Feldon Although there are many things we can do on our end to reduce poor performance when playing EQ2, Public Quests have really pushed things to the limit both on the client and AND the server end. Especially in Storm Gorge which has some 60 combatants in the highest difficulty setting. In the past, there have been some tit-for-tat arguments about people’s slow computers vs. issues on the EQ2 servers themselves. While there is a lot players can do to reduce graphics performance aka “client lag”, it is up to the EQ2 devs to tackle any issues on the SOE servers.
Fortunately, Rothgar has stepped up and posted this about Public Quests performance (ironically the thread started on the topic of Gazebo placement griefing):
We are lowering the hard population cap on Great Divide to keep people from working around the soft limit. We may also change the group teleport mechanic to use the soft cap limits in the near future to keep people from circumventing these limits.
As far as the lag goes in Great Divide, its definitely server lag and isn’t caused by mounts, pets or gazebos. These things might contribute to your client FPS, but changing your visual settings to a lower option should more than make up it.
We are working on several angles to improve the lag situation in these zones but for this weekend the only thing we’re able to do is reduce the population cap. We’ve also tweaked the load-balancing settings on this zone so it should get a larger percentage of server resources.
What Can I Do About Client Performance?
Now that EQ2 devs have been able to reproduce the Server lag issues with Public Quests and are working to address them, possibly by reducing the size of armies in Storm Gorge or other changes, what can we do? We can start by reducing the amount of work our computer and graphics card (GPU) must do to draw the in-game graphics:
- Reduce graphics to Extreme Performance
- Hide All In-game Mounts (this does NOT hide flying mounts, even when they’re on the ground)
- Hide Cloaks
- Switch to Shader 1.0
There are also things we can do to help OTHER players with in-game graphics lag:
- Spread out into other instances. It really only takes 24-30 people in each instance of Great Divide to succeed with a x4 raid and get the Difficulty 5 Exquisite loot. If you show up and see 50 or more people, encourage them to switch to a different instance of Great Divide!
- Cancel all flying mounts (since Hide Mounts does not hide them).
- Hide deity mounts and other pets.
- Disable illusions with fancy particle effects and other ancillary graphics.
why one single zone can not handle 200 player (the sleeper again and again)? that dont look that huge since EQ1 was able to do it…
Really 50 player max by zone is lame.
It’s way more fun to do public raid with 50 (or more) player than with 24, the zerg approch have lot of appeal
i cant beleive server cant handle more than 50 player by zone, they seriously need to change them.
Setting mounts to “hide during combat” DOES work for flying mounts. I’m not sure why “always hide” doesn’t. Set your client to not render mounts during combat and the fliers won’t be an issue for you any more.
Hide mount during fight only work for the user it dont hide mount of other players so it’s useless
I don’t know what to tell you. I was just in a PQ and everyone’s mounts, flying ones included, vanished when they engaged. The setting works for me.
Whoever added this “•Spread out into other instances. It really only takes 24-30 people in each instance of Great Divide to succeed with a x4 raid and get the Difficulty 5 Exquisite loot. If you show up and see 50 or more people, encourage them to switch to a different instance of Great Divide!” needs to pass after the second puff. 24-30 people not in a ‘raid’ and not coordinated like a real raid force just means 24-30 people getting one shotted as the things runs around the area.
With the lag the way it is right now, it takes about 50 people to keep the thing on difficulty 5, every time i cast something i gotta spam it about 10 times before it goes off.