Feldon
A growing number of players on the Splitpaw, Valor, and Storms servers (located in Amsterdam and serving the UK and English-speaking Europe) have been reporting unplayable gameplay lag and connection delays. Some players are reporting no problems while others are experiencing 5-6 second cast delays. Further confusing matters, there seems to be no geographic pattern to the problems, as some living in close proximity to Amsterdam are reporting the biggest problems while those far away are getting fast responses. UPDATE: We’ve updated this article to address the Valor and Storms servers. In the absence of further information, this would...
server lag
This information is not exactly a secret, but it’s a question that comes up often. Where is your EQ2 server located? Thanks to Rothgar for the list which we supplemented. Servers on the west coast [San Diego] include: Guk Everfrost Antonia Bayle (RP) Unrest Butcherblock Nagafen (PvP) Vox (PvP RG) The Bazaar (RG) Freeport (EQ2X) Sebilis (JP) East Coast includes: Permafrost Oasis Crushbone Our European [Amsterdam] data center includes: Valor (German) Storms (French) Splitpaw (UK) Barren Sky (Russian) Harla Dar (Russian)
Raid Zone Lag can add randomness to an already challenging fight. There are many causes such as how an encounter is designed, unintended interactions in the zone code itself, etc. This issue is of particular importance in Velious because the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone drops a Clicky item which is required to take on most of the Velious x4 raid content. Players receive an item which must be clicked by certain classes at certain times in certain named fights in Velious hard mode raid zones in order to make them defeatable. Although some guilds have been...
Kwill
EQ2 Designer Windslasher is working on the lag issues in the Storm Gorge public quests, but apparently it’s not an easy problem to solve: I am working on changes to reduce lag. I’m very aware of how bad it is, and I consider that the #1 problem to fix. It also happens to be the hardest, which is why the going is slow. That is all.
I’ve finally managed to escape Charles de Gaulle airport which completely ground to a halt due to 3 inches (7cm) of snow. Meanwhile, our SAS pilot made a perfect landing in near whiteout conditions with heavy snowfall on a runway and at an airport positively blanketed with snow. Ah… Copenhagen… 😉 Anyway, ’bout those server merges…
Today’s hotfix included some additional lag fixes. Here’s Rothgar: With this morning’s update we made a fundamental change to how our zone servers throttle their frame rate. Our hope is that this change will allow busier processes to consume more of the server resources and increase performance (reduce lag). Whether or not this change has a noticeable impact will depend on many variables that can only be observed in the live environment and under a significant load. We’ll be watching things on our end as we ramp up to primetime tonight but I’m also looking for your feedback as...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 forums: We’ve located the issue that was causing the slow performance last Tuesday. This problem had ZERO to do with battlegrounds but they were taken down as a precaution anyway. I know that battlegrounds tends to get the bad rap because it’s new, but they are not always the cause of problems. In fact, we’ve got the character loading issues under control now so that there are no performance spikes as a result of characters going to and from the BG world. We’ve been making some general performance improvements that will help lower the...
Dethdlr
After the widespread outages of the EQ2 servers the night prior, a thread was created on the EQ2 Forums to solicit an explanation from the EQ2 Developers, and/or new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, on the cause, and to seek reassurances that the issues are being identified and on track to be resolved. As they tend to do, the thread branched into speculation on the origins of Dave Georgeson’s forum handle — SmokeJumper. Skywarrior posted his theory: Hmmmm. Smokejumpers are extremely brave (or crazy) and well-trained individuals who jump out of airplanes in order to reach remote areas involved...
In a break from the stock answer that has been given in regard to server merges for the last few years, Rothgar says server merges are something they are considering a little down the road. The EQ2 world isn’t exactly in the best shape it’s ever been in at the moment with zoning issues, instance lag, contested named fight lag, and broker lag so the dev team has a few issues to take care of before they can move forward with this idea. But this tells us that the idea is at least back on the table. Rothgar writes:...
Rothgar has been working closely with the Database folks trying to solve the Server Performance Issues, specifically Server-side Lag, and extremely long Zoning times which have become a major problem facing EQ2 since Game Update 55, the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, and the introduction of Battlegrounds. These Database and Server Lag issues have been so disruptive, that they have largely drowned out discussion on other issues facing EQ2. Fortunately, Rothgar brings us an update on the situation regarding some long-needed caching being added to how character data is transmitted and stored: Right now we are addressing the database-related issues and...
Tomorrow’s Hotfix will include some changes targeted at server performance/lag. These changes will affect the number of spells and combat arts which can be linked together in 1 macro. We are trying to determine the maximum number of spells or combat arts which it will be possible to put on a single macro. Thursday, January 28th Hotfix GENERAL Ability commands such as “useability” are now being throttled in an effort to cut down on server lag. This means that “mega-macros” that attempt to cast many spells will no longer work as expected. Housing zones and persistent instances will now...