No, we don't want simpler events but I'd prefer they be simpler events than laggy messes that fall apart. A simple raid where you control your own destiny is preferable to one where you are entirely at the whim of the server. Guild A gets 0 lag on AHR? They easily one shot. Guild B gets quadruple sets of golems resulting in the entire room being an aura? They wipe. We have had multiple people from other guilds raid with us or watch our raids and be absolutely dismayed at how poorly performing the script runs in some of our DZs. Maybe it's just a Povar thing, I do not know.
On the other side you got guilds who can use the lag to cause mechanics to not happen or be delayed allowing them to burn through events.
I'm on Firiona. I'm not sure I've seen any raid event of the past 2 years be operated correctly. I wouldn't know what that looks like. Do you mean to tell me the Aten golems are supposed to move within the first 5 minutes of spawning? Or the adds on the 2nd dragon of Crusaders are supposed to be pullable? Or the dracholiches on Zlandicar actually spawn AND do something? How many broodlings are supposed to come at us on the Klandicar event, none?
I don't know anything about it. I do know they have lost customers (3 friends of mine) to lag. Have almost lost me to lag.
And having no new content and lag would encourage you to stay around longer? It is great to suggest that they focus on fixing the lag but I don't think it is reasonable to sacrifice all new content for the possibility of fixing lag. Would be better for them to have people work on reducing lag and others who are unable to do that continue on new content.
I personally feel like the game runs pretty well. It could improve some more and I'm sure they're working on that more over time. The rest of the post is sort of confusing imho.
If you raid you know what i am talking about when Aten has 3 and 4 sets of golems up when its supposed to be one you know there is lag
I raid also and don't really have a lag issue. I don't run any extra trash programs. My server is also low population. Do you think it has anything to do with population and or how many people are raiding on your server at the same time? Love the idea of retooling procs to one proc and instead of 10 procs you have 1 proc and 9 stats from items that give your your one proc more DMG
The shift to 64 bit also leaves some older systems behind. Losing the slowest 10% of the machines on raids just might help. Serverside having to cross communicate with toasters!
i play on the lowest population live server and atleast another raiding guild on server reports these lag issues on the forums
Yes, absolutely. For the purposes of this discussion, what most people are calling "raid lag" is really server/instance lag. Many feel it's a direct result of proc and damage mod calculations. My take: I/O between the instance and the many game clients attached to it is not sufficient to sustain the raid encounter. This results in a scenario where, once the server/instance falls behind, the lag is compounded by all the new data coming from the instance and game clients. For example, in an automotive production line everyone has their job (server/instance). Once someone falls behind (server/instance) everything behind them also stops. But the cars ahead of that point keep going, resulting in gaps (lag). In order close that gap, we either need to speed up the production line behind the gap (increase server/instance resources, improve I/O) or slow the cars ahead of the gap (event change/add gaps). In my limited understanding, the fix is probably forked across several mitigation strategies and limited by things like DB structure, Ops, game engine, server resource limits, etc. I don't think this is a problem they can simply throw more compute or network bandwidth at to fix. The issue is likely inherent to the game's archaic design and finding a fix is more akin to an archaeological dig.
The change to 32 bit has nothing to do with Microsoft ending support for 32 bit OS's. Microsoft may one day end support for 32 bit applications but if they ever do they will announce it years before they implement it and it will likely come with a redesign of the x86-64 instruction set as well and it will take, again, years. What Microsoft announced would have no impact on Everquest whatsoever. It could have lit a fire under them to finally do something they've wanted to do forever though, but it wasn't required. As far as how 64 bit can improve performance, it can't do it magically, but it can do it as the devs update old code that was optimized for low RAM usage instead of low CPU usage. Redoing a calculation every time you need access to a value rather than just storing that value and only updating when a change occurs is one example. Or, one possible example is mobs hp is now over 4 billion and you can't natively store a value larger than 4 billion in a 32 bit application, whatever hacky way they came up with to get mobs hp over that limit is probably less efficient than using a native 64 bit integer. That might not sound like much but most actions we take in game interact with those numbers.
So I just stumbled over this statement from Niente in a bug-thread: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ering-phrase-not-working.281290/#post-4110993 While it is taken out of context, I can't help wondering if this is related to the ongoing lag-improvement. I would expect adding extra hardware, would be a part of the solution... Has the lag decreased with the recent patch/downtime?
This post sums it up pretty well. Unfortunately, magic is how most people seem to think computers work. "Just update the code", they say. Becky, I wish it were that simple.
I only assume low populations of my server bc people want a merge. Are there actual population numbers somewhere like there used to be on servers?
The game kind of went on a bit of a splurge of adding more & more "bloat" by way of procs over time when it wasn't really necessarry to do that. It had a series of knock-on effects. Per-player "processing budget" - which is something of a moving target as servers are upgraded to machines that process more data more quickly - was swallowed by the too-fast pace of additional processing requirements things like procs, swarm pets, double auras etc. Individual spells & abilities were over time made to be a smaller & smaller part of the overall damage matrix - meaning their individual power was lowered as a % of the overall player's power, this also meant they started to feel weaker. This also meant that a larger portion of a player's damage was relegated to a secondary effect. Game needs some "bloat-reduction" & "redundancy removal" in order to make the game far less about passive, extraeneous processing load combat & spell effects and far more about active, player-directed impactful combat choices using a leaner artillery. Character Progression has stagnated to the point that a "combat refresh" ratiification of those bloated, proc-centred & swarm pet centred player power boosts being removed entirely & the damage offloaded to more traditional core of activated abilities/spells would probably make combat feel a lot more immediate, punchy & exciting right about now as well as help address the lag issue. The other option is to halt adding any more of those types of ability & spells and wait for the server tech to once again out-pace that added processing-load - but the impact on the game is severe enough that cannot be a satisfactory course of action. Or a midway point, remove some bloat keep some, halt adding any more bloat, focus on character development through the improvement of the less processor-intensive abilities & spells.
I believe, going to 64bit allowed for more memory to stop the many out of memory crash problems. Reduce or eliminate crashing is a biggie in the win column. I remember reading something else, were they eliminated or revamped some interaction on the back end. This cut back some of the lag but did not eliminate it. There may be different flavors of lag as as well. The lag the annoys me the most happens during login (and switching characters) once in game things are not really that bad outside the lag pile.
Some of this can be ameliorated by players. Having your main use smaller bank bags, holding less crud in their houses, less houses on your main, less stuff in your bank will definitely serve to reduce some of that login loading that slows down getting into the world. The difference between a main with a bank loaded up with huge bags all filled to the brim with a lot of different items, 3 houses all stacked to the rafters with lots of different items and a main whose bank is only carrying essentials they access & use frequently and who has a very limited amount of needless crap in their bags is significant. It's why Dragon Hoard tech is the future of storage because it is "load on demand" unlike all the other storage. TL;DR use your mules more & your main less when it comes to storage & reap the rewards of less login slowdown.
