Every time I play after a patch it is so fast, zones in a few seconds, hotkeys are instant, etc. It feels like it should. But wait for it to fill with players and it goes back to being sluggish.
Zoning in general, and other things seems slightly lagged too, like doing /who, or sending tells, etc. When the server population is low, everything is fast.
[edit: this is was intended to be about load times. Obvs not gonna help with hotkeys, etc.] I can't say for certain, but there's a good chance this has nothing to do with the server. When there are more players in a zone, there are more textures in the zone, and if you have your video settings set to preload textures then it will take longer to load the zone. There's an advanced video setting in the game, something about memory usage (my server is down right now, so I can't load it to check) with a drop down where you get to choose between least, balance, and most. It defaults to balanced. If you change this setting to Least memory usage, it will lazy load textures. This means that it will only load textures as they become needed (i.e. when a character comes onto your screen). This will vastly speed up your load times. The tradeoff is that objects will often appear as grey blobs at first, until the texture can be loaded. I notice that the longer I run the game without restarting my computer, the worse this gets (cause Windows).
Since last time I played (some months ago), it went worse. Merchants are really slow in showing their content. This was much faster but it seems that they managed to get it more stable on AB but with the disadvantage of a slow system.
But it is slow when zoning into places with 0 players. Yeah merchants sometimes take about 6 seconds to show their stuff. It happens even in old zones with hardly any people. It is clear to me they have cut costs by reducing their CPU or bandwidth on servers, but it is noticeable.
This part may be attributable to an interesting thing I've noticed in recent weeks: some zones don't spin up until I zone into them (as determined by /up). The most common example of this is Tower of Rot, for me - presumably the lack of use of the zone puts it on some list that drops it until if/when it is needed.
Even using a good SSD there are still unexplainable slowdowns. I dont think its the server, I think its the client being stupid. It normally takes 30 seconds or so to zone. I could zone into pok, go make a cup of coffee, come back in 5 minutes, turn around to the lag pile and they are all grey for a second until they load their colors. Why? It should have loaded every type of armor there is in zone while I went to make coffee, but instead it doesnt bother until the players all come into view. Thats just dumb. My in game memory setting is max usage. It shouldnt wait. Sure its just a second, but it really makes the game look flawed.
