Dnevne Blue Teme

Napisao Stevan Mitrovic. Posted in Vesti - World of Warcraft

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Bone Fishing Pole Hotfix (Source)
The item level was too high compared to the character level at which it could be used. This was updated in a hotfix on February 14.

It's not supposed to have a level 80 requirement, but it also wasn't supposed to be item level 200.

Priest
Incoming Healer Changes / Shadowpriests using Power Word: Shield (Source)
I probably don’t have the answers you’re looking for in regard to PvP, but Shadow priests already put out significant damage in PvP, and we’re ok if they’re a little bit more vulnerable as a result of this change. Discipline priests while not putting out as much damage, were still healing well and were likewise difficult to kill in PvP. As always, we’ll keep an eye out on these changes to see how they play out on the PvP end.

Generally speaking (and more to the PvE end), the Discipline tree has talents that play off of Penance, Flash Heal, Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing. It wouldn’t be strange for these priests to leverage Power Word:Barrier to help mitigate damage either should the occasion present itself. There's a solid variety of available spells to be used, and we want you to use them. Moreover we think healing as a priest will be more fun if you have to think about which spell to use rather than robotically answering each damage event with PW: Shield. Overall, we’re not reducing the power of Power Word: Shield at all, just increasing its cost and making the more efficient heals more attractive to use.

Power Word: Shield will still have its time and place and as always. We want it to be used often, we just don't want it used to the exclusion of all other abilities. We'll keep an eye on how things play out once the change is applied too.

*Someone earlier in the thread asked if this was an increase from base mana, and it is from the base mana cost.

As an aside: For those sharing constructive feedback, as always, we thank you. For those who are utilizing this thread as a means to simply complain, we hear you, but overstatements of upset aren't going to help us address your concerns. (

Power Word: Shield (Source)
We don't want Discipline priests completely reliant on a single spell or ability for everything- (as in), Shield should not be the only spell you feel worth casting. Discipline priests are still very powerful at damage mitigation and we're not trying to take away using PW:Shield on a regular basis or its value. There should still be some worth in choosing which spells to cast and when.

[...] We want people using Power Word: Shield. As others have pointed out, it's something Discipline priests do well (Damage Mitigation) and it took awhile before more people began to believe that (remember those days?). Damage Mitigation will still happen and is still important even with this change, it's just not going to be the ONLY thing that the Discipline spec is going to be using to keep their groups and Raids up. There will be heals as well. Also, in Raids, there will be more than a Discipline priest supporting the raid. So knowing the best use of your abilities in that situation is key and playing off of the strengths of other healers will be as essential as it has always been.

Again, we're continuing to watch constructive feedback even if we may not be responding to all of the questions and thoughts that have been brought up in this thread. We are definitely reading.  

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Patch 4.0.6 Hotfixevi - 15 Februar

Napisao Stevan Mitrovic. Posted in Vesti - World of Warcraft

Blizzard je postavio novu rundu hotfixeva dana, arcane mage izmene su upravo live, a Blizzard je i odlučio da je vreme da se Guild XP dobija brže od Raid bosseva.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Source)
Here you'll find a list of hotfixes that address various issues related to the recently released World of Warcraft: Cataclysm patch 4.0.6. Hotfixes are updates we make on our end without requiring you to download a new patch. Some of the hotfixes below will go live the moment they are implemented, while others may require your realm to be restarted to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch update. We will continue to update this thread in the days ahead as additional hotfixes are applied. Visit our Bug Report forum for a list of 4.0.6 known issues.

February 15
General
  • The amount of guild reputation and guild experience gained from killing a raid boss has been dramatically increased, as the previous rate felt too low compared to the difficulty of progressing through raid content. This change will require a realm restart to take effect, which will be next Tuesday's weekly scheduled maintenance at the latest.
  • Shield of Velen guards in The Exodar are now consistent with other "royal" city guards in terms of health, level, and damage.

Classes
Mage
  • Arcane Blast now costs 5% of base mana before stacking modifiers, down from 7%.

Dungeons & Raids
Baradin Hold
  • Argaloth despawns and resets properly if the raid wipes during Fel Firestorm.

Blackwing Descent
  • While flying around the Vault of the Shadowflame, Nefarian no longer forces everyone to stand up if engaged.

Throne of the Tides
  • It should no longer be possible to summon a mount in certain areas of this dungeon.

Items
  • Shard of Woe (Heroic trinket) now reduces the base mana cost of spells by 205, with the exception of Holy and Nature spells -- the base mana cost of Holy and Nature spells remains reduced by 405 with this trinket.

Professions
  • Engineering Target Dummies are no longer able to taunt boss-level creatures.

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Dnevne Blue Teme

Napisao Stevan Mitrovic. Posted in Vesti - World of Warcraft

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Epilepsy and elementals flashing death effect (Source)
We've actually seen a number of forum posts, and received a few letters on the elemental death effects. We have a task set to remove the flashes from the death effect, although as the work hasn't begun I couldn't accurately state when the change might make it in.

In any case, we agree and we're going to be changing them. 

