Follow problems :(.

[Kylol]

With christmas money kylol has returned to multiboxing! While i was only playing one account, i got my main shaman up to 65 and speced him enh and twinked him out. So now that im multiboxing my other 4 shaman who are still 60, i decide to just level the four of them up to 65 and then regroup them! This worked great i had fun and got used to mboxing / playing the shamans again. But now that i have regrouped them im having follow problems.. it seems just by adding 1 shaman to the team i have become tons more laggy.. When i was playing just the four i could run around on their mounts all day and follow would never break. But now that i added a fifth shaman just running on complete flat space follow will break due to what appears to be lag. Any ideas? Why else could this be? Could adding 1 instance of the game really make me go from perfect performence to having to constantly slow down and stop on my main so that the laggy followers can catch up? :<. Has anyone else had this follow problem?

[Ualaa]

It's much easier to read, if you use a few spaces in what you type.

Generally speaking, your computer wants 1 GB of ram for the operating system, plus 1 GB per warcraft client you are running. Maybe more, if you do other stuff in the background. If you lack ram, it is your cheapest upgrade and will have a larger impact then anything else you do.

You can turn features down in the graphic options. Shadows generally strain the video card, and can be disabled entirely (only miss them during the Midsummer torch tossing events). Pretty much every other feature is more CPU intensive then a strain on the video card. You could disable spell effects entirely for the slaves. Similarly, maximum view distance reduction can help. Quite a few go with minimal settings on the slaves and moderate on the leader.

Limiting your frames per second can help as well. Something like 10-15 FPS for the slaves and whatever you are comfortable with on the active toon, can help a lot.

Also, pointing your slaves camera down, so they are looking from an over head view, can greatly improve your play. The other four toons render much less of the game, which has the game run much better.

Aside from these, if you are looking at upgrades to your system... start with the ram; if you have enough, your CPU and a SSD are roughly equal boosts to the system. A cheaper SSD ($100-$200 range) purely for the wow folder, can be a substantial boost. Chances are, a CPU upgrade will mean a motherboard and ram upgrade as well, which gets expensive.

[Tim]

Kylol,

Follow will break if FPS reaches below 7. So do this: Constrain your alt guys to 12FPS background and set GFX to low and disable sound. Set your main to have 35FPS max (still really nice) and 25FPS background.

Then delete your WoW cache folder. Reboot and try again.

[lofblad]

Does the quality of the Internet connection affect this kind of situation at all? I'm not referring to those who broadcast their mboxing, that's a whole other ball game when it comes to bandwidth, but what about normal 5-boxing? What kind of Internet connection should one use, what's the bottom line?

[Kylol]

Everything is running absolutely perfectly for me now, and its awesome!
What fixed my problem was
#1 What tim posted.
#2 changing some pwnboxer settings. I run a dual core, and i had my main guy in pwnboxer set to core #1 and core #2, and the slaves just set to core #1.
I changed this to slaves on core #2 and main just on core #1.
WIN INCOMING.

[Tim]

Awesome glad you are back to Pwning hardcore!

[trowabartan]

Originally Posted by lofblad

Does the quality of the Internet connection affect this kind of situation at all? I'm not referring to those who broadcast their mboxing, that's a whole other ball game when it comes to bandwidth, but what about normal 5-boxing? What kind of Internet connection should one use, what's the bottom line?

Each wow client doesn't use much bandwidth but one or 10 wow is always highly affected by anything else on your network spiking the connection(of course that's true for any MMO sans GW, that one I can play even with my bandwidth pegged at max).

Unless you are on dial-up your bandwidth shouldn't be an issue

I can't remember what my bandwidth is offhand but I can tell you that I do not have enough to watch Tim's stream...and there has been 0 issues with 5-boxing

[Tim]

Kylol fixed his situation, its actually a mechanics issue that I tested a while back. Follow mode will not function if FPS hits 7 or below. It has to do with how WoW does its collisions and xyz synching. Once Kylol changed this, everything went perfect.

As far as the bandwidth, I've found that 5x WoWs at an absolute max will use 300kbps (moving around in Orgrimmar AH) with an average of around 80kbps. Your latency when at 300kbps should be as low as possible, pref <100ms ideally <50ms. I have about 18ms myself : )

[lofblad]

Originally Posted by Tim

Kylol fixed his situation, its actually a mechanics issue that I tested a while back. Follow mode will not function if FPS hits 7 or below. It has to do with how WoW does its collisions and xyz synching. Once Kylol changed this, everything went perfect.

As far as the bandwidth, I've found that 5x WoWs at an absolute max will use 300kbps (moving around in Orgrimmar AH) with an average of around 80kbps. Your latency when at 300kbps should be as low as possible, pref <100ms ideally <50ms. I have about 18ms myself : )

That is extremely useful information, thanks Tim!

[Tim]

Originally Posted by lofblad

That is extremely useful information, thanks Tim!

NP - You can actually see this yourself pretty easy using the windows Resource Monitor. It will show you bytes in/out per second per application that windows is running.