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Addressing Latency

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by Accendo, Apr 20, 2022.

  1. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    A lot of that very informative post confirms the long-held suspicion that the "performance budget" of many past changes that added more procs, more pets, more secondary effects, more swings etc. was never really understood properly & so the game increased the processing load at a far faster pace than the advances in hardware performance were allowing for - they have to be kept in balance.

    It probably reinforces my desire for the combat system to be made a little more simple & straightforward, at least until the "performance budget" metrics are clearer & until headroom in that equation opens up.

    Changing & streamlining parts of the engine will only go so far, I think an overhaul of the combat system will be required for a proper root & branch solution and having a dozen or so "spam" abilities is not going to be a situation that can be allowed to continue while raid lag is as bad as it is.

    So reduce the bajillion swarm pets so "proper" pets aren't hobbled, take the zerker pets, cut down on volume of melee hits per swing & just make them bigger hits or something.
    minimind, Allayna, Wulfhere and 2 others like this.
  2. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Beimeith and Wdor like this.
  3. MyShadower All-natural Intelligence


    If I were a betting man, I would wager real estate following you everywhere was simply because that is how they have always dealt with "character" data. It got built that way because anything else would have made it take longer and cost more to implement housing and housing was the "must do" project at the time.

    These posts tend to reveal they have coded themselves into more and more corners over time. It will be interesting to see how they rework things to get out of them. It makes sense how they end up here as I am sure they have many stories they could post about how they wanted to do something but were overruled due to time and budget constraints, having to work on something else because management needed to see more revenue for a specific quarter, etc.

    It just seems like the lag issues have not hurt their bottom line or it is not showing it has in any of their metrics.
  4. Hibiki Journeyman

    This still doesn't solve why you haven't made a TLP server that will lock at OoW. Please do this and all your issues with latency will disappear.
    Defenestrated Vase likes this.
  5. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Go stand in front of a mirror & slap sense into yourself, you might prevent further embarassment.
    Celephane and Wdor like this.
  6. FalafelPedro New Member

    Make EQ3. Make it VR on console with mouse and keyboard support option for non VR folk. Custom voice command casting and all that fun stuff. You can sell VR illusions to buy future talent to sort out all the new lag! =) You're doing a good job.
  7. Pimento Elder

    My personal lag issues started the day after 64 bit patch - but only on my laptop. Has better than min hardware except for video card which meets min requirements. I have tried just about ever tune item that can be tweaked that I can find out there. My lag is obviously video only - screen does not move for up to 60 seconds as I still keep doing DPS. I am just about to the point of reinstall EQ but unsure that would be of any help. A detailed post by the devs on what we can do to tune down even further would be of some help.
  8. Jedis Arch Mage


    There is a difference between a game designer and an application programmer/coder. The items you are referencing (nerfing abilities/spells/AAs, items, etc.) are all design and scripting and not application (C) code. They are two independent and completely different skill sets and people on the team.

    You don't hire an interior designer to build a house for you; you hire a contractor/builder. For a game's core systems, you look for people with a programming background. These are typically not world builders and people that design/populate zones and write quests. Designers typically work in data. Programmers build the systems the designers use.
    Tallie and Keeden like this.
  9. Stumblelord New Member

    [quote="Pimento, post: 4125761, member: 448830" I am just about to the point of reinstall EQ but unsure that would be of any help. [/quote]


    Laptops, especially those with APUs / iGPUs (Intel) struggle because they are sharing a limited amount of memory between the game, Windows, and the gpu. When the game can now use a much larger pool of memory, suddenly things that could rely on it before are left without. Try the two options for Shaders, and turn off dynamic lighting, bloom, tattoos, and basically everything else, set Sky to simple, and so on.

    I play with stick figures, as character animations are not important to me. Enabling 'hide AFK players' can help too, and /showname 1
  10. fakenames Journeyman

    ddo had a very similar issue to zone lag and they reduced it by removing alot of proc things and compensating for the dmg loss in some other way. maybe swarm pets and the amount of procs / casts need to go down while the power of other things go up.
    Wdor and Emilari like this.
  11. Branntick Augur

    Would anyone actually miss mechanics like swarm pets? They seem so needless to me. Like just delete them outright and make it a DoT, or better yet, don't replace them at all.

    They're basically a DoT that has to spawn an entity in the game world. I don't see the point to them whatsoever.
  12. strongbus Augur

    why i have no issues with this they have to change how the mage line of many spells works as the more pets(reg and swarm) on the mob the harder the spell hits for. granted they can just up the amount on the spell and be done.
  13. Emilari UI Designer

    First, thanks Accendo for communicating with us. I appreciate the acknowledgement of the issues the game and players face. I hope to see more dialogue going forward.

    1) I'm only against the idea of removing multibinds if they don't also re-adjust how classes that rely on them function. My class, Cleric, cannot function adequately in a modern raid environment without them. If the class was re-designed so that it could, I'd be fine with doing away with them. Honestly, I think it'd make the class more enjoyable to play if it wasn't just mashing a couple of spam keys hundreds of times.

