This game has been around for 15 years now. Its time to put everything else on the back burner and fix the game so that you can go from 1 zone to another in an acceptable time. I'm thinking of a time like 5 seconds or less. There is no sense in still taking the same amount of time to zone that it took 15 years ago when we now have computer equipment that makes the equipment from back then look like stone ages stuff.
Ummm..... have to disagree here. I don't mind taking a bit of time to zone while they work on actual things for us to do in the game. I don't spend most of my time in game zoning. I spend most of my time camping one area or doing an HA. There are far more important things for them to work on then zone times. We will be lucky if we get a decent amount of content this year never mind zone times. During a time when they have cut back on devs, got purchased by an Investment firm even more concerned about profits, cut back on customer support that people come to the forums and post about minor things they want fixed. That being said I appreciate it is a concern of yours and you do have the right to your own opinion and my opinion doesn't negate yours in any way. I just wish people would look at the big picture instead of focusing on smaller things. And I am guilty of it too.. I want them to move the druid port in West Karana to the wizard port area. Granted I think its a easy small change but even I am asking for things when we have to just pray we are going to get new content. People may say "but they said they will do two campaigns a year" and I will counter with the year before they said they wouldn't stagger the content anymore. Can we really trust anything they say these days? I don't blame the guys in the trenches (the devs) this sort of stuff comes from management in some form... either they suggest it or they tell the devs to achieve a certain goal and the devs are left figuring out how even if it means going back on their words from the year before. <rant mode off>
It's from all the extra stuff they've piled on over the years. I tried EQMac once on the same iMac I used to play Live and the difference was really striking. Literally about a second between zones in Qeynos.
Sounds like your PC is the issue, I have an Intel quad core (i5) and 8 gigs of RAM...loading is very fast, even when 3 boxing.
Installing EQ on a solid state drive will speed up your zoning as well, since loading the zone files on your side is most of the wait time.
As other's have said, you've got a PC (or maybe an ISP) problem not an EQ problem. My computer zones way faster than when I started playing. Any decent PC should have fairly short zoning time excluding times you might be zoning into an extremely high population area, and even then the issue is on the PC side not the EQ side. That is because EQMac was ran on the MacOS, while when you play EQ on a Mac you are playing through a second program which in no way is like what it is to play on a comparable PC.
No, Live was run on Windows via Boot Camp, so there was no virtualization/emulation layer at play there. I didn't mind the zone times on it either, but it was just noticeably faster in the other case, which makes sense when you think about it. Without 10+ years of UI additions, hero's forge, and creature/character/weapon models that need to be loaded into memory, there's simply less work to be done. And no doubt PCs are fast enough now to close much of that gap, with SSDs, and even things like RAM disks. But on a 2011 iMac with a 7200rpm spinning hard drive, it was once also possible.
There are so many things that can affect zone times... You might try creating a new character and time it when you zone. If it's much faster than your main character than you could try getting rid of un-necessary hotkeys and inventory items on the main character. That should speed up your zoning some. It did for me though it still takes far too long for me to zone which seems to be a connection issue I can't resolve. Just to toss some numbers out there for comparison: Quad core I5 cpu, 16 gigs of ram, PNY 256 gig SSD, 1.5meg DSL connection. Takes me roughly 25 seconds to zone to the bazaar and the guild lobby, 30 seconds to PoK, 1 minute 50 seconds to the grand guild hall. I'm comparing my times to people I know with similar computers and connections that zone to the same places in 10 seconds for most zones and 20 to 30 seconds for the grand guild hall. I also have a second computer that's an I3 with four gigs of ram and an old slow hard drive that has the *exact* same zone times as the main computer. The only common denominator being the Internet connection. Which always tests as perfect so I'm at a loss on that.
Everquest has the amazing ability to run like crap completely independent of the specs of the PC it's running on. Most of us have phones that are more powerful than PCs that could multi-box EQ in 2000.
I can't complain about how EQ runs once it's done loading/zoning. Honestly even my zone times aren't that bad. It's just a nagging annoyance when my group leaves me in the dust zoning even though we have similar setups. I've tried a *lot* of things to no avail. Also I can look at the timestamps on my dbg.txt file and see which items are taking too long, comparing it to the dbg.txt of someone who zones fast. But I have no idea what to do about them.
Another vote for running on a solid state drive, if you're not already - improved my zoning times fivefold when I changed to one.
I have to agree with the consensus here on the SSD drive. When I built my computer last year and went to an SSD drive it sped up my EQ game exponentially. Sure there may be other factors at work but I did notice a marked improvement on the zoning times etc.
