In my opinion this is what causes public server lag:
1: Gportal
2: funcom’s failure to properly optimize the game.
3: funcom’s failure to properly enforce the ToC.
4: Hoarders.
5: Over builders.
6: Over ornaments.
7: AI.
In my opinion if 3 was fixed we wouldn’t have 4,5, and 6. But periodic server wipes would not only cure 4, 5, and 6 but push those sort of builders off the public servers; not my intention would much prefer #3.
Now I have seen hoarding on a city scale on quite a few PVE servers. I think it’s the #1 cause of lag that can easily be fixed player side. I’d prefer better servers, an optimized game, or much, much better ToC enforcement. But the 1 thing we can do as players is build conservatively and not hoard.
As I have said I’m no numbers guy But having been on the beta server I have seen just how nice fresh servers runs.
Note: I expect absolutely nothing of funcom. so don’t even consider this a suggestion.
Again, a wipe of the server would address the problem for 2 weeks, until people have literally rebuild what they had before…
I already explained it: This is the players’ attitude and it is within existing ToC.
What you also didn’t consider with the idea of periodic wipes is players stopping to return to the game. Some players actually like the continuity of the official servers. So exactly contrary to what you like.
What would be needed to address the issues you raise is a change of ToC, maybe even an ingame rulesset of tighter building restrictions.
relying on the “good will” of players is naive, especially considering recent events.
A wipe just kicks the problem down the line, solving nothing.
Honestly I even like the idea of “wipes”, but with every new Age.
In any case, it makes no logical sense that wiping a server, even regularely, would prevent that players construct enormous buildings that potentially cause lags.
NO ONE is going to replace 6 years of hoarded content in 2 weeks.
As far as builds a clan concentrating on building on PVE like it was a PVP server might be able to build some large castle in 2 weeks. But #3 would prevent over builds.
That is also assuming your character doesn’t get wiped as well.
over building doesn’t do much, open flame lights do
filled chests produce lag and the dynamic stuff, Tavern, living settlements, high level purges bring the server to its knees.
Don’t see the need for wipes tbh
You know perfectly my dear @DeaconElie that construction parts only affect very much can or not at all the servers’ performer.
Credible and serious tests demonstrated by the pass.
The main reason for the current state of the server is the active addition of content by Funcom to the court of these 6 years, in addition to the choice to use cheap server for lack of financial means at the time (Funcom was at the edge bankruptcy).
Bad design choices and a highly modified graphic engine that prevents the optimization of servers are the main causes of the current server state.
The addition of contents with a strong load as said above (purge, tavern, living colony) contribus strongly to the gap and delay of the server.
It is true, however, that lights, enslaved NPCs, decorations and trunk with their contents negatively affects the server performers .
A wipe only temporarily solving the problem cause by an accumulation of placeable, it is indeed very easy and quick to opt for an equal number of enslaved NPC, light, decoration and others without having been to build town for this.
You are in crusade against the big constructions because they bother you, I can understand this.
I think you should add meeting minimum requirements as a point of discussion.
You know I have upgraded recently. Previously I had almost low spec. Now I have high spec. It didn’t solve or mitigate some things but my experience is incredibly different now. The things it didn’t mitigate are inherent in the issues Anderson is pointing out: GPortal and optimization, IMHO.
We found out recently that minimum requirements were updated but we don’t know when. Going based on my experience, it feels like it should be adjusted, again.
So if we think about how not meeting minimum requirements has an impact there should be some management of expectations of individual players who don’t. While it is true that loss of performance is considered for both server and client side, if someone is not meeting basic requirements then unfortunately they should have to accept it.
