Zoning into instances is my time to go to the fridge, crack open a beer, rummage through the cold cuts bin, open the mayo, make a sammich, check on the cat dish and refill if needed, browse audible.com for my next audible novel, use an app to calculate how many minutes I have left on my phone plan, oh... and open task manager to see if my EQ2 session is crashed.
People who complain about the zoning times in EQ2 obviously never played EQ1 in the old days! What Cravaro describes was every zone back then. It was not unheard of to ride a boat to another continent [back before ports were ultra-common] and by the time that you had finished zoning the boat had left the area, leaving you to swim to shore.
Got disconnected on the green server p99 earlier this year while zoning into the Ocean of Tears (on the boat)... yeah, that was a fun swim. I just laughed and enjoyed swim skill ups.
I just keep Twitter open in another window and do my Tweeting while zones are loading in EQ2. Most of my houses have quite a lot of stuff so it takes them a long time to load. I don't see it as more of a problem than most games though.
That really doesn't make sense unless you have an old PC, since the graphics are all client side. The majority of the zone times on the US servers is when the game has to spin up an instance where no one is already in it (The waiting for zone server part of the dialog screen). So zoning into a new instance, a house or guild hall. Once the server creates it the time to zone in is fairly quick. For me at least that initial part can be significantly longer then the other parts combined. I have heard that this isn't the case on the European server Thurgadin, but I don't have a character there to know for sure.
did you specifically measure difference in time at both high and low graphics settings when entering same zone? and doesn't server specify/confirm to display any object from client? do packets between client and server contain identical text for both low and high settings? in any case, i wrote this according to my feelings (now i'm on ab server). of course this is subjective. i didn't measure with stopwatch
Drat; I thought that sort of nonsense was just on my end (they really should've used a different way to describe it than "Waiting for [our] zone server. Cool your heels, suckas, yer gonna be here awhile."). Back in the day when Win98 and dial-up was still possible for this and Stegosauruses and T-rexes could actually meet and fight to the death, I did use a timer at one point to check: with my antiquated system, it would take, literally, 2.5 to 3 MINUTES to zone anywhere (hence my hatred of zoning; one of the reasons I stayed with WoW as long as I did, very minimal zoning. City of Heroes was even worse than this game; even going into a shop was a separate zone. Plenty of reasons to hate NCSoft's mangy hides). :-/ I can understand with Win98 and dial-up; what's the excuse for it now? :-/ And yes, it does seem to be slower than usual recently...they said it was "fixed internally" or something on the Bug Report forum, but I'm not seeing any appreciable difference for the better. Uwk
Hmm...if that's the case, then why is it sticky, time-wise, when there's more than one other person in a zone? Why does it go up exponentially, seemingly, with each person? :-/ Seems to me that their "zone servers" are about as old, clugey, and clunky as their system for non-default chat channels... :-/ At least they got those fixed! Uwk
Hmm...after working with this, it seems that once you've done the same back-and-forth for awhile, the zone server "learns" where you want to go, but it's the other doo-dads afterwards, like actually going through the steps of getting your toon into the zone where things like multiple items or multiple people being there already might come into play in the sluggishness? :-/ Which would still make the sloooooowwwwww zone servers their fault. ;-> EDIT: Aaaaand there it goes, making a liar out of me... sloooooooowwwwwww "waiting for zone server" messages again. I guess if you go back and forth within a certain time frame, it remembers for a bit. :-/ Uwk
My youngest daughter, who has a spectrum disorder and absorbs data like a sponge, tells me these two lived approximately 60-70 million years apart, so this is impossible. Someone had to say it. Being wrong on the internet is just unacceptable!
Zone times and network lag in raid content has to be sorted before the expansion unlocks in my opinion. Its the number one issue next to having zero content left. I gave up on Public Quests ever being sorted, They have been in the game since DoV and they are just a laggy zerg fest. I cant imagine that they would launch an expansion in the games current state when they had 8 months to sort it by now. People saying there are no issues and people should just live with how it is are delusional at best.
Very good suggestion to the Impatient amongst us. I prefer the beauty and grandeur of highest setting and did not know this affects loading zone timing. Perhaps I'll downgrade to Normal? IDK.
DPG has negotiated contracts with alcoholic beverage makers and all snack providers to delay zoning so we'd go drink and eat more. They get a quarter for every snack and beverage consumed. Somebody said they were making so much money that someone saw Dreamweaver driving a Maserati. Draw your own conclusions about how fast zoning is gonna get fixed.
I thought this was just me. I recently put a support ticket in for this because it literally sits at "Waiting for Zone server" for several minutes whenever I'm entering an instance or my guild hall. If I'm zoning into a public zone like Aurelian Coast or the Blinding, it's like 15-20 seconds. Support had me reboot my router and do an ipconfig /flushdns but that didn't help. I also always had my graphics as high as possible and haven't had this issue in years past. I wish they'd fix it so I don't have to turn the fancy settings off so it looks like crappy cartoon WoW just so I can zone somewhere in a decent amount of time.
i still think so no, not worth it. if only set max performance. difference between high quality and "normal" in terms of delay is unlikely to be felt
