Lag and WOW

I have been playing World of WarCraft (WoW) for a little over a year now. This game has taken more of my time than I would ever like to admit. I am so glad that there is not an in game timer that keeps track of how much of your life you have given to this game. I started playing this game from home on my DSL connection. I have a pretty good connection at the house for a DSL line. Then I got deployed to an Army Base out in the middle of no ware for training. They had a commercial wireless connection. Not too bad of a connection but it was not even in the same ball park as my home connection. I started to notice subtle changes in the game as my lag increased. It seemed like everyone was always getting the first shot off on me in PVP. At times it even seemed like they were getting 4 shots for every 3 I was getting off. I noticed that I was now losing more than I was winning. I am not saying that I am very good at PVP. I actually think I am pretty middle of the road for a guy who is leveling and in greens for the most part. But I was still enjoying the game never the less. So then came the time that my training was over. So we hoped the big bird and flew across the ocean to the land of endless sand. I was lucky enough to end up with a room with free internet in it when I got here. I sat there wondering one night how bad would this game be playing on a US server from Iraq. I knew that my connection was not much better than dial up and that the lag may be a problem. This was a huge understatement to say the least. The first couple of times I logged in I just did not want to play with this lag. Let me give you an example. I was starting a new mage. I have never really liked mages all that much but I was curious about the class. My highest level hunter was sitting right at 60 at the time and I was suffering from a little bit of burn out. I am a very slow leveler but that is another story. So here I am with my brand new mage. So my first thought is that I need to go and kill something because that is what selfish self centered Mages always do first. I hit my little fireball spell at max range and nothing happened. The button was going through its normal animation and all but there was not the normal fire ball streaming from my fingertips. I thought this was very strange. I also thought it was very strange that the mob that I was aiming at looked a little bit pissed off and was coming at me full force. Then the fire ball animation went off. I hit the button again and by this time the mob was beating on me. I almost laughed when a lvl 2 mob almost killed me. What is up with this I thought? I played for a little bit longer and finally got fed up with it and just quit for the night. I was thinking that I am going to be overseas for a year and I will not be able to play Wow for a whole year. I know, those of you who do not play think this sounds crazy but I was already having withdraw syndrome. Much worse than when I even quick the tobacco habit for a while. But the call of WoW was back on me the next night. I was hoping that my connection would be a little bit better…No such luck though. I started back on my Mage again and the same thing was happening. This time though I started to count to myself how long it was from the time I pushed the fire ball button to the next time I was able to push it again. This time two fire balls fired off right in a row. So the lag that I was experiencing was video only. The game was seeing my inputs like normal but the video was the one that was having a hard time catching up. Once I made this discovery I was off and running. I was now getting off a couple shots before the mob reached me and then I would just beat on the mob until it was dead. It seems very strange now counting off my shots but it was an adjustment that I had to make if I wanted to play any further over here. Sometimes my character would completely lag out. So at that point I would need to do a force quit on WoW and log back in. This resulted in many deaths to say the least. Because of the lag, my character and game still thought that I was playing even though I could not move or doing anything on the screen. Then I made another discovery one night. There was a bunch of us playing in my room one night. We were running an instance because lag seemed to be a little bit better in these instances…Don’t ask me why because I do not have a clue why that would matter. We were fighting some random trash mobs when the all too often lag out would happen. I happened to glance at my friends computer screen and noticed that my character was still moving and doing things when I was putting in inputs from my keyboard. Now mind you, my screen is locked up but his screen is still showing me running around and casting fireballs. We all thought that was pretty funny but it is hard enough to play on your own monitor let alone someone else’s. But playing off of someone else’s monitor has saved us from a few low level wipes. I know you want this to end if you are still reading so I will try and close this up now. The funny thing about this lag is that it has taught me something about the game that some people may never know. Your inputs are seen by the game quicker than what you may or may not see. Now on a faster connection with a much smaller amount of lag this may not seem that important. But your input appears to always be the first thing that the game sees. I am a very visual person by nature and I tend to do things off of sight. This lag has taught this new person to the game that timing is important and what you see might not actually be the reality of what is going on in the game. I know that someday I will go back home and be on a faster connection and the game will be a whole lot more fun than it is now. But now I will be armed with the knowledge that the input is done before the animation has started. It has also taught me to mentally think about how long each spell takes to cast and when to hit that next button.