Just to point out, so far from all the posts in this thread, Deacon’s original list is actually the closest to reality, the order is a bit off, but yea…
A lot of people mentioned lights, because that’s one of the BS myths that has been spread for years now… Lighting is 100% client-side… it simply doesn’t exist on the server… as such it cannot have any effect on server performance beyond that of a simple placeable → a torch has the exact same performance hit for the server as a decorative iron bowl
I think aesthetics matter as much as server performance. If officials are the gateway to the game for new players, is this the best foot forward for them?
pretty sure I can fill 200 chests with resources in 2 weeks…
It really doesn’t matter whats in the chests to affect the server.
Not even sure why you are even obsessed with hoarders…I mean, it is probably some kind of jealousy, because purely server performance can’t be your reason.
If it is only A VERY SMALL part of the problem. So why even suggest it and upset many (invested) players? I’d assume that this would literally kill the game, and the many threads on the forum where players lost evereything and said they wouldn’t be back confirms that.
The ball is in FUNCOM’s hand to do something about the issues plaguing the game. Server performance isn’t even the #1 issue. And I think there we agree.
and that is everywhere on that server? Is that even representative for most servers?
This perfectly illustrates player attitude and simply an aesthetic issue one might have, ain’t a reason to wipe that.
Does this cause lags though?
A wipe would do nothing to that behaviour anyway. ToC changes probably neither. The only way forward is rethinking building restrictions implemented in the game. In other words AGE OF HOUSING, reworking what can be build and where.
Just one addition to that topic.
I wiped myself several times since launch, but I am pretty sure, I wouldn’t be here today discussing the game, if regular server wipes would be a thing, I would have quit probably 3-4 years ago
I’m aware foundations don’t cause the lag a vault, or animal pen may cause. But they do contribute. Regardless, people are finding the hard way there is a land claim limit when they get suspended for excursiveness. Of course we have no clue what that limit is.
Codemage convinced me ages ago foundations are the issue. But as far as I’m concerned they are the base of the issues {joke}
Nothing says you have to use all of it. I know over the ages funcom has had a few unique thralls but as far as content what can’t be replace by rebuilding or loot farming?
The issue in my opinion; which I think as absurd I have to keep writing, 90% of hoarded content is not at all unique. In one of my destroyer raids I found a room full of stacked rows big crates, no idea how many looked like a warehouse. Crate after crate of unsorted loot.
Hoarders gonna be hoarden.
#1.
Not my forte, I leave that up to coders. I do get the game is not optimized well. #2.
If it took 6 years of hoarding to get to that point vaults starmetal are not going to be replaced that fast.
Yes but seems enough people play like the public servers are theirs to pave over to ruin a server for us conservative builders.
Not true. I know of a few bigger builds that I like on my server.
One is out of the way, well done, not overly populated or ornamented, I doesn’t have a dozen vaults or 2 dozen animal pens. It doesn’t have flags stacked as close as the can be, in rows covering ever roof. It doesn’t have a dozen giant statues or herds of pets. There is no hording going on there. Does not lag me running by.
Not the same as building the Luxor Hotel and Casino across the guardians bay on noob river. Or covering the top of dagons decent with ornamental plazas, stairs, and walk ways.
It’s more a crusade to get funcom to do a proper job of ToC enforcement.
If ARK is so great why are you always here?
That wouldn’t be server lag. But I don’t think most people realize that funcom has updated minimum and my PC doesn’t meet them; but still runs the game at 60fps with mixed settings; mostly medium.
Because full vaults in mass are the #1 player causes of server lag. And I’d be whiling to bet those that would know would agree.
Now tell me you do not understand hording with out saying you don’t understand it.
Now why would anyone spend 24/7 cutting down trees to fill chests other then to prove a point? You’re being absurd. I do believe the term is reducto absurom or some such. But what you are describing is not normal game play, I can see a PVP clan gather at a rate that could fill those chests but those materials are not going to be static, they are going to be processed and used.
Not when it comes to server lag.
I honestly don’t think so.
When the biggest hoarder on my server quit or got banned; I hope nothing bad happened to them. And the last of their bases decayed you could literally feel a change in the gravity on the server. So many of the covered over building sites opened up there was a swarm of activity and new players.
