World of Warcraft and folding@home

[kelliegang]

I sent a suggestion to Professor Pande last week about contacting people in the know within Blizzard in the hopes that they might support folding@home, even a simple link on the World of Warcraft website would be nice. My thoughts are that ultimately Blizzard could easily offer rewards which, whilst having minimal cost to Blizzard, would greatly encourage the WoW subscriber base [now apparantly breaking the 10 Million mark, whilst this is not unique users, it is likely very close to the amount of CPUs/GPUs which play the game] to contribute their spare processor cycles.

If there are any current or ex World of Warcraft players here you will understand just how far people are willing to go to get a special ingame title or mount or achievement, I dont think it would be expecting too much to anticipate that the majority of WoW players would come onboard for something like a spectral mount, protein pet or baby gnome in a labcoat! . This is a potential 10 Million contributors and possibly more depending on how the reward was given, people may even get their real life friends and family to fold in their name to increase their chances or getting the reward. This would be such a minimal cost to Blizzard for such great reward to the world and to the folding@home project and in this day and age, with the global craze of corporate social responsibility it could mean some major brownie points for Blizzard.

Anyhow, the problem is making the right people within Blizzard aware of the program and the potential public feedback, so this post is to ask anyone who might possibly be able to come up with such contacts to maybe speak with the people in the know on the folding@home team at Stanford.

If you're not one of those people but you play World of Warcraft then help me generate some attention from within:
- Submissions to the Blizzard suggestion & offtopic forums.
- Inform your raid friends and guildmates about folding@home.
- If you're not already on a team, join "The Azerothian Science League" [159347] [Using your Realmname-A-Charactername for alliance and -H-Charactername for horde]
- Submissions to the Community spotlight.

I don't recommend anyone else do it [it is both expensive and in the grey area of the World of Warcraft EULA] but I have been spending my ingame gold and time, encouraging and rewarding people for joining the world of warcraft folding@home team, with instance runthroughs to spread the word and gold to reward contributions.

MMORPG players have demonstrated in the past that they like to find ways to give back to the world [google "CrazyJoe Tsunami Appeal Ultima Online" for an example] so I think that a good deal of World of Warcraft players would be very interested in the folding@home project if they knew about it.

[kelliegang]

If people will pay over $US 800.00 for a spectral tiger mount, surely they'll participate in folding@home if they get some kind of similar reward

[P5-133XL]

Just as an obervation concerning folding and WOW. There is real problem mixing the two, for most people, and that is folding hogging all network bandwidth while the clients are getting new WU's or sending the results back. During those intervals, the folding clients cause the latency of WOW to skyrocket making the gaming experiance totally unacceptable unless one can institute some form of QOS. Most of the time, if one is playing solo then one can wait it out. However, if one is in a firefight at the time, then death will follow and that may matter especially if one is in a group. My obervation of WoW or gaming people in general is that type of behavior is unacceptable and will result in the immediate removal of folding...

[kelliegang]

Not much of a hardcore gamer myself but I've not noticed any big hit to latency whilst folding and gaming at the same time, although my work units tend to complete slowly i do have 4 computers and a playstation folding at the same time, however I would love to see some form of scheduling ability added to the clients so that we can avoid such situations. Good idea

[Christopher N. Lewis]

Pause work ?

[P5-133XL]

Pause work ?

You can only conveinantly pause systray clients. Console clients have to be shut down and anything installed as a service has to be stopped. Further, it has to be done on all machines on the local network and that may not be convienant or pleasant especially if there are children that don't take well to being interrupted while online and when you are done, it all has to be manually restarted.

[Foxery]

Just as an obervation concerning folding and WOW. There is real problem mixing the two, for most people, and that is folding hogging all network bandwidth while the clients are getting new WU's or sending the results back. During those intervals, the folding clients cause the latency of WOW to skyrocket

You've picked the wrong system resource. WoW "requires" (for any useful level of play) a broadband connection, on which one would hardly ever notice F@H work data. Since the F@H client backs off on CPU usage while you're playing, RAM is the only thing you can potentially overtax - the delay would be from Windows swapping to the page file. (I'm a long-time raider and Folder. No interference at all on a reasonable computer & connection.)

The idea is noble; there are, in fact, 11 million players worldwide, most of whom by definition have hardware capable of Folding. However, I think you vastly overestimate their tech competence, willingness to participate in an honest and constructive manner, and desire/ability to leave machines on when not playing the game. There would be 3 million lost WUs, 5 million forum posts all asking the same basic FAQ questions, and 7 million new threads asking to change the point system.

Be careful what you wish for!

[MtM]

You've picked the wrong system resource. WoW "requires" (for any useful level of play) a broadband connection, on which one would hardly ever notice F@H work data.

Did you say, one would barely notice fah work units on a broadband connections? Define broadband? And more importantly, it's not the download which is an issue ( as Stanford isn't ever able to give me wu's with a speed even close to 10% of what my line is capable of ) it's the upload.

Smp wu's can be real big, and the client can upload with 60kB/s ( though usually it's much much lower ) which leaves me 20kB/s from my 80kB/s, as you say you need broadband for wow, I don't think the 20kB/s left can be defined as broadband?



