A huge thanks to those of you already signed up. And lots of love goes out to those of you who aren’t but are reading this because you are interested.
I will be posting status updates here, so you can see how big of a difference you are making. I don’t know if it has sunk in yet, but your help will make sure everyone has instant access to the most accurate gear rankings, for free! The results of this ‘stat weight’ project are made available to everyone who visits the site, including free users.
If you’re reading this and wondering what this whole Global Network thing is about, head on over to read about it here.
Global Network status update:
Antorus – current plan:
Early November: use GloNet to add new Pantheon trinkets and T21 set bonus data to current adaptive strategies. Note, these just add the item & proc info, and isn’t a fully new adaptive strat.
Antorus launch: start running adaptive gearing strategies for all specs – we are waiting until Antorus launch to catch any changes from PTR. DPS will be first, then tanks and healers.
When hotfixes come out, we will re-run gearing strategies that are affected. The system is quite smart – if just one talent or item changes, we only have to rerun strategies affected by that specific talent or item change. That lets us not waste GloNet CPUs 🙂
Update #8 – All adaptive gearing strategies are live for everyone – DPS, healers, and tanks!
Thanks for hanging in there and contributing your CPUs – the project is a huge success and working for everyone. If something seems odd for your character, definitely let us know.
Update #7 – Currently running 7.3 gearing strategies – Sept 4
Schedule:
- This week and next week – running all DPS, tanks and healers with 7.3 updates, and a Tier 20 foucs.
- As Antorus approaches, we’ll rerun all specs with T21 and Netherlight Crucible traits, Antorus trinkets, etc. The plan is to run that BEFORE the raid goes live (crazy, right?!)
- Several weeks after Antorus releases: run more strategies based off Antorus bosses (we just need a couple weeks of raid logs to make sure the boss scripts are matching reality).
Sorry for not updating this over the past 6 weeks, but never fear! A LOT has been going on behind the scenes.
- Added extra redundancy for computers that disconnect
- Added an API so you can scale up/down servers you have connected, based on how much we are pushing through GloNet
- Fine-tuned the adaptive strategy set of sims for DPS. It’s complicated, but we had to tweak things to account for the talent with the ring and if you have/don’t have a different talent when it gets ranked.
- Fine-tuned it even more to get the margin of error even lower.
- Increased the speed of the simulations by about 2x with some fancy math and statistics.
- Added linux servers on our end as well
- Currently testing out tanks and healers, so we can run those next.
We expect to be able to finish all strategies in 1-2 weeks under normal conditions. However, our developer (and me too!) are leaving for a vacation we planned a year ago on Sept 6. Swol (our theorycrafter and UI guy) will be setting up GloNet runs and should be able to keep them running. But if something comes out, our developer will be out of town. If you have questions, you can ask in our discord (where we just talk shop), or our forums.
Update #6 – GLONET IS LIVE – July 9
Simulations are currently running – for real! Restart your clients if you have had them open for a while. And start them up if you’ve had it closed.
Current plan:
- Running right now: DPS specs for Mythic + (AoE)
- Next week: Goroth for DPS
- After that: Tanks, healers, and possibly Sassz’ine for DPS
Update #5 – June 22
We intended to get full strategies running on Tuesday (yesterday), but got tied up fixing a few bugs from 7.2.5 (what?! BUGS?!). We also celebrated Father’s Day. Yay Dads!
Over the weekend, we put in even more code to handle stability on the GloNet, when computers disconnect. We made it more aggressive and we think it worked this time.
We also put in a widget that tells you how much you’ve contributed to GloNet. It will be low for now, but that should spike waaay up when we start running the real stuff. To see your contribution, go to your account page, it’s at the bottom.
Current timeline
- This week: continue to build the last infrastructure pieces for GloNet to do smart updates. By this we mean, as data changes and we have to rerun strategies (say we find a bug, or there is a hotfix) – we don’t want to have to re run everything. Just the things that matter. We’re finishing the code to make this happen.
- This weekend: Start running the ‘real’ data on the weekend. Based on the number of clients connected and our tests, they should finish in well under a week (hoping for a couple of days). Our first ‘bosses’ will probably be Mythic+ to get a good AoE fight, and then Goroth for single target.
- Next week: assuming all goes well – use the GloNet in full force to generate strategies for more bosses!
Speaking of Goroth – I just put the script up! Here’s the ‘readable’ explanation of how it is setup and what it is doing. Â You can now select it in the boss menu on the simulator page.
Update #4 – June 14
After the site update for June 13’s patch, we’re back to working on GloNet. We’ve had to finish up the infrastructure to be able to continuously run gearing strategies and update them live on the site as they come in. We expect to start making full use of GloNet sometime Thursday or Friday. And then it’s full speed ahead!
We also plan to add a widget to your account page that shows you how much you have contributed 🙂
I don’t have a speed test to share, but might tomorrow.
Current timeline plan
- The rest of this week – monitor hotfixes and update our site accordingly, start running stat weights on the Global Network.
- Tuesday, June 20 – Start adding boss scripts to the simulator – once logs are uploaded to WCL, we are able to verify boss mechanics and timing.
- The rest of that week – GloNet will be running in FULL FORCE! Â We can start adding in pre-calculated stat weights for ToS bosses.
