Set fire to the rain !

I know that the excessively common weather effects is a rather ubiquitious feature of private server, but I have to say it's really one of those which is killing the enjoyment. Rain, snow, storms and the like are very fine and increase immersion when they happen sparsely, but when they are on half of the time or more, it just ends up being annoying and killing the mood...
Its also a bug which has been reported nearly a year ago, so it's nothing new.

Oh, and just before someone tries to be helpful but get it wrong : NO, the "set weatherdensity to 0" does NOT disable weather effects. It just changes the amount of droplets or snowflakes, that's all. It's not a solution.

And so the problem : there is FAR too much bad weather. Rain and snow happen for too frequently, for far too long (two days ago, it rained TEN HOURS STRAIGHT in Wetlands, and even for WETlands it's still well beyond excessive) and kill the joy of adventuring.

So please, could we do something for this horrible weather ? Fixing it so it's Blizzlike (which means something like 5 % of the time or so), giving a console command, forcing a fixed schedule if fixing it is too complicated ? I'd even consider entirely disabling it if I could at this point...

Thanks !

But I enjoy inclement weather 8(

Maybe El Niño happened to hit Azeroth as well?

Sometimes rain and snow is too heavy, you can't even see further. It's the point of having snow for sure on, i.e., Alterac Mountains, but if you dont turn the effects down on options you are suddenly surrounded of a heavy courtain of rains in other zones which doesnt allow you to see anything.

Spazztastic said:

But I enjoy inclement weather 8(

Maybe El Niño happened to hit Azeroth as well?

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As I said, I also enjoy weather effect... in moderation.

When it's just raining/pouring/snowing/storming half the time (or more) you play, then it becomes just irritating.
It should be just a bit of variety, not the main course.

You certainly sprinkle a bit of salt on your food to make it taste better. But if you empty the salt shaker on it, it becomes just uneatable.

I see what you're saying, I play on a five year old laptop so I have all video settings as low as they can go, so I'm not really affected by view distance being obscured.

I mean, it makes sense that one cant see, but as often as the storms hit, I can understand the frustration.

Okay, just an illustration right from the frontline, because this insane weather is quickly killing my will to play at all.

I was trying to finish some quest in Wetlands tonight, but as usual, heavy rain :



As I'm really, really tired of it, I just chose to leave this quest for later, and as I dinged 30 recently I just say "fuck it" and switch to Arathi.
Well, as I enter Arathi, of course, heavy rain too :



I left the Wetlands because of the rain, so I'm not going to endure it here. So well, I give up, just run for the flypath, look at my quest log and notice I still have one or two quests in Darkshire. So I jump on the gryphon.

On the way there, here is how Elwynn Forest look (hint : rain) :



I finally land in Darkshire, ready to do some quest.
Guess what I find there ?
Got it in one : rain.



By now I'm pretty insanely annoyed. So I just abandon it there and go for the next place where I might quest : STV.
I suppose you know where this is going now and how STV looks :




At which time I just gave up, hearthstoned and logged off.

If it's not completely, retardedly bugged weather, I don't know what is. Pleade do something about it. Kill this rain. With fire. Even just deactivate the weather effect if it's too time-consuming to fix, but please stop this fucking rain...

I've had the weather turned off since I've joined the server... Not sure why anyone who doesn't rp would care for it.

just my 2cents

Labathor said:

I've had the weather turned off since I've joined the server... Not sure why anyone who doesn't rp would care for it.

just my 2cents

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You CAN NOT turn the weather off. If it was possible, I would just have done it and not made this thread.
The only thing you can is reduce the weather density, and as it was said in the opening post :

Akka said:

Oh, and just before someone tries to be helpful but get it wrong : NO, the "set weatherdensity to 0" does NOT disable weather effects. It just changes the amount of droplets or snowflakes, that's all. It's not a solution.

