The World of Warcraft patch 2.2.2 recently went up on live realms while patch 2.2.3 took its place on Public Test Realm, meanwhile players are asking where patch 2.3 is. Blizzard poster Tigerclaw responded to the query and explained why the patches are taking too long to roll out.

Players are understandably impatient toward the coming of WoW patch 2.3 as it brings with it a lot of content and general changes: guild banks, new flying mounts, and Zul'Aman, among other things. Patch 2.2.3 on the other hand generally contains a number of bug fixes for problems brought about by voice chat. Tigerclaw explained why:

Simply put we know that 2.3 - since it contains some significant new content - will require multiple weeks of play test and balancing on PTR. As a result, if the bug fixes now being tested in 2.2.3 were instead "rolled up" and only shipped in 2.3.0, no one on Live would get the benefits of these fixes until 2.3.0 shipped.

We made a decision to ship 2.2.3 in response to customer feedback about 2.2.0 and 2.2.2, in order to address some of the higher priority issues much sooner than if the fixes were part of 2.3.0 only.

Do we need to say it again? Patience is a virtue. Let's just sit tight and check out what's coming in patches to come. Keep checking this space for more WoW news.

Players over at the official World of Warcraft forums want Blizzard to admit that its developers committed an error in implementing the MMO game's voice chat feature. According to some players, it looks like Blizzard put in a software driver that adversely affects hardware acceleration.

Forum moderator Drysc answered that the new sound engine and the chat feature are not actually related. While the voice chat feature does rely on the software upgrade, the said sound engine has been planned long before. He added that the new engine has a lot more features than the old system. But then Drysc admitted:

We do understand that the switch to the new sound engine has caused some issues. Any undertaking and replacement of such a large system within the game, and especially with so many and varied machines running it, there are sure to be some growing pains.

Furthermore, another forum moderator Tigerclaw mentioned that "some performance bottlenecks in Patch 2.2.0 that are non-hardware specific" have been identified. He advised the players to look out for the upcoming WoW PTR cycle where they can try the next update.

Effective a few hours ago, World of Warcraft's Public Test Realm had its voice chat feature disabled. But it doesn't appear to be due to complications regarding this feature, nor was the feature completely removed.

According to Blizzard representative Tigerclaw, WoW's integral voice chat was simply deactivated. Here reads part of the blue-texter's official post:

"Temporarily disabled" does not mean "removed" (since all the code is still in the client).

There is some server hardware/software shuffling going on, which affects the servers that provide the voice chat service.

Please note that we have the capability of selectively activating and/or deactivating voice chat on all or a chosen subset of WoW servers as needs require.

Following the report, some of the thread visitors began asking if it was possible for Blizzard to simply disable voice chat, so that the public realms could enjoy the rest of the features patch 2.2 had to offer. Nethaera showed up later, indicating that disabling voice chat enabled the devs to see if it was indeed the source of the patch's problems. Interestingly, thread poster Meerti submitted this thorough explanation of the reasons for patch 2.2.0's delay:

The VoIP stuff isn't holding up the patch. The transition to a Windows Vista compatible sound library (for all sound, not just for VoIP) is holding up the patch. This was done completely independently of VoIP, VoIP could have been implemented on the old sound library. However, Windows Vista compatibility was given a high priority, and both changes were done at once.

There you have it - while WoW's PTR will be going silent (figuratively) for the moment, it doesn't appear that the integrated VoIP is the source of patch 2.2's delays.

Players have been asking what's the hold up in implementing the Public Test Realm content on the main servers in World of Warcraft. Apparently, there is more than meets the eye in the development and there are a lot of difficulties that players don't see.

Blizzard QA Hortus and Community Manager Tigerclaw pointed out that one of the primary problems include the multiple crashes. Tigerclaw explained that while crashes happen at a ratio of "one in a million odds per played minute" that's still about 12,000 a day given the 9,000,000 players in the game.

To solve this problem, they gather data from the automatic crash reports received everyday, patch the game, and then release the new build on the PTR. If it works, then they move on to the next set of problems. This isn't as easy as it seems because according to Hortus, each patch is done with the goal of improving the overall stability of the game. With so many players running around, that's a very difficult thing to do indeed.

So if you want to see the PTR content in the main game, you really have to wait while Blizzard still irons out all the bugs. After all, it's still better to wait for a well made, stable patch than to have one that will require multiple hot-fixes (or worse) over the next few months.

It looks like there's a bit of a misunderstanding regarding the long delay behind World of Warcraft's patch 2.2.0. As Drevven and some other players are stating in the WoW forums, they're convinced that Blizzard's new integrated voice chat is what's keeping game  patch 2.2.0 within the test realms, and preventing it from moving over to the live servers.

To this end, some of the players are convinced that it might be better to just release 2.2.0 without the voice feature, given that third-party VoIP clients like Vent are already readily available. So, is it really Blizzard's insistence in keeping 2.2.0's integral VoIP that's causing the delay? It doesn't appear to be, based on spokesman Tigerclaw's response to the thread:

2.2 does include a new revision of the basic sound engine that is not connected with voice chat. It also includes the new voice chat technology which is a separate effort, but it does rely on the new sound engine to function. Astute players can see that we have always used a third party licensed sound engine for the former, and we have upgraded to the most recent version of that library in 2.2.