2 weeks into the patch, we expect to have solid gearing strategies (stat weights) pre-calculated for all of your situations, for all characters, for at least 1 boss. (Assuming the hotfixes don’t continue late into the 2nd week and require too many new calculations).
Update #3 – June 11
If you’re on the Global Network, please check to make sure your client is version 349 or higher. If not, close the client and restart it. Normally it updates itself, but due to some changes, some clients got stuck and didn’t auto-update.
Speed test – Our last speed test makes it look like we should be able to generate gearing strategies for everyone, for 1 boss, in less than a week. I’d like to say only a few days, but the final number is dependent on how long each class takes to run. For example, classes with a lot of dots take longer because the simulator is always checking to see if they need to be refreshed. Tanks take longer than DPS, and healers take the longest due to the insane amount of variables we account for.
Over the weekend – we have been testing the GloNet and making it more resilient to client disconnects, recovering a client if it gets stuck, etc. We also have been putting a bunch of code in to streamline the gearing strategy update process. For example, let’s say we have to update a trinket because of a hotfix – we’d have to rerun gearing strategies around that. But we wouldn’t have to run ALL of them again, just the ones that would be affected. So we put in code to handle that smoothly, to make the most efficient use out of the network. We are finishing up some code tonight that allows us to update the database that holds the gearing strategies without updating the website (so we can do updates faster and more often).
Update #2 –Â June 9
We were featured on MMO-Champion’s news yesterday and got a lot of signups from that. I don’t have a new speed test yet, but will soon!
I have a preview of a visualization of some of the data that will be added to the site.
Given a specific set of talents, set bonuses, and legendaries, this graph shows you how different stat combinations affect your DPS.
The red areas are 90% (or less) of the DPS you could reach. Green is the best. So what you see here is that a LOT of stat combos are fairly equal. We also see a trend that mastery is all around not good for this player.
Why is this important? Let’s say with your current gear you can’t reach the stat combo of the very best one (the column furthest to the right). Can you reach the 2nd best one? 3rd? Mr. Robot keeps checking until he finds the best combination that you CAN reach. As you get more gear, he rechecks and keeps adjusting, moving your further and further to the right.
So you can start to see how the old stat weight method we’ve all used in the past just doesn’t work that well. Yellowfive, our developer, explains:
As you can see in this data, there are relationships between stats that make your DPS go up or down. If we went with the “traditional” stat weight approach and just said Haste > Crit > Vers > Mastery… it would stack Haste way too high. Look at that chart… all the really high Haste columns are in the middle-left, creeping into yellow and orange. You don’t want that!
You want a good balance of Crit and Haste, and that is what the Ask Mr. Robot approach excels at finding.
Yellowfive wrote a longer post about this on our forums if you are interested in reading more.
Update #1 – June 7 & 8
June 8: 1:30 AM PST – We’re running 7,500 unique gear+talent setups a minute. Not bad! We are on our way, and every person really helps. I recorded a speed test so you can watch numbers climb reallllly fast.
Today’s goal – Continue to recruit just 3 people per spec a day who are interested in this project to eliminate the need to run custom stat weights whenever you gear changes. We’ll just do it for you, before you even need them!
June 7: Current estimates will let us finish ‘stat weights’ for everyone, for 1 boss, in roughly 10-14 days.
Today’s goal: To get just 3 more people per spec to join the global network. Baby steps! Think you can help? Tweet it, post it in your guild forum, etc.
FAQs:
I’ve seen a few really good questions pop up. You might have wondered something similar, so here they are:
Q: I have questions or just want to say hello, where should I do that?
A: Stop by our discord (where we just talk shop), or our forums.
Q: Will this work for only ToS gear, or all gear a 110 might use?
A: All gear for a level 110 character 🙂
Q: How will you prioritize what type of stat weights are run first?
A: Let’s say it will take 10 days generate every set of weights everyone will need, for 1 boss. You might be wondering if we’ll do all of the Ret Pallies first, and you’ll be left high and dry until day 7? Nope! We will running them for all specs at the same time. So after day 1, we’ll have 10% of the gearing strategies (stat weights) finished for each spec.
Q:Â I joined, but it isn’t running anything.
A: Right now, we are running small tests throughout the day. So often there is nothing running, and that’s normal. If you signed up for the email on the Global Network post (very bottom of the post), that will let me communicate details with you. I’ll email small updates like this and also let people know when ‘the real thing’ is happening and that it is critical for as many machines to be connected as possible at that point. The emails will be directly from me and I will not send you marketing stuff. (Girl)Scouts honor :)’
Q: Are there any incentives to joining the Global Network?
A: There are 2 parts to this answer:  The main incentive is that everyone gets fully custom stat weights, instantly, even if they change talents or get new gear. This helps you and everyone else who plays Warcraft, including your guild mates. Having custom stat weights as accurate as this increases DPS around 5% on average, based on tests we’ve run. This is available to all of the free users, not just premium.
Secondly, we do want to compensate people who join, but we don’t have the system finalized yet. One possibility is for people who donate at least X amount of time to the network get free premium. We have tracking in place to see how many hours each user is donating, so we can do something like this down the road.