*THIS IS FOR EVERYONE WHO IS SUFFERING DISCONNECTS SINCE 3.2.X*

reposted from my local gaming community forums

I came back to WoW last week. Same old story mostly with the lag in raids and major cities. 800ms+ in cities, and spikes leading to DC in raid.

Especially TOC25 normal -- Gormok = DC (guaranteed), then cannot log back on without insta-DC again. Random DCs and generally lagginess including MASSIVE FPS lag on most boss fights. Anub was like a 3fps lag fiesta.

Luckily, <LoTH> has its own tunneling servers that its raiders can enjoy, and this definitely helped. But still LOTS of random lag, DCs and fps problems. And, the very frequent "server hopping" to find a "well behaved" tunneling server, would often take the joy out of the game.

Imagine in raid, "Hang on, give me 5 minutes, i need to find a good server to switch to". Damn embarassing to have 24 people wait on you.

I think my situation has just about described the scenario a lot of us are facing. Game is somewhat playable, but only if a good tunneling service is used.

So i did some research to find out what the problem was. Ever since the latest patches have been released, many people are feeling the same. My digging revealed some changes i could make to improve my experience. So i made these changes last night for my first togc25 heroic (too me a week to gear up enough to be useful in this raid), and OOOOOHHHHBOOOOY did they make a helluva of a big difference.

Here is what i did.

1. Remove Recount. Some guildies said that disabling synching in Recount helps, so if you insist on keeping Recount loaded (or any other combat log tracker), you can type /recount synch to disable it from trying to synch with other players' Recount.

2. Disable Blizzard Combat Log.

Right-click your combat log tab. "Self", "What happened to me", "Everything". Click on each of those, and then click through each of the sub-tabs and disable EVERYTHING. Make it so that NOTHING appears on your combat log.

I had Scrolling Combat Text installed, and that still worked fine even with my combat log off.

3. Install this addon. http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/fu-bar_addon-spam-fu.aspx

This amazing addon allows you to monitor addon message traffic from your raid members. What you want to do is to MINIMIZE this traffic.

For me, making this change was the LARGEST single factor that made everything run so smoothly last night.

Many addons have secret "whisper" programs that we cannot see. They whisper other players in the raid/party for all sorts of information. Pallypower wants to find out who is buffing who, or who needs a buff. Healbot wants to find out if your current heal target is receiving an incoming heal from another source. Gearscore whispers you to find out what your gear is like. DBM whispers you "MOVE OUT OF THE FIRE NUBCAKE". etc etc etc.

The problem is, many of these mods do the whispering extremely inefficiently, thus leading to massive, MASSIVE spamming of your client with data.

A mod like Gearscore (stupidest ever mod ever created) spams you with whisper requests every second ALL the time, and because your client response is pretty large (info about all your gear), thats a heck of a lot of traffic moving between you and the other player with Gearscore installed. Imagine both of you have Gearscore installed. You'll be spamming each other with requests and data. The only way to block the spam is /ignore, but that's something you can't really do in a raid.

WORSE still, mods like Gearscore not only affect the performance of the person who has it installed, it adversely affects the person who DOESN'T have it installed -- the mod spams you with data and requests, and if your connection cannot take the load, then you will DC; the person with the mod installed may have a better connection and therefore may not lag or get DC'ed.

So last night, i ran this mod and found half a dozen people in the raid with offending mods that were practically spamming the raid with data/requests. A raider with just DBM installed has a footprint of just 200-300bytes (multiply that by 25, and its still hardly 5kb of data a second -- most connections can handle that no problem).

But some raiders had footprints of 100kb of data. Multiply that by 6 - thats 600kb of data moving through the raid per second!!!! Thats 600kb extra that your clients need to download, process and respond to. Plus the stress of the incoming data and processing from the actual encounter itselt - its no wonder that ppl DC.

In our raid, the worse offender was Gearscore. It was a massive data spammer. We got everyone to switch it off. The addon lets us know in real-time how much data spam is coming and going, so even when we had to swap raiders later on in the night, we could monitor the newcomers and told them which mods we wanted them to switch off (Gatherer is another big offender).

And that's all i did.

Last night, LoTH tunnels were acting up, so i had to raid without them. I RAIDED WITHOUT TUNNELS. Never thought i'd hear myself say that.

Result: 25man TOGC 400ms smooth as silk throughout the whole night (up to Faction Champs). Had one DC at the end during Anub when we did 25man TOC, but that's to be expected i suppose -- my local ISP generally sucks, nothing will change that. But otherwise, one DC the whole night? Smooth gameplay for the other 4 hours? Yes pls.

