OMG Blu - Oceanic Voice chat FTL!!

#0 - Sept. 18, 2007, 2:14 a.m.

Word on the G*%!*vine is that players on high latency connections may suffer specifically when the in Built voice chat feature gets introduced. I am an Oceanic player (Australia), with a high bandwidth internet connection that is under no other load while I play WoW, I average 350-500ms latency.

Realistically speaking, what should I expect this to push my latency out to? 600-700ms? If that's the case, with the latency indicator in the red all the time, will you be advising all Oceanic based players not to use voice chat?

I accept entirely that this question is a bit of a loaded gun, nonetheless it remains an extremely relevant one.

Regards,

Eldaren

Tigerclaw

#37 - Sept. 18, 2007, 4:19 a.m.

The question "will VOIP increase my latency, and by how much" is similar to asking something like "I live in (country X) and I use (ISP Y), tell me what my normal game latency should be?"

i.e. it is not predictable/calculable given the available data.

Have you tried it on PTR? Might be the fastest and easiest way to answer the question empirically.

just some ideas.

Tigerclaw

#63 - Sept. 18, 2007, 6:44 a.m.

Q u o t e:

I agree that I need to test this on the PTR. What is of concern to me however is that with an answer like the above it is evident that you guys haven't taken this into consideration when you decided to implement VOIP into the game. This isn't a one user technical incident that we're talking about here, this is an entire region of players.

"Taking into account a high bandwidth connection, playing from an Oceanic based location where latency's main contributing factor is distance to the US based server infrastructure, will latency be affected further; potentially adversely affected further with the new VOIP feature enabled?"

To be quite honest, if you cannot answer that question, does that not reflect Blizzard's attitude towards us Oceanic players? Once again, we're not talking about affecting 20 players in a remote outback community in Australia. We're talking about the play experience of potentially the majority of your Oceanic customer base, and I'm being led to believe that you haven't even taken into consideration the effects that this might have on us?

It's a long thread and I might have missed a detail above; I just wanted to ask if you have tried the current PTR build yet.

Technically speaking, unless the basic internet link between you and the game server is already saturated, I do not believe this feature will add noticeable latency to your gameplay - I believe the main contributor to latency is physical distance and number of router hops.

Tigerclaw

#68 - Sept. 18, 2007, 7:10 a.m.

I could post some rough bandwidth numbers but I would have to check with some other team members on it first.

An even more effective way to evaluate the performance of our solution would be to download the PTR build and run it. We'd love to see your experiences with it, and you might have a real answer in your hands faster than we could even begin to generate a guess using the predicted bandwidth numbers.

Tigerclaw

#72 - Sept. 18, 2007, 7:32 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Thank you for an earnest answer to my question.

OK, see you on the PTR forum :)