Zoning takes 30 seconds on a good day. I know its not me cause I checked system usage in taskmanager and nothing is bad. Cpu and GPU usage actually go down significantly during zoning. Its not internet speed because its only 500k bps max and I have 180M bps. Not great but far more than needed. Hard disk usage is minimal, and in case anyone goes there - yes its an SSD. There is nothing on my end that is throttling zoning. So why does eq of all games take so long to move me to a new zone? No other game is like this afaik.
I would be interested in what Darkpaw considers an intended zone time. 30 sec is fast and obviously outside raid time. I would still expect times less than 30 seconds to zone considering modern hardware and internet speeds.
Because every time you zone, it reload your character file. Which includes all your inventory, your bank, and here is usually the big one... your housing.
Ive heard that before but when I checked there really isnt that much data being reloaded. You can see how much data is downloaded in taskmanager. The download is small. The HD usage is small. Yes there is some reload, but compared to the capabilities of the computer it is a measurably trivial amount.
My low level bare nekked characters take just as long to zone as my fully stuffed hoarders. Other days they all zone fast. Just like some days Overseer conversions really do take 10 sec and other days can take 1 minute. Just like someday the hot buttons for Veteran AA will be depressed even though I did not use them. Yes, I have set the clock. Yes, its the same on different computers. Has it gotten worse for players since Dragon Hoard was introduced?
Server-side, the main slowness in zoning is caused by real estate items. When a server first comes up it will also be slowed down by lots of characters loading.
Sounds like a good time to revamp housing, divorcing it from the character... and while we're splitting things, split the largest pop servers. With zone times easily parsed with log files, what is being done to improve the 17 mins worth of zone time for T1 launch or roughly 8 min for T2 (zone in, zone out, zone in)? https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/good-job-daybreak.288060/
Except I have toons will all sorts of junk in housing and others with no housing that zone slow, 30 sec or more. Also, after a server up I actually zone faster and get slower the longer servers have been up. So from my perspective I would prefer a server reboot every 2 weeks if not weekly.
It's worth calling out that zoning time is entirely dependent on the server itself. The more people, the longer it will take to zone. Try on a low pop server such as Agnarr, Vaniki, or Zek, and you will zone in 5-10 seconds. On Agnarr, we don't have real estate to load, so zoning time is significantly faster. However, Agnarr is also locked at PoP/LDON.
A new L1 character zones 20% faster than a fully outfitted L120 character with all aas and a house. Not a whole lot of difference.
last two nights ive been having a node in vegas that is giving extreme lag and in turn long zone times, it started last night later, what was your ping at the moment?
@niente Starting Thursday night at about 9:30PM EST when we incidentally had our final boss on last T2 raid (Deepshade-2) to 8% and ever since something has been going on with these servers. Could support please figure this out ? It's affecting mostly Eastern USA players afaik but this is obviously a big problem that you guys haven't figured out. My ping has been 70 consistently for years but ever since Thursday evening at that time its been 280-350 even spiking to 450 just now when a weekend raidforce started to gather...Maybe that is a hint to what is going on?? Anyway, its quite simply unplayable all the sudden for many. It's affecting a handful of raiders in my guild to the point where none of us can raid now and the timing caused us to wipe our raid which we easily had beat. This is nothing at all on our end. We have perfectly fine pings to anything else. Personally I have a fibre connection and get 400m up and 400d to everywhere else I still am getting 20 pings all across the country even to California on other services/games so I have no idea why Everquest east coast pings are even in the 70-80 range on a normal day. Could you all please look into this or reboot the servers or do something to try and fix it ? Thank you.
this has happened probably 5 or so times in the last few months, its always the same node, always level3 vegas in the tracert everquest.com
It may be worse if you have a lot in the house. I only have 48 items. But the point is that with just 20% difference (measured), its not my gear or aas or bank thats causing long zone times. Its just the server.