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If you have a way to actually REALLY disable the weather, I'm all ears and eager to find it (I looked at it online, I even tried to find if you could modify the files like to have darker nights, to no avail). But if it's just to reduce the amount of rain, it still doesn't remove rain, and it doesn't fix the problem at all.

I noticed that too when I started to play. I kinda got used to it but I had to reduce the environmental sound because the noise of the rain got really annoying. A fix for this would be really nice.

please fix rain
really critical pvp bug
thanks

you guys have never been to the UK

If the UK had the same amount of rain as private-server Azeroth, it would be the Underwater Kingdom by now.

So, today I wished to do some questing, but rain, rain, rain...
Fix it, pretty please ?

You can't quest because of rain? stop complaining ,lower your weather density to minimum or learn to code and modify your vanilla client so it never rains for you.

call69 said:

You can't quest because of rain? stop complaining ,lower your weather density to minimum or learn to code and modify your vanilla client so it never rains for you.

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As it's written in the OP : constant rain is extremely annoying after a while, and lowering the density doesn't change anything about it. Pretending it doesn't affect the experience in-game is ridiculous (if ambiance and effects were so irrelevant, Blizzard wouldn't have added them to the game to begin with).

As for modifying the files : that's actually what I'm trying to do, but finding the file responsible for managing the rain client-side is a bitch in Vanilla. And as an aside, answering "just recode the game" when someone points at the annoyance of a bug is more the sign of some kind of internet warrior-wanabee than an actual constructive answer.

You cannot actually modify your client so the rain would stop. It is not possible by design.
Anyway, as I was wondering about this issue by curiosity, I checked the weather report in named zones and rain / storm frequency is the same as on newer datadiscs.

As I do not want to release some unwanted information, I can't say actual numbers, but your rain frequency is NOT an issue, the amounts are actually pretty low and reasonable. You just perceive it as very often, because you hardly just stop from questing and say "well, it's quite nice today, isn't it?". Because sunny day does not blind your eyes and prevents you from questing.

And seriously, if you complain from all the things about the weather in some zones, you know the server has to be quite bug-free :biggrin:

Just like Bonesharper said, you probably didn't have luck with the sun those last few days and they stick very strongly to your memory, because of emotional reasons and because for the whole duration of the rain you are attentive to it.

Try to remember all the days you have had in your life where everything went okay. Can you? Likely not. But can you remember days where bad things happened? Very probably.

Maybe something could help distract you from it? Music? Increasing the game's gamma? Messing around with screen colors? Focusing on zones where there is few rain?

Bonesharper said:

You cannot actually modify your client so the rain would stop. It is not possible by design.
Anyway, as I was wondering about this issue by curiosity, I checked the weather report in named zones and rain / storm frequency is the same as on newer datadiscs.

As I do not want to release some unwanted information, I can't say actual numbers, but your rain frequency is NOT an issue, the amounts are actually pretty low and reasonable. You just perceive it as very often, because you hardly just stop from questing and say "well, it's quite nice today, isn't it?". Because sunny day does not blind your eyes and prevents you from questing.

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Sorry, but that's just not the case. I've been playing WoW for 10 years, so if it were like retail, it would be just "business as usual" and I wouldn't notice an abnormally high amount of rain.
In fact, in retail I distinctly remember that I found there was NOT ENOUGH weather. It was pretty much the norm to have zones not getting weather for several days straight, and the most extreme form of weather (heavy rain/snow/sandstorm) were even rarer - here they are easily seen several times a day.
So it's a pretty hefty jump to go from "not enough" to "too many to the point I'm stopping playing because of this" and claim it's the same amount, especially considering this "excessive amount of rain" is one of the most ubiquitous bug in Vanilla/TBC private servers

Samely, there was not, never, ever, a case of rain lasting for a day in Azeroth - rains lasted maybe 30 mn, one hour, 2 max. Here I've seen several times zones being drenched in rain for something like 10-12 hours (with maybe some small break in-between), and some zones have had rains EVERY DAY (not all day, but rain every day, which is also something which never happened on retail).