The last few builds on PTR have helped us isolate and fix a few serious bugs that you really would not have wanted to see on Live. WIthout the player input on PTR (error reports online and forum reports) some of those bugs could well have been undetected.

If any of you have time this week to try out the PTR build, we can always use the feedback on how good it is doing. 7272 is the latest version and we want to rack up as much testing on it this week as we can.

In short, the cause for WoW patch 2.2.0's delay are other more pressing concerns such as serious game bugs. Tigerclaw didn't say exactly what problems have been encountered lately, although we're hoping more information presents itself in the near future. Visit us again in case we hear of any updates.

The topic concerning how much Internet bandwidth the World of Warcraft Voice Chat will be using when finally implemented has been raised before but Blizzard somewhat tiptoed around the question and didn't really provide a concrete answer.

So the question remains: how much bandwidth does a player need to minimize latency when using this feature? Blizzard's forum moderator Tigerclaw reiterated that the question can't be answered directly because there are other factors affecting latency.

Aside from bandwidth connection and the server a player is on, several aspects have to be taken into consideration. Tigerclaw hazard a suggestion:

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.

The blue poster continued by saying that players should try the voice chat feature on the Public Test Realm (PTR) to know if it will indeed affect the game's latency or not.

Just in case you're having the same problem as Paynegwynn, whose WoW won't run its video recording feature properly on his Mac for some reason, then here's an explanation.

It turns out that there's some conflict between the video recording feature and a GPU bug. The folks at Blizzard have noted this already and it turns out that they've actually already disabled the option to record videos. Here is Blizz poster Tigerclaw's full explanation:

At present there is a bug in the driver software for that GPU which inhibits our video recording feature (in fact can lead to a crash) - so we disabled it for now on that hardware. However, once an updated driver is released for that machine which addresses that issue, we can post instructions on how to re-enable video recording on that configuration. It's not ideal but this is the best we can do given the bug that we ran into.

Though the solution implemented (meaning the disabling of the recording function) is rather off-putting, it really is the best thing they could do, given that the problem is hardware-based.

Apparently, there's more than one way to enjoy World of Warcraft's recently integrated voice chat feature from patch 2.2.0, at least if you follow Redcrystol's lead. The gamer explained that he played as a female character, and in the days prior to having voice chat, he used to get plenty of freebies by sweet-talking (or is texting a better word?) other players into thinking he was a girl IRL.

The problem was, come WoW's integrated voice chat, Redcrystol found that using this new feature gave away the fact that he's a dude. The thread poster further asked if there was a way to mask his real voice.

Blizzard spokesman Tigerclaw dropped by a little later explaining that if Redcrystol had  analog audio input for his microphone, WoW allowed the use of various voice-disguise devices. Mighty nice of Tigerclaw to point this out, especially given that this wasn't pointed out in the official Voice Chat.

The thread was further backed up by opinions of two distinct opinions: guys who were either against Tigerclaw's advise (they were apparently fooled into giving out free loots), or guys who gave their own suggestions for voice-masking devices. Guys interested in catching up on the thread can visit the WoW Forums via the source link below.

We picked up an interesting bug report over on Blizzard's Public Test Realm forums. Youcantseeme of Draenor reports that there's a bug plaguing the Mac video recording function currently being tested on the PTR.

According to Youcantseeme, the glitch causes the movie to freeze, though the sound will keep on going as if nothing happened. Eventually, the video returns to normal, with the frozen portion of the movie getting skipped.

Blizzard poster Tigerclaw is on the case, however, responding to Youcantseeme's report. He writes, "there were some bugs with the time stamping of the frames, I'll check and see if the appropriate fixes made it into the build currently on PTR (7195)."

It's good to know he's looking into the matter. Hopefully the issue will be resolved in the next PTR build. In the meantime though, PTR players would best be warned with an actual video of the glitch in action, which you can see below. The freezing actually occurs halfway through the video, though we're having trouble scrolling to the exact point. Chances are, the glitch affecting the video is also messing with how YouTube reads the vid, so you'll just have to watch it from start to finish to see the freeze.

 

We found on very interesting question over at the World of Warcraft Forums and it's about an upcoming addition to blockbuster MMO, (no, not the Wrath of the Lich King) voice chat. Appompyro from Stonemaul asks whether voice chat will eat up precious download and upload usage.

The player explained that his "internet connection plan has a download limit" so when that's maxed, he won't be able to play WoW until the next month. Appompyro was concerned about how much download and upload usage the voice chat would add on top of playing. Players have been concerned whether the in-game voice chat will affect things like bandwidth usage and additional latency issues, most of which were addressed by Nethaera's voice chat FAQ. We know that voice chat will use up additional bandwidth, but don't know how much. Blizzard poster Tigerclaw addressed the question:

The added voice chat bandwidth should be comparable to the basic WoW game traffic, but the actual total amount will vary depending on how much talking you do. Silent times should see no traffic due to voice chat.

I don't think we have released any numbers yet on the data rate of the WoW voice chat solution.

Hopefully, we'll be seeing those numbers soon. Otherwise, people with limited internet connection services will surely keep their mouths shut or turn off the feature while playing the World of Warcraft.