And you're positive this isn't ISP related? What kind of ping do you get from LA based servers outside of EQ? Speed Test
34 mbps download and 24 mbps upload, about 200 ping connecting from SE Asia to LA. If my ISP was acting up i would know it. Definately only EQ client that has any real latency. From the moment i click enter World, it starts to lag. And only the last 1.5 weeks the previous 10 years have been fine go figure.
I'm not going to pretend to know your system structure, but after reading through what you said above, my suggestion would be to use distributed services. Have a server farm setup for character movement, another for spells/abilities, etc. The main processing would send asynchronous calls to the app farms to do the processing. The server(s) that are processing and managing spells and abilities should not be the same server(s) in charge of character movement. Also, you need an audit app server farm that keeps all the other app servers playing nice together and keeping stuff from getting out of synch. It's not an easy thing to setup, and it will cost a lot of money, but any MMO developer that's not using a distributed design going forward is going to run in to the exact issues that EQ has been dealing with for a very, very long time.
Wired connection (from computer to modem/router) or wireless? I go wireless, and my ping jumps to around 1000, but with a cable, ping is around 80 in game. I am in the US, not oversees.
What you are describing is a failure of "load balancing". If the raid instance servers are allocated and assigned correctly you would not have one running light while others are overloaded. One simple fix would be to move an instance that is detected as laggy to a different server - whatever that takes. Most raiders would be glad to log off and back in while having to stand up and tap dance if they could have an instance with less lag.
K regarding the loading of all a toons items in their plots has to go. I have toons with 3 plots with full buildings and crates to boot. I would think this is done because of personal Trophies and possibly other things. I would suggest the following. Call it The Showcase. But instead of it having anything to do with plots have a special bag. Say Bag 0 that contains these special items on the character that does not show on the character screen or have it show. Does that really matter? Then have an item that can be bought from the plot vendors that duplicates what is in the special bag.for showing Trophies and whatnot in houses.
Distributed servers is a nice buzzword to toss around but in reality it doesn't work like people tend to think it does. The big problem with it is that the app itself needs to be able to support it and even if it does that just changes the bottleneck from one area to another. Sure adding more servers could let them process parts of it faster but they still need to communicate with each other and process the data they get from that server.
I could be wrong but I don't think they have servers in LA and I thought they got moved out of state to Nevada.
In my experience reboots, back ups and other items to ensure equipment longevity and functionality happen at a frequency of no later than a week. EQ does them monthly+. Is there an opportunity to increase reboots and such to weekly during lower population times to try and keep the materials running a bit better?
Oh I know it's not a simple thing, and it requires a great deal of redesign. I thought I mentioned that. Either way, its a massive change to the server code, and I get that because basically this is what I do for a living. The thing is that you need dedicated services that do very specific things, so they can be optimized to be very fast at what they do. The main server code would then have to consume these services as part of its loop so to speak.
even wow and ff14 do this its not some weird thing someone did a long time ago they are stuck with. its why ff14 is hesistant to allow you more glamor slots. It should only effect your zoning time not actual lag though. once you zoned it doesnt need to check again it just needs to add new aquired items to your list. then you zone and it needs to check again. atleast thats how it works in ff14 idk about eq but i suspect its the same. It does sound like load balancing could also be better. Vish and Hanvar spawn scripted adds at double the length of time 90% of the time. I suspect its very similar for live with similar mechanics. Thankfully tlps do not see the amount of lag live does. Probably because we all arent twin procing twin casting and procing swarm pets. Which leads me back to my earlier comment. Redo effects that lead to high server stress situations. twin cast and twin proc could just double the dmg. thats 1 less spell every time it procs for the server to care about. make swarm pets not function as npcs with a mesh requireing movement updates. DDO did that and it helped alot once they nailed down buffing the people who got hit the hardest by that type of stuff.
So, maxing out housing for my main and 7 alts would be a bad thing. Stripping my houses of stuff would be a good thing. Why have housing then ? I assume, Guild halls do not have the same issues. Is there anything in my characters housing that is relevant to my character when not in the housing zone ? Anything other than Trophies ? Maybe they should stop reading all that crap when not actually in the housing zone and provide some compensation for the trophy loss if necessary. Lag proportional to number of zones in some way is scary for a game this old. Is the delay issue more related to the high proc rate ? Lot of stuff (can) happen every time my pally swings.
It may be april but it is not the 1st. Just this week changed mobtypes and now some see SoS.. Thorough testing would have pointed this out.
Yet another data point that seems to affirm the old adage that software quality decreases with time due to it being maintained by people that do not fully understand it and the impact of the changes that they make and that things get broken that are not detected until after a new release has been issued.
Going to take a wild guess here and assume that they are referring to 20+ year old sparsely commented native/unmanaged C++ code or perhaps something far worse like C or some other procedural programming language
A question for the devs, how much load on the server could be reduced by changing the "logged in character" bazaar system? 100's of extra players loaded into the game using up memory and who knows what else. has to be something that could be done to reduce the load, and allow your paying customers to play the game while still selling their wares (people play at peak time, not shopping in the baz at 4am) a listing agent, or something to let 100's of players log out, gotta be easier on the hardware and bandwidth for mem and packets...