Nor I've ever seen a case where half a continent was under the rain like in the example I've posted above, with five regions being rained upon at the same time.

And seriously, if you complain from all the things about the weather in some zones, you know the server has to be quite bug-free :biggrin:

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Well, the server is pretty good (or I wouldn't play on it, though the rain is slowly chipping away at my desire to play and I'm starting to play less and less), but it's not like I don't notice bugs
But the thing is, quests bugs are a one-time thing, they might be pretty annoying but once the quest is finished the irritation is in the past, and most bugs aren't a constant in-your-face annoyance hampering the whole experience as excessive weather can be

Since there are 3 types of rain, it rains 75% of the time. One type of sun 3 types of rain. What are the chances to sunny weather? Server Side setup. IMHO we don't know how = we can't = it works properly.

forerun said:

Since there are 3 types of rain, it rains 75% of the time. One type of sun 3 types of rain. What are the chances to sunny weather? Server Side setup. IMHO we don't know how = we can't = it works properly.

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You're litterally saying "it rains 75 % of the time, but it works fine".
Did you think this through ?

And if we did indeed consider things are fine because they are coming from the server, I wonder how we could even report a bug (considering they are all from the server setup, duh).

(also it doesn't rain "75 % of the time" actually, it's more about 35-50 % of the time, which is still several times more often than in Vanilla)

Also, because I'm a bit irritated by people suggesting I'm so dumb I can't make the difference between the maybe 5 % rate of rain in retail and the huge frequency I see in game, I made a little experiment : logged every hour to check the weather in the zones I've put watcher in (yes, rain was so annoying that I actually sent lvl 1 char all over the place just to check if a zone was rainy before going to quest there) and noted the weather.
Of course it's just a serie of snapshots, but it gives an idea of the weather frequency.

Here are the results :




So, what can we notice ?
109 checks done.
53 instances of "clear" (that is, fair weather). That's about 50 %. That means about 50 % of various amount of rain/snow. Which is in-line with my perception, so maybe it's not confirmation bias, right ? (and also it kind of shows it's not a one-time unlucky serie of RNG, or this thread wouldn't exist)

Are we going to seriously claim that retail had a rate of 50 % of bad weather ?

Also, EVERY SINGLE OF THESE ZONES has had heavy rains several hours in the day. Every. Single. One. Still going to claim that all is right and working correctly ? Because very obviously it doesn't.

While I'm busy with irl at the moment and haven't been on for a few weeks I will say that during my time especially in zones like Duskwood, Elwynn, Wetlands and Arathi Highlands I did notice a very large amount of rainfall. I remember questing in duskwood very casually for a couple of days and it was raining literally all the time that I had been logged in, I actually thought that the rain never stopped for 2-3 days until finally, it did. I even posted in general chat "Wow the rain finally stopped."

Though as I do play casually I can make my best bet on having 'bad luck' with the weather times, but I strongly feel like rain is over abundant. However I'm sorry to say that I think only a handful of people have an issue with this, sure it would be nice to fix but it should be no where near the top of the priority of things the Kronos team needs to work on.

Kind regards; Kazrid

Kazrid said:

Though as I do play casually I can make my best bet on having 'bad luck' with the weather times, but I strongly feel like rain is over abundant.

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No, it's not a question of "bad luck", your feeling of overabundance is right. Bad luck can and do happen, so yeah if one time you have a string of unlucky/lucky happening (like if I spent one particular day under the rain but other days were fine) it can be chalked up to just that, a coincidence.

But it only goes so far, in case of a single, or at best a very few, isolated incidents. You might explain such a string by bad luck once, but when it's recurring it just doesn't work anymore.
And the bad weather is certainly not a singular occurence. I've noticed it for weeks, still the beginning, I'm still noticing it (I've spent today seeing the sun for literally 10 mn over four hours of play, once in Hillsbrad when switching zones and once in Dustwallow Marsh for 5 mn, and that was after one hour of rain ; I've quested in three zones, ALL THREE under rain or snow ; as I'm typing right now, I've been in a blizzard in Alterac Mountains for two hours straight without any clearing), and I spent quite a bit of time yesterday making a practical test of the weather.