1: and why I’ve given up Lacking in any sort of meaningful communication.
2: Present state of the game.
3: ToC enforcement.
4: Server lag.
Now of those 4 which do we have the most control over?
With out hesitation.
I play 7D2D on a private server that wipes every 500 game days. That means characters too.
And ya, I’ve restarted Conan 100 times? Right now I have 3 on beta and 3 on live but only 1 level maxed.
its G-portal ■■■■■■ cpu , and that the game is on ue4, single core mostly is used even other cores has some usefull stuff, but mostly 1 core atleast when switching from gportal to some cecen site, personal server performance improved like 80%, and only difference was in cpu cores… so thats what i think
it’s simple , if FC does a wipe the servers will be better off , no question about it
because a large part of the community will uninstall the game and never come back.
CE is already the last game from Funcom for a lot of people I know. Their inability to do anything without it being buggy and zero or minimal progress in fixing any consequences makes them a company where the game may look great, but we all(community of players I know) already know there will be a lot of bugs behind it that will be in the game for years to come…
You are basing all your arguments on your experience alone…I mean, where is it conclusively proven that hoarding is an issue?
You felt that the server was laggin less when a hoarder left your server is not something I’d base the decission on to wipe servers.
I mean NeoTheMatrix layed out a complete different cause. And frankly, that is what I have gathered from reading into the issue too.
That is the core problem with your argumentation and general attitude: You take your own experience as proven fact. Not even remotely questioninig if it is factual.
Then you try to debunk my argument of people simply rebuilding to status quo in just weeks, with YOUR own “I don’t think so”. Well that is cool and so on, but it doesn’t warrant any of the rather drastic actions you are proposing. And in your next anecdote you tell me that after that one hoarder left it was quickly rebuild by other players…well that literally confirms what I was trying to tell you.
I’d really love to see how you would run a private server and how long it would take you to scare people away with your “know it all, god complex”.
And as Keldy pointed out, we are at the stage of the game where people are only returning to the game because they are invested into their bases that they build over years. If the bases are gone, they are gone. And since you said yourself, there are many, many of these bases on all servers, I doubt those who would return, would make an impact on performance.
And we have still not established objectively, that these bases are even the main cause for server lag.
I would say even less than that (assuming the playerbase doesn’t just up and quit).
Those who have only played on non-wiping servers do not exactly have an idea of how quickly a player can get back into the groove. Your solo and small group casual players may take a little more time as they get reused to the nuances of newbie river play that they may not have done in a few years. But overall everyone knows how to gather efficiently and even if they don’t know the meta-optimal ways of getting up to level and established, they know enough after a few hundred to a few thousand hours that they could rebound in this scenario.
And I don’t mean a few T2 buildings and maybe a thrall or two. I’m talking 10,000-20,000 T3 elaborate buildings with a thrall army of choice thralls and crafters within a few days of starting over. Your buildings you have now may have taken months or years to build through iteration over that time. But if you had to, you could rebuild something similar within a week, even if you have limited time.
And believe me, after a wipe, there is a incentive to go a bit more than casual building as all the choice spots open up and not only do you need to take a spot before someone else, but also build out to ensure you have enough room for what you had planned, all the while staying in the landclaim regulations, and only ‘temporarily’ violating them (you know you all do…).
Though the servers would likely run pretty well at first. At least if they stay under 20 players, which they won’t as all the reseters will come back and actively play. A blessing and a curse. Actual underpopulated servers would be the best place to play for a while longer. But they too would succumb to issues if they rise in population as populations fluctuate or in time as the map begins to slowly fill in.