Hasn't this come up before btw? I can recall a discussion where the conclusion was that for most it would not be feasible. Also, WoW can be quite the resource hog itself on high settings.

[kelliegang]

Ability of computers running WoW to fold: On my measely machines I average 500 points per day when they are left on overnight with nothing running, when running World of Warcraft I average 220-250 points per day. I do mean measely machines by the way lol.

Like I said, I personally never notice when a unit is uploading or downloading, whether its the ps3 or any of the crappy comps on my network but I only run the CPU clients so I have no experience with SMP or GPU clients, by the looks of the points of the highest wow folder on The Azerothian Science League his machines are very active with uploads/downloads. Still... an upload/download task schedule feature would be nice.

The idea is noble; there are, in fact, 11 million players worldwide, most of whom by definition have hardware capable of Folding. However, I think you vastly overestimate their tech competence, willingness to participate in an honest and constructive manner, and desire/ability to leave machines on when not playing the game. There would be 3 million lost WUs, 5 million forum posts all asking the same basic FAQ questions, and 7 million new threads asking to change the point system.

11 million subscribers, some double ups or triple ups, like myself i have 3 accounts, at one stage 4 for the family, however I imagine most of the double ups would have more than one machine in their household... conservatively I think the figure could be cut to 9 million CPUs/GPUs. I think probably half would be under the age of 16 and therefore incapable of making the decision to use the family computer to fold unless there was some ingame incentive that they could beg their parents about [4.5million]. A good quarter of those remaining would find any way they could to be deconstructive and dishonest, leaving 3 million some...
3 Million uninformed and unconcerned people looking to clog up the boards with questions.... couldn't agree more there, this would be a problem without a doubt, I would imagine this to be the main reason Blizzard would reject the idea, support staff don't need to be supporting a program that isn't even theirs. A self install, self updating service version of all clients would be ideal in this case, it would also have to have an uninstall feature.
I do think, however, that you underestimate the lengths people will go to in MMOs to give back to the community and then beside that, the lengths people will go to in order to get something "special" [think: Headless horseman mount, Winterspring Tiger, Spectral Tiger Mount (still 600+$), Lucky Fishing Hat, Murloc pet, Blizzard Bear Mount].

I never supposed it would be easy for the folding@home team, just easy for Blizzard, so long as the right concessions were made.

- Some way of tracking a World of Warcraft user's contributions to assign rewards [even if its an automated email upon receiving 100 work units or something]
- World of Warcraft client tracking [GFLOP contributions specifically from world of warcraft users/referees]
- Self install clients [Surely amongst the current folding@home users there are enough with technical expertise required to simplify the install process]
- Task schedule for upload/download only, allow work to continue whenever the program is running.


The first one wouldn't be necessary as Blizzard might be happy for the Pande group to "raffle" off the ingame rewards to all the users, may encourage more people to join World of Warcraft. Yes it would be some work.. but there is a lot of potential computing power there.
Although it would take considerably less work for both parties if Blizzard simply made mention of folding@home, without any rewards or incentives, the recruitment rate would be equally reduced however.

[P5-133XL]

You've picked the wrong system resource. WoW "requires" (for any useful level of play) a broadband connection, on which one would hardly ever notice F@H work data. Since the F@H client backs off on CPU usage while you're playing, RAM is the only thing you can potentially overtax - the delay would be from Windows swapping to the page file. (I'm a long-time raider and Folder. No interference at all on a reasonable computer & connection.)

You are just plain wrong. When F@H sends and receives data it uses 100% of the BW on the broadband connection leaving Wow competing for what remains. While Wow doesn't use more than around 9-11 KBPS it needs those bytes delivered promply which does not happen causing extreme latency issues. It is totally not enjoyable when WoW's latency goes from 70-100 ms to 3000-4000ms and upto 10,000 in a city because folding has started uploading a WU and will continue till folding is done (aprox 2.5+ minutes). The broadband connection I have personally observed this behavior was on Comcast cable (8Mbps/384Kbps) which I believe most would classifuy as broadband.

It is definately not RAM or the page file that is the problem. I had nine machines SMP folding on my network and the same behavior was observed when any of the other machines were sending and receiving data. When a seperate machine is causing the problem, you can be guarenteed that it is not a RAM or a page file issue on the machine that you are playing WoW on. Since then, I have reduced folding machines to two and that helps. Also, switching from SMP folding to GPU folding as my primary focus also helps alot because the files sizes drop from 50+Meg (2.5+ minutes) to around 1 Meg (4 seconds) and thereby the network interruption is far shorter.

I solved the problem by getting a DLink DIR-655 router and configuring its QOS to give top priority to WOW and the bottom priority to all the folding servers and that definately made a big difference. The WoW latency then went from 70-100 ms to 250-350 ms and while not good it at least is playable while folding is uploading.

[kelliegang]

Dont suppose you'd be interested in writing up some basic instructions on how to configure a router to do that? A QoS guide for dummies?

Might help if people cite this as reason for not folding [and if the files are 50mb+ then this is definately valid, my experience has been limited to the cpu clients]. Anyone got access to the FAH wiki and able to fix the filesize information?

