because of how well it performed but it’s a complete and utter mess right now.
Loading screens are ridiculous, the entire environment needs ages to fully load, same with the UI, camera is stuck when you’re mounting after a loading screen, game is unplayable with more than 25 players because it’s so laggy and this is not even it.
What happened? When did this happen? And no, it’s definitely not my PC.
What you say is true, except that it is your PC - or more accurately, the devs feel that they don’t want customers with PCs like yours.
I’m sure your PC is fine. But the devs only want customers who don’t settle for “fine”, but go for “latest gamer bling”.
I had a PC that was fine, performed as you describe, until it stopped working in WoW altogether in BfA. It’s still fine; it just won’t run BfA. So I got a new PC, which does handle WoW BfA. You should try Classic, btw, just to compare the performance difference.
I know that some people have the conspiracy theory that Bobby Kotick is behind so many development outcomes, but if I was Bobby Kotick, and sticking my finger in the WoW pie, the FIRST thing I would do is demand that WoW be playable on PCs that are “fine”, so that they don’t lose so many subs to people who just can’t keep up with the hardware requirements.
The devs want you to pay for an SSD to deal with loading, and a later CPU and GPU. Oh, and probably more memory so they don’t have to optimise their bloated code or cut the budget on their precious pixels.
At least some of the lag when a zone is crowded, though, is not about your PC; it’s about their addiction to adding random procs. There’s a video from Preach Gaming on YouTube going around at the moment explaining that.
Is that still the case? I know in legion dalaran had really long loading screens even for people with fairly good computers but I haven’t played much of BfA.
Yeah. I went into BfA with the machine that carried me through Legion ok, and it just got worse. 8.1 was the wall. 8.1 was when my old PC just couldn’t handle WoW any more, even with zero addons, minimum settings.
I have this PC now just because of WoW. I neither need nor want it otherwise. It makes WoW a VERY expensive pastime.
I have a i9-9900k, rtx 2080, 32 gb ram, wow is on my ssd. Loading screens are insanely long. In classic I can barely see the loading screen before the game is loaded though.
The only catch would be if the SSD controller has problem with compressed data and/or handling access to such (WoW CASC files). You can check the SSD percentile performance by like running userbenchmark before WoW and then while the game is loading Dalaran or alike. Or just watch in MS Process Explorer the I/O caused by wow.exe.
How am I supposed to run that during loading when it takes ages to run the thing?
“236% is an exceptional SSD score. This drive is suitable for heavy workstation use, it will facilitate fast boots, responsive applications and allow for fast transfers of multi-gigabyte files.”
WoW is the only game with a problem. It’s been like this on all computers I’ve had over the years and I seriously doubt all of them have had problems.
Just an experiment: Disable ALL addons and try your loading screens.
Addons load during the loading screens, and any conflicts they experience lengthen the process. Worth one try just to see if it makes a difference. If it does, you have somewhere to start investigating.
alt-tab out of the game while it’s loading a zone. Also the Process Explorer will draw charts so you can just launch it, load a zone and then alt-tab to see results.
No you are currently miss informed YouTube all the examples with high end low end and medium gaming rigs and laptops.
Something deeper is going on with the load and lag in game far beyond computers and internet.
For instance witcher 3 which is far more demanding runs on ultra as does overwatch with 0 problems and near instant loads where wow can have up to 1-3 minutes of load times even more in alot of cases reported and lag in raids which make the game unplayable.
Devs that used to work on Wow have All but confirmed the game engine cannot handle what’s being thrown at it and are surprised its still functioning this well.
If you take all the reports and complaints into consideration across all price points this is nothing to do with hardware.
The best theory is alot of it is with the amount of rng and effects which are now in place and layered on each other.
Go back and watch the world first race for NY alotha these guys have crazy low ping and ultra high end machines and it was on show for everyone to see, live.
Why? I only play WoW. I don’t care about PC/Console gaming. What is wrong about having Potato to just play WoW like we used to do? Also don’t get me started on how they stopped Mac support.
If I wanted to play Activisions games like Call of Duty then maybe I will need to ‘invest’ in my gaming PC every 5 years…
I had a similar experience, except that my old i5 did run BfA well enough. I had to be really careful with addons and keep a close eye on CPU temperature, but it ran it.
The motherboard died and I had to replace the CPU as well, so I bought a 2nd gen ryzen 5 (couldn’t afford the latest one) and the difference is incredible. I still get some lag and slow loading now and then, but nothing like as bad as it was, so when it happens I know it’s their end and not mine.
In my experience, an overlooked cause of slow loading is an intel CPU with inadequate cooling. It doesn’t matter what the clock speed is, they’re really finicky about getting hot.