Arelith

Hi,

So if I am to be to the point for once : it has been going for a while that my personal experience playing arelith in Europe's evening (let's say 9 to 12pm), has been extremely poor to the point of "okay, maybe i shouldn't play at all around those times even if i want to", which is not the kind of thought players should have, even more in an expanding community (as in, we want players to play because they want to, not dodge peak times to be able to enjoy the game, which brings back PTSD of WoW Vanilla and the "low player cap era" for arelith).

So here's a couple questions related to that:

1- Is it isolated/just me and my connection ? I doubt it but maybe it is in which case diverging feedbacks would help me understand that I'm the issue.

2- If that is "widespread", I suppose that the staff is aware of it. The player count is, as in the old days, most probably responsible for it, and as much as code might have been improved, the fact is here : enjoyment of the game (aside from laggy-RP) can be destroyed when it enters slideshow mode or "plays well for 15 secs, then gets out of sync for 8 secs, then plays well for 15s etc", where adventuring without dieing becomes an art in itself. So, while I'm OBVIOUSLY not blaming anyone or anything (a problem doesn't have to have a scapegoat), there is still a problem here, if some staff number drop by this thread :

2a: Is the topic being discussed internally?
2b: What are our (= staff + community) options?
2c: Is there any solution in sight/in the work? Or that's a problem that can't be helped?

Note: I'm well aware that my approach in this thread is very much "ME, I HAVE A PROBLEM, ME NOT HAPPY ABOUT MY ISSUE", however please note that entitlement to have it fixed isn't AT ALL the spirit of me posting here. It's just that I start from my experience to ground the discussion in something real: one player that wants to play has his pleasure to play shattered by excessive lag. Anecdotical in itself, but problematic if widespread.I just wish to understand how widespread it is, and if there are plans/solutions/or even mere desires to act on it, on the horizon.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Cheers, take care.

It's a known issue and why there is currently a guldorand server being added as the fifth one in the hopes to spread out the playerbase more and lower the lag.

Thanks for the quick answer!

A couple more questions about the issue (mere curiosity, nothing else):

What creates the lag : the number of players on a given server? The total player count for all servers? Or both? As in, if we have 50000000 players on one server, and 5 on another, the one with 5 will be devoid of lag or unplayable? Or is it a relation between the number of players and the number of queries/complex actions they do? As in if 1 000 000 players do absolutely nothing and afk, it will be less laggy than half that count doing pvp?

Are all servers of the same quality (hardware)? (distance shores vs surface for example)

Also, do you guys have an estimate of the threshold after which the game experience seriously decreases? I have tried myself to spot a trend but it's not always easy. I've seen Distant shores struggling at 30+, Surface being fine at 50 but also Surface being completely ridiculous at the same 50...

The large amounts of lag are almost entirely caused by many people in one area.

Things that increase this even more are VFX buffs/spells and People Partied up.

The people partied up are the largest adder of lag I believe. There is a lot of info that has to travel between characters in the same area (And even more when there are parties). If you remember people talking about how contact tracing (with regards to COVID) increases exponentially with the number of people, it's the same thing here with data going back and forth.

So, it's probably not the large numbers directly, but large numbers mean it's more likely that a lot of people are in the same area.

I remember back in the days, during bad laggy nights, DMs shouting across servers to:

- don't be in a party from afar
- remove superfluous vfx
- I even remember some calls to "spread out"

While all of these "shouts" are from another era (haven't seen a DM do that in years) and most certainly a strain on the DM side and an immersion breach to the natural flow of people's RP, wouldn't it be worthwhile to resurrect those old "emergency dm requests" to save a server from blowing up? Just a thought, I have no clue how effective these were.

Out of curiosity, would removing VFX from some spells reduce lag then?

I seen meetings and realy large scale pvp in the past wit little to no lag.
This lag is something from the last few months.

Nobs wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:43 am I seen meetings and realy large scale pvp in the past wit little to no lag.
This lag is something from the last few months.

Disagree, the lag has always been there. You might get a blessed large scale PvP encounter now and then when the rest of the server had nothing going on so it ran buttery smooth but often it devolved into slideshows of charaters teleporting in and out of gas clouds.

But it has gotten worse of late, likely due to the increased number of players.

It seems lately there are nearly 100 players on Arelith continuously (awesome), and pushing 250 - 300 during peak times, every day.

It would be great if there were improvements that could be done by the Arelith development team, or if throwing more hardware at the problem would work but I suspect some of this lag is related to cascading inefficiencies that build up over time within the NWN server engine itself. Hard to know, it's really tough to make meaningful guesses without looking at the code.

I do think the constant area transitions (not just between servers) would be a prime place to begin looking for mishandled dynamic memory allocation or opportunities to reduce fragmentation, but again, this is probably on Beamdog to find.

everytime server lag is brought up spell vfx is noted as a cause - some have been removed, but still enough remain that it causes lag. why not just remove the buff vfx and replace them with descriptor tags?

Anime Sword Fighter wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 9:02 pm everytime server lag is brought up spell vfx is noted as a cause - some have been removed, but still enough remain that it causes lag. why not just remove the buff vfx and replace them with descriptor tags?

Having to examine someone to see what buffs they have up is clunky at the best of times, and nigh useless in hectic combat situations, which is when the info is most important.

I would legitimately rather go through the hassle than suffer through the VFX related lag tbh. The sound of someone transitioning in with that spell shield haunts my dreams.

Is it the complexity of the vfx or there simple existance that causes problems?

If its the complexity I could see simply replacing many of the VFX for a simpler visual indicator being a good solution, you can get the information you need at a glance, at least after everyone gets used to the new indicators and we have less lag?