[Eveofwar]

You've picked the wrong system resource. WoW "requires" (for any useful level of play) a broadband connection, on which one would hardly ever notice F@H work data. Since the F@H client backs off on CPU usage while you're playing, RAM is the only thing you can potentially overtax - the delay would be from Windows swapping to the page file. (I'm a long-time raider and Folder. No interference at all on a reasonable computer & connection.)

You are just plain wrong. When F@H sends and receives data it uses 100% of the BW on the broadband connection leaving Wow competing for what remains. While Wow doesn't use more than around 9-11 KBPS it needs those bytes delivered promply which does not happen causing extreme latency issues. It is totally not enjoyable when WoW's latency goes from 70-100 ms to 3000-4000ms and upto 10,000 in a city because folding has started uploading a WU and will continue till folding is done (aprox 2.5+ minutes). The broadband connection I have personally observed this behavior was on Comcast cable (8Mbps/384Kbps) which I believe most would classifuy as broadband.

It is definately not RAM or the page file that is the problem. I had nine machines SMP folding on my network and the same behavior was observed when any of the other machines were sending and receiving data. When a seperate machine is causing the problem, you can be guarenteed that it is not a RAM or a page file issue on the machine that you are playing WoW on. Since then, I have reduced folding machines to two and that helps. Also, switching from SMP folding to GPU folding as my primary focus also helps alot because the files sizes drop from 50+Meg (2.5+ minutes) to around 1 Meg (4 seconds) and thereby the network interruption is far shorter.

I solved the problem by getting a DLink DIR-655 router and configuring its QOS to give top priority to WOW and the bottom priority to all the folding servers and that definately made a big difference. The WoW latency then went from 70-100 ms to 250-350 ms and while not good it at least is playable while folding is uploading.

Not sure why you're WU uploading takes 2.5+ minutes on SMP client...mine takes a matter of seconds. With "big" packets and advmethods.

[MtM]

You've picked the wrong system resource. WoW "requires" (for any useful level of play) a broadband connection, on which one would hardly ever notice F@H work data. Since the F@H client backs off on CPU usage while you're playing, RAM is the only thing you can potentially overtax - the delay would be from Windows swapping to the page file. (I'm a long-time raider and Folder. No interference at all on a reasonable computer & connection.)

You are just plain wrong. When F@H sends and receives data it uses 100% of the BW on the broadband connection leaving Wow competing for what remains. While Wow doesn't use more than around 9-11 KBPS it needs those bytes delivered promply which does not happen causing extreme latency issues. It is totally not enjoyable when WoW's latency goes from 70-100 ms to 3000-4000ms and upto 10,000 in a city because folding has started uploading a WU and will continue till folding is done (aprox 2.5+ minutes). The broadband connection I have personally observed this behavior was on Comcast cable (8Mbps/384Kbps) which I believe most would classifuy as broadband.

It is definately not RAM or the page file that is the problem. I had nine machines SMP folding on my network and the same behavior was observed when any of the other machines were sending and receiving data. When a seperate machine is causing the problem, you can be guarenteed that it is not a RAM or a page file issue on the machine that you are playing WoW on. Since then, I have reduced folding machines to two and that helps. Also, switching from SMP folding to GPU folding as my primary focus also helps alot because the files sizes drop from 50+Meg (2.5+ minutes) to around 1 Meg (4 seconds) and thereby the network interruption is far shorter.

I solved the problem by getting a DLink DIR-655 router and configuring its QOS to give top priority to WOW and the bottom priority to all the folding servers and that definately made a big difference. The WoW latency then went from 70-100 ms to 250-350 ms and while not good it at least is playable while folding is uploading.

Not sure why you're WU uploading takes 2.5+ minutes on SMP client...mine takes a matter of seconds. With "big" packets and advmethods.

Sorry this is hard to believe since it's not only your own connection but also Stanfords, and though I got to go through allot of hubs, I'm quite sure their capacity is throtteld per connection to ensure a more even spread.

[P5-133XL]

Sorry this is hard to believe since it's not only your own connection but also Stanfords, and though I got to go through allot of hubs, I'm quite sure their capacity is throtteld per connection to ensure a more even spread.

I went over this a long time ago, in a previous forum. I tried to argue that slowing the data transfer would solve a bunch of issues for folders. They countered with the faster they can dump the data, the fewer simultanous connections and the less load on their servers/databases.

[MtM]

Sorry this is hard to believe since it's not only your own connection but also Stanfords, and though I got to go through allot of hubs, I'm quite sure their capacity is throtteld per connection to ensure a more even spread.

I went over this a long time ago, in a previous forum. I tried to argue that slowing the data transfer would solve a bunch of issues for folders. They countered with the faster they can dump the data, the fewer simultanous connections and the less load on their servers/databases.

So it's not throtteld by them, and I'm just SOL since I get bad routes?

I agree on the fast dump helping as well, because a client which hangs during a transfer will have a corupted queue entry, and the wu results would be losts. I would just assume there should be a balance there, and there should be a maximum speed they allow for any single connection. If they don't, it would also get pretty easy to dos an collection server ( well not easy easy, but easier ).