I have a 75/75 fiber optic connection with Cat6 (I'm on the East Coast so my ping times will never improve much beyond 90ms), a decent PC (i7-4930k, GTX 780, 64 GB RAM and a Samsung 840 Pro SSD) and I'm continually amazed at how quickly my groupmates can log in and change characters compared to me. It often takes more than 3 or 4 minutes from starting the launcher to loading the world and having a character logged in. No 3rd party software involved. The login server appears to be doing its job fine. My server's VM is fine since my guildies are usually faster than me at switching characters/accounts. What can be done to improve the experience?
My specs aren't nearly as good as yours but I have been on 350/25 and now 100/10 and have had long log in times for years now.
I noticed a slow down starting about 2 months ago. I was getting 1000ms, which is 1 second ping times. Last summer iwas getting 100ms and less.The login area for game username and password can take up to 10 seconds to show up, aftyer the patcher loads. I'm in Southeast U.S.
I watched my ping time tonight. This is with the in-game green ping bar. About 5-7 PM CDT, I was getting 221-450 ms. When I checked again at 9:15 PM CDT, I was getting about 720ms.
I always assumed login time was more associated with computer specs, rather than ping time. In the old days, they had an option where it would reformat the zone files on your PC so that they would load much faster, with the tradeoff that they took more storage space. Some people nowadays use an SSD drive to speed things up. One more possibility... if you log out in your neighborhood, house or guild hall, they may have to be spun up when you log in, and that can also take extra time. Tat
Yep. Because the Guild Hall is instanced, it can take an additional 20 seconds to generate the zone file if the zone was empty previous to you logging in. I log out in the Guild Lobby, facing a wall. I have a 6-core CPU etc., top end consumer SSD, etc. and this has been a problem for me since I began playing 14 years ago. I'm not complaining about a recent patch since I haven't really played since last October-ish. I just want to have a better experience if/when I'm able to return to playing regularly so I would like to know why the loading times suck so much. This is 2016. It doesn't feel right.