Feldon As you all know, this is “season 1” of Battlegrounds. Specifically, that the EQ2 team did not get the load testing they wanted to on Test, and so now this test is going on on live servers. But as much as we have gotten reassurances that Battlegrounds are having no significant impact on live servers, this seems to be exactly what is happening.
We’ve heard reports of servers rebooting, inability to open instances, and Battlegrounds have been down several days a week for adjustments, tweaking, maintenance, etc.
Hopefully this will all be worth it, but Rothgar did shed some light on part of the problems that Battlegrounds is causing:
The issue isn’t really that type of character data, it’s more the large amount of inventory. EQII has more inventory slots available to a charater than any other MMO I’ve ever seen. Combine that with your bank, house vault, guild bank, harvest depot and shared bank and its just an immense amount of data. Much of this inventory does not need to go back and forth with you, like your bank and house vault, and that’s what we are working on fixing now. Unfortunately even just your inventory slots represent a large amount of data and that stuff does need to go for us to have the flexibility to give quests that use/consume items, reward items, etc.
We have several changes we’re working on to improve performance across the board as well as reduce the data that moves between worlds. We also have more DB upgrades on the way for servers that haven’t gotten them yet.
It’s clear to me that Battlegrounds started out as an extension of the Character Transfer Service. In essence, your character is completely copied to the Battlegrounds server, and then after the match, you are copied back to your home server. But a lot of redundant data is being carried back and forth.
and further from Rothgar:
Battlegrounds are still having a pretty big impact on DB performance especially during primetime and on weekends. We’ve decided to throttle back the number of BG matches that can run concurrently until we can get some additional optimizations made. This should resolve the issues with a little longer queue times instead of us needing to take them down altogether.
It is no secret that Customer Service have been swamped with issues of stuck characters, duplicate characters, etc. as a result of Battlegrounds. We continue to track these issues…
I’ve had a stuck quest petition open for a week now – I even got a GM update saying I must be wondering what they were doing with it… /boggle
clearly BG has overloaded the petition system :o(
What can the public expect when games are hosted on systems that make a TI99 look fast? Sarcasm aside, I wish SOE would do less profit taking and more investing in a workable infrastructure. The issue that the servers bog down whenever there are more players on is as old as day one. Every time school is in recession, every time there is a holiday, every time there is an expansion the servers become virtually un-playable. That has nothing to do with the inability of the game designers at SOE to write acceptable code but has to do with the systems being laid out and the customer base being handled. It should be set up in a way that there is enough overhead for peak times. Whoever is the network engineer there should be send into exile somewhere in the amazon far away from any internet connection so he can do no harm. I understand, that the first priority of any corporation is NOT toward the customers but toward the share holders. But I have news for SOE, your customers are feed up with the lack of response, mediocre performance, and overall lack of your will to address the problems. Help is virtually none existent on the forums, SR Daniel was on a few times in the past and once the crap hit the fan was no where to be found leaving people high and try. Nobody else took up the slack. No wonder people are leaving. I know, that there are still some good employees at SOE such as Rothgar that really try but my fear is that this game is going to implode if SOE is not adequately address the problems very soon.
Just proves once again that SF is the biggest expansion failure of all time. Not only itemization is messed up, but battlegrounds is causing massive lag. Throw in some horrible class balancing and you have a game not even worth playing.
I dunno, for the most part, at least for the classes I play (pally, brig/swash, illy, warden) they are pretty balanced with their counterparts. Paladin’s holy ground I was really worried about them changing when they first mentioned it, but in practice on live servers, its actually a bit better now than before imo.
With the exception of class balance (which imo, is at its best point so far in game), everything is a cluster.
I find it unbelievable that they did not expect the problems they have with battle grounds now. Also hard to believe that they even copy unneeded inventory like the bank.
I am typing this while zoning out of our guildhall. Already read other webpages and watched a video clip, still receiving zone infos 😉
What an awefull system to server swap like the token system to go to battlegrounds. This game simply is not capable of doing that. Database issues, come on guys, what a crappy database that must be when switching servers is such an issue… Plz disable those Battlegrounds on prime time so we can at least raid decently and not waiting 1-2 secs betweens casts…