I noticed that this morning! Zoning to BB thinking well it will take forever might as well get coffee. But I didn't even get a chance to get out of my chair lol. It was great! If all that downtime made that happen then thank you!
I guess I spoke too soon. Tried zoning into a house and sat there for close to a minute. This NEEDS to be fixed. waiting for a zone for 1+ minute in todays world of mmos is absolutely unacceptable. You want to attract new customers? Provide the level of service they get from literally every other MMO on the market.
At any other MMO company this would be considered broken. I work on a platform operations team for a SaaS company and this type of server response time has to be intentional. Stop skimping on your resources and make the game function like a real product.
Zoning to areas is still very fast. For housing I noticed the bigger the house the slower the zone in time. Average for me is 35 to 55 seconds I'm not sure what the difference is between housing and zones. But at least zones are faster so I am thankful for that.
Zoning doesn't seem any faster to me. It seems to same. It would be nice if they talked about what was fixed/changed with the 24 hour downtime. I'm glad the zoning is (seems?) faster for some!
It was backend systems maintenance, nothing that should have affected zoning, that's possibly a side effect of the servers being reset though.
Housing zones are closed down when not in use and have to be started up when you enter them. Then you have to get loaded in so it's always going to take longer unless somebody else has recently been there.
Back in 2013 I played this game every day all day, I raided, I quested, I leveled dozens of characters and between then and now something drastically changed. I never waited for a zone to spin up. I never remember ever having to wait a minute or more to zone to anywhere, and I went all over the place, old zones, new zones, back to house, I did the epic quests on all of my many characters and they took me to places you'd never see a soul. Never did I stare at the screen waiting forever for it to zone. Something at some point was changed to reduce resources used so the servers had less load. This drastically effected zone times so now anything that isn't actively being used it essentially turned off. If I had to guess, it seems similar to what you would see if the zones themselves were all containerized, and deployed on demand, like you would see in kubernetes pods. For what ever reason this was done, I can tell you from recent personal experience that this has a very negative impact on player experience, especially from new people coming to play the game from wow and other MMOs. My friend came to play and we started the RoS timeline with his newly boosted toon. This led to several zones we had to travel through and the repeated zoning delay led to this comment from him. "These zoning times are ridiculous, they need to fix this." That is what new people think of this game, it gives them the feeling that its old, and busted, and just crap, you do not want your new customers getting this impression, how can you ever expect to keep new players if the game performs worse now than it did when it was new, especially when you are competing against MMOs on the market that don't have these issues. So really it boils down to this, do you want your MMO to grow? If so, act like it.
This extends to every solo and heroic zone in the game too. Nothing like getting a group together and having to sit there and wait forever to actually get going.
The backend of the game has definitely changed, and not for the better. I remember when we had more servers, a better population and zoning/lag was not so painfully slow. Honestly, it seems like things went to h*** after SOE washed their hands of this game (and they switched database engines).
Logging in to Thurgadin is being problematic atm, lag same as usual, and random crashes this evening as well which I haven't had for a while now.
As I recall once hearing, the way the zoning works in this game is that every zone is assigned to an internal server. These "servers" that contain the zones are put to sleep in order to conserve power and memory usage for both the server and user sides. Whenever a zone takes forever to actually load up, it's because the server is waking up. Anytime you find yourself zoning relatively fast, it's because either the zone is designated as always-awake (Qeynos, Freeport, Greater Faydark, Neriak, Timorous Deep, Frostfang Sea) or because another player just recently activated that zone for themselves. I believe it works something like that.
I would suggest that all zones that are essential highly visited parts of BoL, and RoS should never be shut down. Fabrication Hall is one example, its a small zone, but you sit and wait forever for it to load up so you can zone in. These zone are the ones people traverse every day, especially on leveling weekends. You guys can see the most used zones, surely you have sql reports that can show you that. Make a list and keep those running so people don't feel like they are still back in 1999.
It's a self regulating system. If a zone is 'highly visited' it won't be left empty long enough to shut down.
