Overseer lag - problem with too many agents.

By this point in time, I imagine anyone who has been playing Overseer within EQ since it started, has maxed their experience in each individual quest type, and barring special agents, has multiple versions of each agent, having given up doing the Recruit Agents quest long ago.

I was recently told in-game (so anecdotally) that having too many overseer agents would slow you zoning. I also find the actual interface quite slow when selecting quests. I must have at least 10 x all common and uncommon agents by now.

So what is the solution? To convert my common/uncommon agents. This reduces 3 of my common agents to 1 uncommon. Multiple versions of uncommon can still be useful if they are not Iconic, meaning more than one can be used at the same time in quests, but in Rare and Elite Agents, multiple versions serve little or no purpose.

So if you dont convert them, what can you do? Well with uncommon agents and upwards, your options are to retire them. If you retire an agent, you get a token, which allows you to either claim 2 agents at a lower level, or claim quest experience.

In my case, and I suspect a lot of other players, neither of these options are particularly beneficial. All I would be doing would be retiring agents, claiming quest xp that is maxed, so I can reduce the agent count and lag!

Once I pull my finger out and get the agent numbers back to reasonable levels, thats the end of it? Sadly no, as even without using Recruit quests you still gain agents - through critical wins of other quest types. So what is the way forward?

After reading much of the same feedback on lag - I bit the bullet and took the time to do all the conversions and the retire my elites. It was quite time consuming. Now that I am caught up, I make sure to do conversion quests at least a couple times a week to keep up on it so that I don't have to go through the pain of converting a huge number ever again.

I have chosen to aim for 4 common, 3 uncommon, 1 uncommon iconic, 1 rare and 1 elite of each agent. I no longer have significant lag attributable to overseer while I am in the game/starting/ending quests.

edit: what will I do with the growing stack of retired agent things? Don't know yet.

Doubt this, my box account has 0 agents and my main account has like 3+ duplicates of every agent in the game, both zone at similar speeds. Only agent count related lag I experience is when interacting with the overseer interface itself.

Its the reason given all over these forums also.

And it is said anything over 800 agents will cause it, yet I have less than 300.

Just like the reason we zone slow is all the stuff we have in real estate etc.

Both have been proven wrong.

There is definitely additional server lag when interacting with the Overseer interface with a large number of Agents. Reducing Agent count in that case is definitely worth it and shows significant improvement. I've never seen a difference in Zoning times however, whether its with thousands of Agents or 100. I believe that's just misinformation.

You misread that. Overseer has nothing to do with zoning times. I was pointing out the 2 myths that abound in this game regarding what causes slow down.

One is that reducing the number of agents will reduce lag in Overseer - its very possible that works for some but it does not for many others and this has been tested ergo it is not a fix.

The other point that has been made on these forums is that your housing contents and everything else you own slows you down when zoning because it has to load everything. Again possible for some but not all, tested and shown not to make difference to account for the zoning lag.

Do others really not see the connection? Its not us, its them!!!

I will go put on my copper bracelet and tin foil hat now - but I know the truth is out there.

From what I've read, some people like to keep Overseer open but minimized. That will impact zoning times because it has to refresh the client data every time because the window is open. The more agents you have...

CPU seems to play a large role as well.

Three accounts, two of them have 8-10 of every common, third account recently converted down to just 2-3 of each common (before the recent overseer QoL patch, god that took forever). The two accounts with more agents are certainly slower.

I'm just going to guesstimate here, but from what I've seen:

Old computer (i5-8600k@4.2ghz DDR4-3000 CL14)
Account with ~10 duplicates: ~2 seconds (complete freeze up when finishing a task)
Account with ~3 duplicates: ~1 second.

New computer (Ryzen 7600x@5.4ghz DDR5-6000 CL30)
Account with ~10 duplicates:~1second.
Account with ~3 duplicates: ~0.5seconds

Biggest difference is just opening the Overseer window, feels like 3x faster now. I nearly died a few times on the old machine when accidentally hitting my overseer keybind when running around.

Same network connection (wired, gigabit fiber), GPU, and SSD that EQ is installed on. Overall the entire Overseer interface is just much snappier. I really wasn't expecting a big difference, assuming it was mostly connection or server based, but isn't.

I don't notice any difference in zone times between the stuffed accounts and the trimmed account. I don't leave overseer window minimized though.

Other than trying to track down a bug (like quests going missing and the like), can someone explain why exactly you'd want to keep this open all the time?

To oversee it?

Save the retired agents for when they come out with new agents. Thats what im doing i got like 102 elites echo's.

i wish they give us a way to convert many agents at same time ( specially common ).
or a button that we can click to prevent us to get more agents past 4 or 5 duplicated.

I think they've already shown us that they're going to use the seasonal events to get new agents from now on, and those can't be acquired via conversions. I think they're gonna have to come up with some other use/rewards for the echoes.

We've gotten one new set of general agents already (which took a while), there could be more coming later depending on what assets they still have to work with vs creating new ones. I would also imagine once we are through a years worth of seasonal events, they might not create a second set so they would only be left adding general agents if there were to be more.

Well a AA reward be nice but who knows if they will do that.

After you get an Agent via whatever way you can in the event, you can also get them via conversions. That is how I got 2 Santug's, and you cannot retire him.

You sure you got it from a conversion and not from just doing the task again?

Should we really have to maintain our agents to make overseer playable? Once you have maxed overseer there is no useful reward at least for me to convert agents. Dead simple game with a few hundred agents should not be a problem. Smells like poor design.

A lot. Till last year i still played EQ with my Dualcore PC from 2009 i think, till it finaly died. Had no problems at all in EQ, zoning was fast, no lag at raid etc...
... but overseer: It took around a minute till a finished quest let me choose the reward.

I think its a bad design. I played overseer on EQ2 with the same PC (yeah its different than EQ1) but no lags and waiting at all.
Its only seconds to wait now on a modern PC, but there is still some waiting time and minimizing the Tab and making it Fullscreen again can take over a minute. (Custom UI, perhaps thats the problem or part of it.)