That is a great observation. Then the question becomes who owns that particular part of the network. Is it part of the hosting platform they are using ? or is it outside their network?
Yesterday there was some sort of lag for European players; it was messing up our raid a bit but did not affect players in the US, so it was some sort of European routing issue.
Since everyone has an idea how to fix it here is mine. Add the line below to everyone's ini folder and make it permanent....... Eqclient.ini add - Stickfigures=1
Seriously though, playing on all old models helps. I wonder if any big guild would (and could enforce) every single person being on StickFigures, all spell effects off, and other settings 'low balled'. And do a raid for test purposes, and compare to normal. Would be interesting to separate out some client side issues, and minimize the difference in peoples machine/gfx card and setup (to some extent).
I have found, ALL old models, and pre-Luclin mounts helps. Even one model new, and you're bringing along all the graphics stuff that is needed to show any. Losing any benefit you could get from all old. Old vs. New water? I haven't seen much diff. But when you are looking for absolute lowest possible graphic requirements (as a baseline) might want to. TINY for sky? Far clip plane? UI? uggg *edit* But to be clear, these are Client-side optimizations. They may or may not help the lag much. I just propose to try a raid with every player on the exact same lowball settings. As a way to separate Server-side from Client-side issues a bit. If every single player being on lowball settings doesn't help, it is largely a server-side issue. If it helps a fair bit, the issues are likely both client-side and server-side.
We have tried the hide all AFK players on a raid once and then everyone check themselves as afk a few years ago to try and get past the lag. It didn't work.
Stick figurers and hiding player models is all client side so really doesn't address the server lag issue.
Using the old models can really speed up zoning, not sure what else it might affect though. It's kind of unreal when a potato PC with a physical drive zones faster than a gaming PC with an SSD. That's the only explanation I have been able to find for this oddity. And we're talking a 4-core APU with 8 graphics cores on DDR3 and a 7200rpm drive versus an 8-core 16-thread CPU with DDR4 and dedicated GPU and SSD. Almost all of the new models are off on the potato, so those old texture files must be a lot smaller.
I find the zoning issue is not consistent. I am currently playing out of Germany so my normal time should be off peak time Tuesday - Sunday. Most of the time I can zone just fine and in a reasonable time frame (not sure what the Dev team considers reasonable for zoning), there are instances of prolonged zone times and lag spikes through my day. Still playable though. But....between 7-12 pm eastern time on Mondays for sure it can take minutes to zone and you have to ask if you crashed from the raid.
The lag is so bad on BB during semi to heavy peak times that I no longer log those toons in. Click fs campfire in pok and you have time to check parcels and make a quick bank stop prior to it activating. It's that bad. Yes, I'm just repeating what many know already, but it's killing my love for the only game that I've ever played since May 99.
There are two things about old models. 1.New models use different rendering and bring along different graphic calculations. Use even one and you take that graphic performance hit, which really isn't huge, but it's a thing. 2.New models have larger textures (and more textures), and more complex (larger file size models). This is about load times and not really a consideration at all as far as 'lag'. If you're seeing lag, you're seeing the texture, it's already been loaded. I think it is very likely ALL old models helps 'potatoes' much more than more powerful PCs. What you see and what you load is all client-side, but there may or may not be some interaction with server-side there. It would be interesting to test IMO.