Lag in 4.0.6 (Source)
To address these directly, we can't say what any individual ISP may look at when performing any sort of Quality of Service traffic management. There are numerous factors that a traffic management console can monitor and consider as an indicator that throttling a subscriber is required. Those settings and thresholds are between the ISP and, if they choose to divulge it, their subscribers. Blizzard is not directly privy to that information. All we can truly proffer is generic information regarding the technologies involved and how it may impact our users. 

Bandwidth requirements in the future (Source)
As far as increased bandwidth requirements, nothing 'new' is coming in the works, as far as I am aware, that will require enhanced bandwidth. Our published minimum system requirements can change at any time, depending on what improvements and innovations we introduce. What I am saying is that some issues people have been reporting have indeed been traced to their current throughput limitations. This isn't true across the board, but this is the root cause of some of the reports.  

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Patch 4.0.6 Hotfixevi - 14 Februar

Napisao Stevan Mitrovic. Posted in Vesti - World of Warcraft

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Source)
February 14
General
  • Players who are exalted with 40 factions are again awarded The Exalted title. Note that the associated achievement does not state that this title will be awarded when it's earned. This will be corrected in a future patch. More information can be found here.

Druid
  • Starfall will now hit any target in range which is in combat or not at full health (including the Exposed Head of Magmaw, which was causing issues with Starfall).

Paladin
  • The hotfix to Beacon of Light and Light of Dawn on February 11 did not produce the intended results and has been reverted. Light of Dawn should still trigger Beacon of Light.

Raids & Dungeons
Blackwing Descent
  • The Atramedes achievement Silence is Golden was incorrectly failing when any raid member's sound bar went over 30%. The achievement now requires no one's sound bar to go over 50% as advertised.

Professions
Alchemy
  • The Mysterious Potion was restoring the wrong amount of mana. It now restores 1 to 15,000 mana, instead of 1 to 30,000.

Fishing
  • The Bone and Jeweled Fishing Pole quest rewards are now item level 15, down from 200.

Herbalism
  • Whiptail was spawning too quickly in Uldum after patch 4.0.6. The spawn time has been reduced.

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Patch 4.0.6 - Home / World latency

Napisao Stevan Mitrovic. Posted in Vesti - World of Warcraft

Patch 4.0.6 promenio prikaz latency-a, sada imamo "Home" latency i "World" latency, BrianI sa Tech Support foruma objasnio je što to u stvari znači i kako letancy funkcioniše u World of Warcraft.

Patch 4.0.6 - Home / World latency

Originally Posted by BrianI (Source)
We have been seeing a lot of confusion regarding some of our recent changes to the User Interface, specifically in regard to the new in-game latency meters. With 4.0.6, we have split the two separate connections the client forms to our game servers into two different ratings, labeled 'Home' and 'World'.

The speculation regarding what these ratings mean has been very interesting and some of the guesses as to what the numbers actually refer to have been pretty imaginative. Some have speculated that 'Home' referred to your personal latency and 'World' was Blizzard's latency. This is incorrect.

In essence, 'Home' refers to your connection to your realm server. This connection sends chat data, auction house stuff, guild chat and info, some addon data, and various other data. It is a pretty slim connection in terms of bandwidth requirements.

'World' is a reference to the connection to our servers that transmits all the other data... combat, data from the people around you (specs, gear, enchants, etc.), NPCs, mobs, casting, professions, etc. Going into a highly populated zone (like a capital city) will drastically increase the amount of data being sent over this connection and will raise the reported latency.

Prior to 4.0.6, the in-game latency monitor only showed 'World' latency, which caused a lot of confusion for people who had no lag while chatting, but couldn't cast or interact with NPCs and ended up getting kicked offline. We hoped that including the latency meters for both connections would assist in clarifying this for everyone.

As is probably obvious based upon this information, the two connections are not used equally. There is a much larger amount of data being sent over the World connection, which is a good reason you may see disparities between the two times. If there is a large chunk of data 'queued' up on the server and waiting to be sent to your client, that 'ping' to the server is going to have to wait its turn in line, and the actual number returned will be much higher than the 'Home' connection.

"Well, great," you may say, "but what does that mean to me?!"

Not much, maybe, but I wanted to focus on how local (or network) factors can (and will!) affect these numbers.

Here are the most common causes of high pings/latency (on both Home and World):
  • 1) Wireless
  • 2) Packet loss
  • 3) Almost-but-not-quite-broadband*
  • 4) Addons (yes, those wonderful UI modifications)
  • 5) Firewalls (some firewalls do interesting things to latency... try playing without it to see if it helps!)
  • 5) Mis-configured or defective home routers (please temporarily bypass before anything else)
  • 6) Quality of Service and Traffic Management Systems performing packet queuing of some sort.
  • 7) Net link saturation (not necessarily your ISP, but somewhere between you and Blizzard)

*As of July 2010, the 'official' definition of Broadband Internet (per the FCC) is '4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream'. Anything lower than this is not 'officially' broadband.

