Quote:
Originally posted by Darkbane
Well, I'm sure the crowd control system will help, and the latest patch on testlive contains some fixes that should help the situation in the interim (though if you stuff more than about 50 people into one area, even a cable modem will choke regardless...)
The server has to actually run the game, receive player input and process them. It must then send updates to all relevant clients. And that input and those updates must fit down your pipe. Given a fixed bandwidth, you can either limit the relevant set, or reduce the frequency of updates (you can also prioritise, effectively trying to maintain update frequency for a certain set of data, whilst being less worried about other data and therefore accepting a lower update frequency, or even no updates for the lower priority data).
Even in a standard FPS, these are issues, and in a MMORPG the situation can be many times worse.
AOs 'graphical lag' is a seperate issue, being basically client side, and as such would be amenable to engine optimisations or re-writes (maybe Shadowlands?).
There are undoubtably things FC can do to improve the situation, but they aren't going to happen overnight, so we'll have to live with it for now :(