DISCLAIMER: I don't guarantee that these steps will work for you. I'm just sharing my experiences. It worked for ME and my raid (overall, fewer DCs last night than normal, no doubt thanks to identifying which addons were spamming the raid). If it doesn't work for you, pls don't shoot the messenger.

If this works for you, please help spread the word to your guild and/or others who are suffering the same.

NOTE: My PC is 3-years old. Top of the line back then, but quite dated now. 2GB ram, 7800GTX graphics card.

Btw, this is where i got most of the info for this.

http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t40955-wow_performance_issues_tweaks_etc/p21/

Didn't bother with the registry hack (coz i'm dumb and dunno how to do it).

This should be bumped and stickied for justice. Especially for those that are claiming that the addons are not at the root of many issues.

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Q u o t e:
This should be bumped and stickied for justice. Especially for those that are claiming that the addons are not at the root of many issues.

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but then they wouldn't read it....

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Q u o t e:
Didn't bother with the registry hack (coz i'm dumb and dunno how to do it).

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Sure you can. If you can point and click, you can do the registry hack. My latency is down to roughly 12ms now.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13581-LeatrixLatencyFix.html

It's no use posting all of this info... they're all too busy complaining to see this thread.

The ones that do see this thread, however, will probably look at the info and not install the addon you posted, saying that they're not going to force their guildmates to turn off their addons/ignore them... even though several other people have posted they have done the same and it worked for them. It's their fault if they want to keep wiping on content has a limited amount of attempts.

I will try this, although I fully expect to feel like a complete dumbass asking guildmates in a guild I just joined to disable addons, when I'm the only one having issues.

edit: Is there any way to disable their addons from asking me for information without disabling them?

You should run the addon, and just /ignore any player who sends you too much information. That should work without them disabling their addons.

Ah, good idea.

OMGG!! After friggin 2 weeks of constant 1000+ms latency finally a SOLUTION!

THANKS ALOT!! I personally think the fubar spam addon is the most useful.

Latency down from 1000+ constant red to 150-200ms GREEN!

After 10minutes in game, so far so good, will be updating status

tried this, and so far it's working great. however, it's still early and i haven't hit a raid setting yet, so i'll be sure to keep y'all posted.

My latency is the same, but it was fine before, usually. Hopefully this can help clean up some of the spam going on during raids.

bump. lets keep this up there

We only did about 9 attempts tonight, but I did not disconnect at all. From what I could see on the FuBar monitoring addon, there weren't really any ridiculous amounts of requests being sent my way. Healbot (and some other healing mod, not sure) sent a fair few, but nothing large enough that would cause me to disconnect.

Halfway through the night, I enabled Recount and continued to have no issues. So, not sure if it was dumb luck or what but tonight was smooth sailing.

So the only way to block their traffic is through the ingame /ignore?

Awesome awesome post. Thanks so much for taking the time to share this with the communty!

So far this seems to have solved my issues. I'll be giving it more testing the next few days as I raid more and see if I still have the issues.

Just hope blizzard enables a way to block all incoming addon requests so that I dont have to put all my friends and raiding buddies on ignore for that time. Not to mention the ignore list has a low limit of 20 or 25 players I believe, and Gearscore seems to be sending data to me even though I do not have it and am not in a party/raid with them, just in the same guild.

I wanted to add to this topic. I have been experiencing random DCs. However, tonight I was tanking (offspec) and DCing on every pull. We had one of the dps switch to tank spec and continued, and I continued to have problems DCing every pull. I played with mods to no avail. Eventually, I went back to resto spec and gear, and just hurricaned. No DC. I think maybe this has something to do with determining melee range? Happened on almost every time I hit swipe, but still occurred when I didnt.

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Q u o t e:
So far this seems to have solved my issues. I'll be giving it more testing the next few days as I raid more and see if I still have the issues.

Just hope blizzard enables a way to block all incoming addon requests so that I dont have to put all my friends and raiding buddies on ignore for that time. Not to mention the ignore list has a low limit of 20 or 25 players I believe, and Gearscore seems to be sending data to me even though I do not have it and am not in a party/raid with them, just in the same guild.

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my guild has recently banned Gearscore while raids are running. No one in the GUILD is allowed to have it running, irregardless if they are in the raid or not.

anyone who is caught with it running gets a -50dkp. lol.

Its not just mods/addons.

REMEMBER TO DISABLE YOUR COMBAT LOG TOO.