The main causes of server lag in my opinion due to observation and experience (I’m not Funcom) are:
Logged out characters remain in world - This setting when turned off on an older server with a large volume of players will reduce the size of the database everything is stored on by about 25-50%. Now… does that affect performance directly, the filesize? In theory it really shouldn’t. But anecdotal reports on it say that it causes a massive improvement on a server’s abilities. My opinion is that you should have this setting turned off on all PVE and PVE-C servers. Could even make an argument to turn it off on PVP as server performance may be worth the cost of everyone body-vaulting.
Thralls - I remember when the thrall limit was added several years ago and everyone complained it didn’t make a difference. Well, I saw a difference but then I was playing on servers that didn’t allow a single solo player to have 50+ thralls. Remember that when you play on a public server and you only see 2-5 players online, it doesn’t mean there is only 2-5 players playing there. Its what you see, at that time, on that day. You don’t see who is playing when you don’t. You don’t see those players who have placed thralls and maybe have taken a short break. There’s at least 100-200 players per server on these public servers. Many of them have more. But even at the small end… that could be 5,000 thralls, and frequently much more. That’s at a minimum for the ‘less populated’ server.
Storage - Aka the hoarding argument. This one isn’t really as bad as it sounds in fact I would probably lump it with the building category below since they are kind of related, and they could swap places based on what the players on a server are doing. This is one of the reasons why larger stack sizes are preferred. If you have 100,000 stone. Its better for the server to store that as 100 stacks of 1,000 stone instead of 1,000 stacks of 100 stone. Its even better if they can store it as 10 stacks of 10,000 or best to store all of a single material in one place. Its why I advocate for specialized storage that ‘poofs’ simple materials into its inventory and simply records them as a number instead of stacks. But to put it simply, the less stacks of items (single unstackable items are one stack by themselves), the better. The less inventory sources the better (so using a vault instead of a few chests, is better). Also removing the feature (and all references to it) that allows us to see the contents of nearby storage before interacting with might help some too.
Buildings - Now this one is interesting because it takes A LOT of building pieces to bog down a server. For example I’ve built admin-made dungeons for players to explore (with respawning loot and enemies, doors needing keys or switches, and so forth) using around 400,000 building pieces and didn’t see any server hit there. And just to kick the myth in the teeth, that was black ice being used. There’s a combination of factors that pile on each other. Building size, building area, building density, and server population and how dense it is. The map on the server side of things tends to load in sections. I don’t remember if its called zones or chunks or whatever in the devkit (map makers have more info here), but the server doesn’t load all of these. This is why your golems don’t gather when you are away. But the more of these zones that are active, the more the server has to strain, and if those zones all have tons of buildings to load in, it can get heavy.
Activity - What players are doing causes some server slowdowns. As players engage in combat and dungeons, they get NPCs up and moving around, this causes the server to need to do more work. This is why the siege of al-Merayah caused some problems, there’s a ton of activity happening there in a small area, and its in the middle of the map making a large part of the map active. But the servers are kind of designed with this in mind, its just combined with above things it becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Player count - Mentioning the zones and player density before leads us to the number of players. As this can exacerbate all above issues. And this is why I put it at the bottom. Its not the bottom issue. It can be the top issue. A server with 2 players online won’t see this be an issue at all. A server with 80 players online… well yeah this will be the top issue. You’ll see issues even if the top 4 things don’t even exist.
Conclusion states that the first issue of the Logged in players has the biggest impact for many servers (it might not be a cureall though, FC has done some excellent job over the years optimizing the servers and their databases compared to launch). But the other issues if tackled in a vacuum, such as wiping the servers, won’t help very much. Or as stated before, only for a short while.
All wiping the servers will do is decrease the playerbase on those servers. Causing server mergers which will result in every issue I mentioned being exacerbated for a fewer set of servers. Bringing you back to square one or even worse.
The servers have been available for nearly 8 years and in that time players have many hours played with the assumption and promise that they would not be wiped. There is an understanding there that these servers should not wipe unless absolutely necessary. And that being if the servers cannot boot up with their database or all possessed backups. This is a decision best left to the server admins, rather than the players.
imagine that.
