We've been told for years that picks are terrible for servers. We had pick thresholds changed through the years. We used to be able to keep picks open with 1 person. That was considered too powerful and too much of a stress on the server. So, what's up with the botting on Aradune? Why is it okay for 12 picks of Sirens grotto / velks / chardok / griegs end / to be up 90% of the time by 2-3 people? We've been told that picks are too much for the server to handle. Yet, we are allowing 2-3 people to keep 12+ picks open 24/7? How does this make any sense? Why would you change picks and refuse to give us personal picks but allow such blatant abuse of the rules and integrity of the game? Picks were so bad for the game but somehow what's going on on Aradune is not bad for the game? When they made the pick changes, I doubt those servers were keeping more than 20 picks open as an entire population. So, now 2-3 people are keeping 12 picks open by themselves, and picks are all of a sudden not a big concern? So, do picks cause lag on servers, or do they not? If they are as bad as we've been told, can we clear up the bots on Aradune so that the rest of us don't have to deal with the lag they cause by having 200+ bots warping and automating and causing stress on the server with their 12+ picks of automated toons.
I dont see any reason a pick should consume more resource than a normal zone. They have all of the same mechanics and AI for the NPCs that could consume resource. AE groups cause heavy load, lots of NPCs calculating patching, all taking damage at the same time etc. Multiply that up by multiple picks and the server load is going to increase. So multiple picks if the deep I would imagine would be much worse than multiple picks of SG.
All depends what you are doing in them. AoC are more RAM-efficient than Picks but everything that happens in game has processing overheads. Biggest overhead is swarm-kiting just due to how much processing pathing generates, which is why so many nerfs to that activity were necessary - that lags the servers out disproportionately to pretty much every other activity.
You can not see it all you want, the fact is that there is an issue with too many picks. It brought earlier TLP's to their knees until DPG adjusted the pick thresholds. The reasons, as the devs have explained it, is that old school zones weren't designed as efficiently as newer zones ldon onwards that were designed to be instanced from the get-go. They tend to run a lot of resource intensive scripts, and the server can only handle so many at once. When you get too many of these running at the same time, the whole server bogs down and eventually crashes.
Search dev posts circa february 2017. They are there. Doesn't necessarily apply to live picks, but too many hurt the health of the server on early era tlp's.
