Me and my lag

Ever since I installed Wrath, I had been having the most terrible lag issues. At times, my screen would dump me at 1 FPS, and all sounds would become a horrible crackling noise that would make the wailing noises on the video tape in Ring seem like a fine orchestra. Loading screens took forever, and once I got in, I could watch the whole world being rendered layer by layer.

Also, if I would have any other program running besides WoW, all would be going very slow, and alt-tabbing gave me enough time to get a fresh cup of coffee.

I tried defragmenting, I installed Ccleaner, ran virus checks every day and even started disabling programs in startup. Nothing helped, and it even slowly started to become worse.

At first I thought it might be Windows Update secretly working in the background, so I put it on manual. It seemed to work for a while, but the lag came back soon after.

Because I have Windows Vista, I started checking out ways to improve performance. I disabled the Aero Glass theme, which requires 50 MB of memory just to give you those nice mouse-over screens on your menu bar. I even disabled some service that are no longer in use (including some old remnant that is used for dial-up internet, yikes!)

Finally, I found the holy grail. I right-clicked the WoW icon, and went to properties. I selected the “compatibility” menu option tab, and put it in Windows XP Service Pack 2 mode.

Problem solved, WoW runs like a dream. And how much does this all affect my playstyle? Let’s just say that the difference between before and after the fix is 500 DPS. Yeps, you read it right. 500 DPS.

Guess the best way to run WoW in Vista is to make it believe it is not installed under Vista. ^_^

Jinglespam, jinglespam

Well, it was the season to be jolly, that had to be said. Between trying to get the winter’s veil achievements and grinding cash for my epic flying mount for my druid alt, I was hit between the eyes mostly with spam.

Goldspam.

After the spam in general chat and the throngs of level 1 human warriors plying their illegal trade in Stormwind, the letters being sent to me by companies who wanted to sell me gold, I thought the whispers were the worst. “Hey friend, want to buy gold again?”.

Ho, there pal. I know this trick. You think that I can’t report you now, since Blizzard will think I bought gold from you before? Well, guess again. Since the ticket I am making will now also include “player’s whispers are personally offensive and seek to blackmail me, or besmirch my reputation.”

The spam is worst on servers where a lot of gold is bought. Let’s face it, it takes a lot of work to get such operations going, including the ad campaigns. They do this most heavily on servers where most people buy gold (ie. high success rate). And on an RP server, raiding is not the dominant factor on which your success is dependant (far from it) but rather sense of style and such. And to achieve this, people believe they need that mammoth, that 20k gold chopper or that special war hyppogyph. And so they buy gold. And as long as they do, the spam continues.

And then the holidays came, and it all became worse. The letters have long since stopped, but Trade chat was positively vile. Goldspam even haunted you outside the capital cities, as they had placed town criers in Northrend zones now (The light knows how, as it’s pretty hard to do with level 1’s).

And then more whispers of course. “Hey friend, we have gold in stock.” But honestly I can’t be arsed anymore. I just hit the report spam button and inform them kindly that they have been reported.

Will there ever be an end to this?

Anyway, next up something useful again.

Enchant material requirements are going to be lowered in patch 3.0.8, according to posters on MMO-champion. If this gets through, it means we finally have enchants that do not cost the world resulting in nobody wanting them. Sucks for all of us (including me) who leveled it to 440 and beyond, wasting piles of gold and materials, but at least our future consumption will be lowered.
Saves the environment, I guess.