If at this point the devs and producers do not know what's causing the lag, they have not been doing their jobs, or, no one has been tasked with investigating the problem. All of the stuff in the original post is known. The question is simply, which all of those things ARE causing the problem, and what is the proposed solution. For example: lag time of various kinds have been observed since DP went to the new and different server hosting infrastructure. I'm guessing, yes guessing, that DP has cheaped out on the amount of memory, bandwidth or virtual CPUs. This is not rocket science.
Hit the nail on the head. The company thinks they thoroughly test their code, changes, and additions despite it being glaringly clear to the players that there is a massive breakdown in their testing/Quality Assurance programs. Nearly every patch includes new and often very impactful issues with the playability of the game. Worse, they do not prioritize fixes to the fixes that broke what wasn’t even seemingly related to anything they have done in the patch (patch notes). As well, they also take unacceptable amounts of time to address truly game breaking issues such as the “QuickTime bug” or the “purple bug” (complete loss of mouse usability to activate any ability, spell, or button/feature of any sort when after going unconscious and then being healed back to consciousness.) Maybe monthly patches are the root of some of those issues. I do think they ought to be patching weekly/as quickly as necessary to possibly gain and maintain some integrity for the game and company. I appreciate Accendo’s post and communication with us concerning the topic at hand. Unfortunately I feel like it is too little too late for this EQ’er. The only thing that keeps me logging in is the people I play with. For the past six-ish months I have mainly only logged in for raids and I raced through progression for ToL with only one of 4 characters. Even with the new group content I found myself despising logging in to do anything. This behavior is a result of numerous issues but absolutely the playability or more accurately, the lack there of any reasonable playability was and continues to be the leading factor/driving issue to my disgust with the game. The management of EQ seem to be content with and interested only in delivering high server up-time rather than deliver anything remotely close to any sort of acceptable game in regards to performance/playability. (Their history being my only evidence of such). As a result of our fed-up-ness with EQ, my group of friends has been trying out every game under the sun, both new and old, in hopes of and to try to find a game we all like and can swap to so that we can just rid our hands of EQ and all it’s issues. Currently I am fully vested into a game called War of Dragnorox (WoD) developed by a team of passionate long term eq players with promises and assurance that many of the countless unemmersive additions that found their way into eq and pervaded our gaming experience do not ever find their way into their game. Even just the WoD developers’ communication with its’ potential player base has been astronomically greater than what I have experienced with the developers and curators of EverQuest over my entire history with the company. (Since Sept. 27th 1999). The game isn’t due out until late this year or sometime next year. But as soon as it launches live my EQ accounts will be cancelled. I’ve tolerated the deplorable state of the game/content/server performance/lack of communication for the past three years mostly to maintain friendships. I feel that that is far longer than any rational and reasonable person would. Currently, my group of friends now choose to have watch parties for movies and Tv shows or to play other games rather than login to eq. Where for nearly five years we used to login to EQ and EQ alone every single day of each year to play together. The only EverQuesting we do now is logging in to raid just to maintain our raid attendance. Raid attendance is the last straw we hold onto as we have waited for months and years with bated breath for some sort of miraculous fix to the game and/or release of worthwhile content (We did enjoy TBL even with server lag issues, the group content was top notch with plenty of content to do and the raids were challenging.) Only to be met with worsening conditions and poor content over that course of time. I am truly disappointed in EQ and Darkpaw and am living with a “bad taste in my mouth” that will likely persist up to and after I do leave the game. And frankly, I will never play any other game related to Daybreak Games/Darkpaw due to the complete lack of integrity within the company and in the service they provide in EQ.
Your post does shows you don't understand precisely what is being said. Your graphics setting don't impact the server. It doesn't matter what you set your personal graphics level to, the server is just handling data. X Client cast this, send the clients the cue to display x graphic for y seconds. That is the extent that servers process graphics. However, swarm pets have a huge load on the back end. A certain amount of AI, server processing, has to be deployed to every pet. You can't offload this to the client because if there is a sync issue between clients, things will appear differently on some or all of the people in the raid, on their screen. Not to mention you have now given client the authority to execute code on the server that directly affects the environment. Cheating would be rampant. Multibinds causes an impact while the client is active though. It's small but on a server scale it can become over burdening. Each client has 2 basic points. The bind point and the home point. So the server has to load 2 flags into the virtual table each time a client loads the game. Personally I don't see that as a major issue though. The flag is a zone with x y and z coordinates. Multi instancing is also a huge load on the server. Now the server doesn't run just 1 zone. it runs a zone for every instance. You really can't do away with instances though. In the past, before multi instancing, some guilds decided that a server belongs to them and would raid bomb guilds not aligned to them to prevent them from raiding. Instancing or massive player bans. That is the choice.