The constrast with reatail (where it most often doesn't rain at all for the whole day) is just painfully obvious, and anyone trying to say the contrary is just stuck in denial.

However I'm sorry to say that I think only a handful of people have an issue with this, sure it would be nice to fix but it should be no where near the top of the priority of things the Kronos team needs to work on.

Kind regards; Kazrid

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I agree that not everyone have an issue with the weather, but I disagree it's not important. Many bugs might be mechanically more crucial, but few things directly, constantly and visibly impact the immersion as much as weather - it's displayed all over your screen after all.
A broken mandatory quest is a game-breaking bug, but it only affect people who are directly doing it, and only for the short duration of the quest. A problem at some level in the combat system affect everyone everytime, but it might be "hidden" enough nobody notice.
But the bugged weather is in your face all the time, regardless of class, level and activity.

What I also notice in your data is that there was always at least 2 areas with no rain at any time.

Anyway, admitting it is a bug we still need some reference to compare your results with, otherwise it is data without context. We obviously don't have access to Blizzard's formulas, but maybe we can get better than "5% chance of rain according to my feelings and memories".

What if you try to map out the weather Joana experienced during his leveling (that was in patch 1.10)? That's 4 full days of /played in vanilla, with multiple areas. Or maybe see how the weather is on retail with a trial account?

On a side note, maybe I didn't notice if someone already said it, but is it even a variable developers can influence or is the weather formula built-in?

tekai said:

On a side note, maybe I didn't notice if someone already said it, but is it even a variable developers can influence or is the weather formula built-in?

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The chance of rains / storms / snows can be set by developers for every season separately. What I find funny is, these numbers were never actually changed and there were no concerns about weather on all realms but this thread.

tekai said:

What I also notice in your data is that there was always at least 2 areas with no rain at any time.

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That's nothing surprising. What's surprising is that at any given time, there is always at least one third of the zones with weather effects. That's massively more than what was the case in retail.

Anyway, admitting it is a bug we still need some reference to compare your results with, otherwise it is data without context. We obviously don't have access to Blizzard's formulas, but maybe we can get better than "5% chance of rain according to my feelings and memories".

What if you try to map out the weather Joana experienced during his leveling (that was in patch 1.10)? That's 4 full days of /played in vanilla, with multiple areas. Or maybe see how the weather is on retail with a trial account?

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I don't need a trial account, my account on retail is working ^^ (gold token FTW)
I can easily try to map the weather the same way, but I didn't produce a comparison because the weather has changed a lot in retail compared to Vanilla (and zones themselves have little left in common since Cataclysm) so I didn't felt it would be an adequate one.
If it's not going to be wasted time (it's easy but pretty time-consumming to log ten alt each hour for a whole day, so if it's to have the results dismissed on the - true - basis that WoD WoW is nothing like Vanilla WoW, I'd prefer to spare myself the effort) and actually helps fix this bug, I'll be happy to lend a hand and do it.

On a side note, maybe I didn't notice if someone already said it, but is it even a variable developers can influence or is the weather formula built-in?

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The whole point of Mangos is to allow people to emulate a WoW server. The whole code is available, there is nothing the dev can not influence.

Bonesharper said:

The chance of rains / storms / snows can be set by developers for every season separately. What I find funny is, these numbers were never actually changed and there were no concerns about weather on all realms but this thread.

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This bug is one of the most ancient and common in private server, so maybe people have become used to it, or gave up on it after being wrongly told so many times "it works as it should", or even started to think it's actually not a bug - you yourself said that the rate of weather effect is not an issue, is comparable to retail, and everything was just confirmation bias on my part, after all.