Server Split Needed

[speardancer2]

Along with all the other fixes this game needs, they need to do a server split on Atlantean, and set a server population limit.

As of now, my characters on Atlantean/RK1 are unplayable. Moving around in cities is painfuly slow, and the lag in missions is terrible. My NT has died twice, due to lag. My wife has a doctor that partners with my NT, and due to lag, neither of us could get a nano off... result? A one-way trip to reclaim for the NT, and the doc, who can't do any real damage herself, has fortunately made it to the exit both times.

Rimor/RK2 is still playable, but slowly getting worse as players move over. Of course that might have to do with the characters I have on that server aren't as depenant on Nano's, and can survive more lag.

Funcom, it's obvious your servers CANNOT handle the load being placed on them today. You need to get another server up, and move people off of Atlantean. If noone can play the game, who's going to pay you for it?

[Slavor]

I'm sure there are other options Funcom can/is examing to improve the scalability of each environment, that are primarily architecture changes to the server-side software.

[speardancer2]

well, they need to do SOMETHING while they still have a customer base to keep.

[Jellobiafra]

Server size is not the problem. SOMETHING....I'm not sure what, changed with the 14.6 patch. I always had minor problems in places like trade and BS. But since that patch, it has been horrible. I actually moved to RK1 after months of playing on RK2, because of the fact that there are more people here. RK2 was like a ghost town too often.

And if they did make a split, how pissed do you think players would be when they found that their guildies, people they have been playing with for over a year, were just split from them. And their guild went from 150 people down to 75.

Not a good option in my opinion. Fix the coding, or whatever they messed up with 14.6.

[Animosity]

I would prefer solutions that did the opposite. I would rather see, "we are merging the servers together..." to limit lag, we are investing heavily in more hardware in LA, Paris, Ottawa, Orlando and Tokyo"

I did notice things got better when I switched my ISP. but even with lowered expectations, i see things deteorating.

Ani

[Doncaballero]

One solution could be the previously promised ability to move characters between servers. People who are having a hard time on Atlantean can move over to Rimor or RK3, whatver it may be called.

Unfortunately, there would jave to be some sort of process for doing this that would not allow for people exploiting it. We obviously don't want people running all 4 GS's of Camelot on Atlantean and then logging into RK3 and rolling up 4 more. One move every billing period or something.

Some more things that need to be done:

Reload button.

/busy command

Bronto Body Armor piece

And a way to pass the loot window from one player to another without allowing access to it from scumbag ninjas.

[__________Curmudgeon]

Originally posted by Jellobiafra
ServSOMETHING....I'm not sure what, changed with the 14.6 patch. I always had minor problems in places like trade and BS. But since that patch, it has been horrible.

Exactly. Something went horribly wrong in 14.6 with loading of graphics in places like Trade. I went from smooth sailing to spending a couple minutes spinning in a circle while skyscrapers appear.

[___________wrecklass]

Originally posted by Curmudgeon


Exactly. Something went horribly wrong in 14.6 with loading of graphics in places like Trade. I went from smooth sailing to spending a couple minutes spinning in a circle while skyscrapers appear.

Odd, I had exactly the opposite reaction. Loading times improved a great deal for me with that patch. Of course, the game has always run very smoothly, so the improvement was only minimal, but noticable.

Unfortunately, that tends to be the problem for the developers, different people with different setups get radically different results. Hard to track down what does and doesn't work...

[Kuro]

Originally posted by wrecklass


Odd, I had exactly the opposite reaction. Loading times improved a great deal for me with that patch. Of course, the game has always run very smoothly, so the improvement was only minimal, but noticable.

Unfortunately, that tends to be the problem for the developers, different people with different setups get radically different results. Hard to track down what does and doesn't work...

Personally I don't know what's up either. I was all over OT cities this evening (shopping ) and only encountered the "Here comes a crowd" hiccups. But the original poster is off by a couple steps.

Nobody is affected by the entire dimension's population. All the playfields are independant on their own servers. That's why Bashers can offer a playfield status on their website. So the overall population of RK1 is pretty much immaterial. The chatserver is shared, I think. But that's about it.

[svendor]

I agree that something happend with the 14.6 patch not sure what but before that the only problem i had was i would hit my nuke button and it would say executing whatever nano and nothing would happen. all i had to do was take a step forward and everything would work fine. but since maybe 14.6 but i think it started in 14.7 patch for me something is very very wrong with newland city. i cannot take a step without 4-5 seconds of lag.


I would appreciate it if funcom could honestly tell me if its my computer or them. Because from what i read on these boards some people that have high end computers have the same problems that i do. Also my computers is average i would say and i shouldnt have alot of the lag issues i am having now since i have all settings for gameplay that may make me lag at the lowest possible. I would go by a new top end computer but would that really fix the problems?

[______________Nianna]

Its not your computer. That happens to a lot of people. My 1.2 GHz machine was very smooth and only experienced a few quarter second lags going through newland prior to 14.6. With 14.6 I experience about 5 or more 1 sec+ lags when I'm trying to go through newland. On my 500 MHz machine I used to be able to walk through newland with a few 1 sec-ish lags , but now especially when I head down towards the Bronto Burger I get a 2 sec lag every few steps. Its horrible now. Low spec machines playability was seriously disrupted by the 14.6 engine lag in newland city. Even walking around with 0% view and character distance my 500 MHz machine lags like heck in newland now.

[Lumin]

MY experience so far is that the Computer Setup is very much to blame for the games preformance.