Lowering video settings (especially view distance) has the added benefit of lowering the amount of data your connection is asked to convey, as well, so even that can be a valid troubleshooting step.

If your 'Home' connection latency is low and your 'World' connection latency is high, that frequently indicates that there is some sort of QoS congestion controls being applied to your internet connection, at either the micro (LAN) or macro (WAN) level. A common symptom would be that you would be able to chat, but not to cast.

If both connections report high latency, that means your connection to our servers, in general, is almost completely saturated, or 'overflowing'. Without making any claims where that saturation lies, that seems to have been the most common case to date.

Please refer to our support pages (such as http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...ategoryId=2329) or contact a technical support representative directly for further information and troubleshooting.

Patch 4.0.6 Latency Izmene
BrianI je takodje objavio zašto su neki igrači videli da im se dramatično poboljšao letancy u patch 4.0.6, i kako su morali da odrade izmene kako bi svi bili srećni. Dobre vesti su da mnoga nova poboljšanja su predvidjenja za Letancy.
 
Originally Posted by BrianI (Source)
With 4.0.6 we made a couple changes to our instance servers in an attempt to lower latency. Unfortunately, with those changes came increased bandwidth requirements. Due to the nature of the feedback we received, we have temporarily reverted those changes, as of around ~6pm PST last night. Are you still experiencing issues?

Could you go into a little more detail on this? You said the change done with 4.0.6 caused a bandwidth problem but was said problem on my end, your end, or somewhere in between? If this change did cause a problem on my end how can I prepare for when it has been reimplemented?

In a nutshell? That's a bit hard to explain clearly, but I'll try. Some people have an ISP whose peering link to their tier 1 backbone provider is oversaturated. Some people have ISPs that are throttling their connection in some way. Some people are on wireless connections, or are using old routers that are causing issues. Some people simply have a misconfigured or malfunctioning LAN device. Some people just have lower bandwidth connections. I’ll explain further below.

Unequivocally, the bandwidth problems were not internal to our network. We never came close to capacity. The actual total peak transfer data rate was around 1/5th of our maximum capacity.

When we performed maintenance the day we released 4.0.6 we made a couple modifications to our instance (BG/arena/dungeon/raid) servers. One of these changes had the effect of lowering latency for a very high percentage of our users... around 99% or so. The numbers were pretty staggering, to be honest. My personal ‘instance server’ experience was a drop from 120-150ms average ping down to 12ms. No, really, 12 ms. From my home residential connection. It was amazing. Raiding was glorious. The vast majority of our users saw similar improvements.

Then again, I have a very stable high bandwidth cable connection with a well designed internal LAN, and I had no problems handling the requisite increases in bandwidth. You see, part of that reason the latency went down is that a lot more packets were being sent. In some cases, the bandwidth almost tripled. For those who don't (or can't) meet all of our minimum system requirements (e.g. broadband internet*) or who are having issues with their connection or are on a flaky wireless connection... things weren't so pretty. We ended up rolling back that change until a later date when we will be able to selectively turn on that performance enhancement on a ‘per client’ basis. Unfortunately, that will require another patch, so we’ll just have to wait a bit.

Yes, we really did roll back that change for something that negatively affected less than 1% of total users. We really do care about providing the best environment we can. We do things like this frequently.

We do understand that some people do not have the options available to them that others do. We know that people are playing on 6 to 8 year old computers (in some cases, even older) with a flaky 3G or satellite connection, even though this does not meet our minimum system requirements. Not everyone can afford newer or better and not all areas have a faster connection available, currently. We do see people connecting from all over the world from backbones that are throttling their connections due to the cost of transmitting data over transoceanic cables. We see all these things… and we feel some of the same frustrations these people do when trying to have a smooth gaming experience. It is actually difficult to be unable to help someone due to situations outside your control.

To be honest, World of Warcraft was not designed for these types of setups. That is why we are very clear with our ‘minimum system requirements’ and what, exactly, is supported. Will we still try to help you connect and do our best to help you out, anyway? Absolutely. We just can’t make any promises or guarantees, as much as we would like to. The actual bandwidth requirements are not that high. In ordinary play, WoW shouldn’t end up taking more than a few hundred megabytes a month. What is important, however, is the stability of the connection and width of the ‘pipe’, due to the bursts of data that need to be transmitted at times. While total bandwidth may not be high, there will be short periods where a ton of data is being sent simultaneously (like, you know, raid boss fights or even when first logging on to a server when your toon is in a capital city).

We may wish it were otherwise, but if we tried to send and receive less data we wouldn’t be able to provide the immersive, complex, top-notch gaming experience (most people) have come to know, love, and expect from Blizzard Entertainment. I wish there were some way to do both, but there really isn’t, at least with today’s technologies. Either we can provide an intense environment that over 98% of people who play WoW have no problems with, or we can lower our standards to unacceptable levels and try to get that extra ~2% in, as well.

Anyway, I apologize for the lengthy post, and I’m sure this will be lost in the thread, but I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts on this for awhile. I hope you’ve enjoyed the read… it was fun to type, at least. Patch 4.0.6 - Home / World latency

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