While in an external view during a battle for a screenshot, I
noticed something. It seems to me the song graphics show up a
fraction of a second before the text message (last night I was
having an atypical 280 ms ping time). I suspect what's going
on is that the graphics are drawn based on a client-side
timer, while the text messages are sent by the server. So the
slight difference is just the time it takes for the server
message to get to you.

I mentioned before that I usually use the song graphics
pulsing to tell me to switch to my next song. Some time ago,
I also said I thought our songs weren't lasting quite as long
as before, yet when I timed it I found no difference. Well
now that I think about it, I started getting this impression
about the time I turned particle density off and began using
the text messages to tell me when to switch songs.

So maybe this is why I was able to weave 4 songs?

On the topic of weaving 4 songs, I'm starting to wonder if JM
Capozzi was correct when he said our DoTs last for 10 seconds,
pulsing 4 times at 2.5 second intervals. I disagreed with him
because if you start/stop Accelerando, the boot icon (and
effect) lasts from 12-18 seconds. However, the latest test I
ran with weaving Clarity (the effect began to taper off when I
weaved it with 2 other songs) points to its duration being
somewhere between 7-11 seconds. I suspect what's going on is
that some effects (Accelerando, see invis, etc.) are entirely
client-side. These will last 12-18 seconds (depending on when
you started the song in the 6-second "heartbeat" cycle).
Others (Clarity, DoTs?, Hymn?) are server-side and quite
possibly could last only 10 seconds (which you can't really
see since the client only updates every 6 seconds).

--
John H. Kim
kim@...