SSDs don't help nearly as much as people are claiming. Most of the game gets quickly cached into the games memory or cached by the OS itself. Zone into pok then zone out and back in. On the last trip in, use resource monitor to watch your disk reads. It will be next to nothing yet zone times will still take an annoyingly long time. Zoning also has little to do with internet speed unless you actually are on a modem. Again watch resource monitor as you zone. There's a small burst of data for maybe a second or two, then it drops to the steady stream you'd normally see as the zone stays up to date. I believe the real culprit here is antiquated texture and object model storage containers that are inefficient at quickly decompressing. Another question is why game resources can't be persistently kept in memory through a zone. Considering the enormous amounts of memory the game already consumes, the fact it's as slow as it is, is pretty amazing.
Sorry to disagree, but it helped (me) exactly as much as I claimed. Zoning time became a fifth of what it had been previously (I timed it to compare).
The SSD certainly improved my load/zone times in other games. A lot. If I could figure out what's causing my slower than it should be zoning in EQ then I suspect the computer with the SSD would be much better/faster than the older one. I have used Resource Monitor, and some other monitoring programs as well, and watched what was going on as I zone. There are the expected bursts of activity on the connection, the cpu and the SSD when I start zoning but then I have long periods where absolutely nothing is happening on any front. It just sits there like it's waiting for something. Then as my character finally appears in the new zone there's another burst of activity. I really need to take the computer somewhere and test it on a different connection. I just don't know anyone locally that I could ask that of. Also short of dialup or satellite there's only the one isp here.
The only way SSDs are going to drastically improve load times is if your machine is slow low on memory that data is constantly being swapped out of memory to disk (and back). If you have 2GB of RAM or less, this could apply to you. In which case, yes, go get an SSD--no wait--scratch that.. Go get more memory. I would suggest the following memory table: 2GB for the OS, then add another 2GB per client you plan on running (if you multibox). 2 per client is probably overkill, but w/e. Anyway, I just finished a series of tests zoning from GL to POK multiple times while watching perfmon (performance monitor) monitoring "disk read bytes/sec" and using resmon to monitor disk utilization as well. I found (as I knew) that after the first trip in to either zone, virtually everything was resident in memory (I have 16GB). Perfmon and Resmon barely registered *any* disk reads, making the type of HD in use a non-factor. Next I picked a fresh zone that I hadn't zoned into yet since running the client. In this case, Gulf of Gunthak. During zone in, which took about 15 seconds (RME...), there was basically no disk activity until about 8-10 seconds in (and no CPU load for the first 5 seconds btw - I'll talk about this later). At that point, about 13MB of data was fetched from the disk. Even a mechanical hard drive can read 13MB in ~1 second. Yes an SSD can read 13MB in fraction of a second, but the point here is that the *actual* disk read time in this zoning process was about 6% of the entire waiting period. As for CPU load, It's interesting to watch. During about the first 4 or 5 seconds of zoning, there is basically nothing happening on the system. Very little network (I'm talking like a few hundred bytes, if anything), no CPU, no disk activity. What the heck is it even doing? If I had to speculate, I would assume its handing off the client to the various zone servers or something. But even then, I would expect to see more network traffic. I honestly wonder if they have a programmed delay to prevent people from abusing zonelines for dropping aggro and such. After the 4-5 second delay, the disk read portion happens (reading zone files), then some CPU activity as it decompresses the zone files (textures, meshes, etc), then it starts another cycle of pre-loading data depending on who/what is in the zone. This phase of zoning into POK or the GL can easily add 5-6 seconds to a zone-time and there's nothing we can do about it. This is simply inefficient management of game resources. There's no reason why every time I zone in and out of POK, the client should need to re-cache character animations, skins, models, etc. When I leave POK, my client memory consumption goes from 1.2GB to about 970MB. That's like going from "ginormous" to "kinda ridiculous". Just keep the extra 300MB of resources loaded and save me 5-7 seconds off my next load time! It's not a ton but its *something*. All in all, the OP has a very valid point, that the load times in EQ are beyond antiquated when compared to modern AAA titles. The problem lies in resources available to combat the issue.
Logging in from server select. What is even going on here. I'm talking up to four minutes. Seems to be worse with certain characters. PC specs: 16 GB RAM, 8core cpu 3.6 ghz, SSD, 50MB internet with <20ms ping wired
Im normally the first one in my group to appear after porting, but its still not what Id call quick. If Im always first then I dont see how it could be my computer.