My first setup to play this game (mind you that was during beta)
was a p2-233 mhz with 256 mb ram and a matrox g200 card.. it worked fairly well in 800x600 though there was some graphic glitches here and there. I never encountered the enlarge mass of players as this setup only lasted beta 3.

the next was a p3-500 mhz with 512 mb ram and a Geforce 2 mx 400 in 1024x768. this thing kicked trough evrything, from 40+ people at the same spot and so on, though the framerate was only 3 to 15 it was still very much playable since this game doesnt require "real-time" zoning went fairly fast aswell.

the last which is my current setup is a p4-2,4 ghz with only 256 mb ram and still the same geforce. while this baby gives me 40-80 fps in areas with low people count it chokes on it self in areas with lots of people. not because the processor cant handle it, but because of all the hard disk swapping, and mind you I got fairly fast hard drives (thats what im looking for when buying)
I was so lucky that I could borrow a 256 chip so I was in 512 total, and my oh my things speeded up again. the large crowds where again not comp choking and zoning speeded up alot.

My tip would be to get as fast hard drives and all the ram you can get, for this game is all about storing massive amounts of textures and meshes in memory. also tuning down onspecial effects might be a good idea. I do ofcourse run with evrything on

both the p3-500 and the p4-2,4 was tested after 14.6 both used the same hard drives and I always run in windowed mode at 1024x768x32. I would gain a lot on my p4 by running the game in fullscreen but I like to be able to surf the web while playing, as missions aint the most fun thing to do

edit:
Though before 14.6 I was zoning 3 times faster, I usualy didnt noticed that I zoned other than the zoning feedback text.

[speardancer2]

Well, I have 512mb of RAM, and run U160 SCSI hard drives on a 1.3Ghz system, how much faster do you want me to run?

And besides, one of the things that prompted me to start this thread was the fact that I get HALF as much lag playing on Rimor, as I do trying to play on Atlantean. On the SAME system.

That usualy points to the problem being on the other end......

[Kuro]

Originally posted by speardancer
Well, I have 512mb of RAM, and run U160 SCSI hard drives on a 1.3Ghz system, how much faster do you want me to run?

And besides, one of the things that prompted me to start this thread was the fact that I get HALF as much lag playing on Rimor, as I do trying to play on Atlantean. On the SAME system.

That usualy points to the problem being on the other end......

Still, the playfields have their own resources to utilize. Not sure what resources might be shared besides the chat server.

As for your HD performance, when was the last time you defragged you hd? I got a noticable speed increase when I finally sat down and forced a defrag program to defrag my drive. Took 16 hours set to continuous defrag before the AO database was in one piece.

[AiymaNeut]

Originally posted by Kuroshio

I got a noticable speed increase when I finally sat down and forced a defrag program to defrag my drive.

Same for me. And not a handful of FPS, either - a whole wack of them. The difference between running past BB in Ent before and after was probably about 10 real-world seconds travel time.

[Jellobiafra]

As Ive said before, If I had been having these problems since the beginning, I would blame it on my machine. But the problems I'm experiencing started the minute of server up after 14.6. Nothing about my machine changed. Nothing about my connection changed. The only thing that changed in that 8 hour period was the 14.6 patch. There can be no other reason for the problems. Even after 14.6, I had not experienced any black doors or rubberbanding. Just massive load times in trade and NLC. The subsequent 'fixes' have added that wonderful bit of fun to my game.

So, yes, your machine specs can sure play a part. And so can your isp. But when the problem arose only after a certain patch, it can be neither of those issues.

[speardancer2]

I did a defrag last week, havnt' done one since the newest patch came out. And for anyone having extreme problems, this is a great idea.

It did not, however, remove the problem. It does make a noticable difference tho. There is definetely a problem in the new code released in 14.6, but some of the problems could be releived by distributing the load across more servers.

Of course they could just fix the problems, but I don't know if any of us will ever see that day.

[__________Curmudgeon]

Yes, your personal machine can cause problems. But I'm not talking about that either. On my machines (and my real life friends, on theirs), we all had pretty decent performance prior to 14.6, but something changed. I'm talking several machines varying in speed/brand of processors and vidcards. All of us went from smooth sailing - to taking forever to load graphics in Omni Trade.

Our guild's "Base of Operarions" or meeting place was a store in Trade. We would log into the store, then zone out into Trade.

All of us had a serious increase in zone time into Trade.

Then, as we tried to turn away from the outer wall, we would freeze up for a minute while skyscrapers loaded.

This is new as of 14.6 and unrelated to anything our machines are doing. Our machines could all handle Trade fine before 14.6.

If there are people who don't have this issue, consider yourself lucky, becuase everyone I know does. My main computer is a 2.0A Gb p4 processor, with 1G DDR Ram, GeForce4 4600 Vidcard, and cable modem... and I still have to freeze up the first time the program loads the skyscrapers in Trade every session. Bah!

[Alpherah]

lol i have no lag problems...
512Kbps DSL connection
Geforce 4
1 gig ram
2Ghz Athlon processor

I understand that not every one has "uber" pc's, just pointing out that for me AO runs fine and lagless in most areas (cept for camalot...)

[Rugger807]

As of now, my characters on Atlantean/RK1 are unplayable. Moving around in cities is painfuly slow, and the lag in missions is terrible. My NT has died twice, due to lag. My wife has a doctor that partners with my NT, and due to lag, neither of us could get a nano off... result? A one-way trip to reclaim for the NT, and the doc, who can't do any real damage herself, has fortunately made it to the exit both times.

Are you voulunteering to be moved? Some of us have been on rk1 since the beginning. I'm not a fan of being moved.

Yu can go to rk 2 is you want but the server population isn't high enough at the moment to really be an issue.