    2) 100% agree.

    100% Agree. I'm rather disappointed that the Dragon's Hoard storage isn't larger, and they haven't already gone ahead and re-worked housing and banking to function more like DH. I would buy more DH if only Darkpaw would let me...

    100% Agree. It's also disheartening when they say they're reducing the number of procs/swarm pets, and then turn around and release new proc augs as a reward for one of the brand new quests released today. It kind of feels like communication within Darkpaw should be improved so it doesn't feel like the left hand isn't talking to the right hand, and unintentionally lying to us as a result.

    100% Agree. While I don't interact much with damage proc augs and don't want to comment an idea on how to possibly fix it, there are some other things that could be modified to not spam us on every spell cast like armour focus effects. I don't need 5+ lines of text just to tell me that the armour I'm wearing did what it's supposed to do; I'm pretty sure everyone filters that sort of thing to spam. Perhaps there's a way to make them quieter and require less processing by making them more similar to how worn effects function?

    100% agree. I don't think we'll see significant improvement until the entire system is overhauled personally. It'd take significant work to do, both on the end of the designers to re-think design, and the engineering team to fix/implement changes, but I think it'd be worth it. Most other games I play only require 4-6 hotbars worth of buttons; not 11+. Calculations bloat and button bloat is definitely a contributor.

    I'd hate to see the game "dumbed down" but a simple design-side re-think of who should even have pets in the first place, and removing them from some classes (adding the lost functionality / damage into other things) isn't a bad idea. As a cleric, I don't even use my pet and don't understand why I have one. I'd rather have the damage a pet adds just inserted to the base damage of my nukes. There's a lot of other things that could use a re-think, not just pets - so don't think I'm hating exclusively on pets oh pet classes. I'm sure we've all got a hotbar or two of buttons we rarely use; I know I do.

    100% agree - why not just commit to not making any more damage proc augs, nerfing the ones that exist so they're no longer as fashionable, and just adding the "missing" damage straight to the base damage of people's spells/abilities?

    The type 18/19 damage proc augs introduced in TBL remind me of the necro 2.0 effect that was never aged out for years. People in some classes are still hoarding onto all 4 chase items, plus the ToV ear just for the augs - which I feel is bad design. Chase items like the grow cube in Vex Thal are fun and I'd love to see more of them; chase items like these proc augs should have an expiration date.
    Wdor and MasterMagnus like this.
  14. Pimento Elder


    Laptops, especially those with APUs / iGPUs (Intel) struggle because they are sharing a limited amount of memory between the game, Windows, and the gpu. When the game can now use a much larger pool of memory, suddenly things that could rely on it before are left without. Try the two options for Shaders, and turn off dynamic lighting, bloom, tattoos, and basically everything else, set Sky to simple, and so on.

    I play with stick figures, as character animations are not important to me. Enabling 'hide AFK players' can help too, and /showname 1[/quote]



    Thanks for the info! Its an HP Omen laptop and has an Nvidia RTX 2060 with 6Gb of ram - I had zero issues with lag of any sort prior to 64 bit
  15. Puzzled Elder

    I just want to say, I've been around with the greatest of interest in this game since I first heard about it in 1995. There have been several issues of course but what game hasn't had. Anyway just keep doing what you're doing It'll all work out. Great Job EQ!!!
  16. Finchy Augur

    The real question here is; why couldn't you wait 1 more minute to hit "post".
  17. Marton Augur

    Absolutely agree with this.

    We see people complaining about numerous issues, lag for example, for years and years; we are being told 'there is no time' for years and years.

    Oddly enough, there is time for classic achievements - why is that more important then addressing the fact people don't want to log for raids due to raiding being a very lousy experience?

    Edit: my apologies to those 4 people who actually enjoy classic achievements.
  18. Kaenneth [You require Gold access to view this title]

    Be careful when adding delay loading Faction data; there used to be a bug when it was delay loaded in the past that guards near a zoneline would attack players entering the zone after another player with bad faction left. The entering player would have the old players faction for a moment before they appeared.

    Happened with Freeport guards. Once they aggroed, even if your faction was supposed to be good, they would kill you before your client got control.
    Vumad likes this.
  19. dwish Augur

    Great post, and it's nice to get some acknowledgement that you are aware of the issue and what you are planning to do to fix it.

    It's definitely not going to be an easy fix however. Pets, swarm pets, procs, and many other things that negatively affect server performance are part of numerous classes and their functionality, and trying to change these things to lessen the load on the server is going to be a nightmare in my opinion.

    One tweak to the above mechanics could negatively change a class's playability, and we all know changes/fixes to classes come extremely slow. I would rather see some of these things limited a bit going forward instead of trying to retroactively change multiple classes which I feel will just end very badly.

    Regardless, it's good to know you guys are actively working on this issue and recognize how much it affects players currently.
  20. Goofydoofy Lord Goatspanker

    Awesome of you to get that information out. I am a firm believer in knowing the problem, even if I can't fix it. It may change the way I do certain things at certain times to help with the problem. Thank You
    minimind and -----Cinexa----- like this.