Suggestion to help with Lag and the Floor Bug

After reading the forums, and exploring other Official servers and player hosted servers, I have learned some things about Lag.

When my husband and I recently returned to CE for the AoW update, we were on a server that was afflicted by the Floor Bug (where you fall through player made blocks), quite often and it would last quite a while at times. Discussing things with players there, we noticed this would happen for a few minutes every time someone with an exceptionally large base would log in.

When there were at least 10 people online it would happen even more often. When I was researching the bug, I came across posts about the Bars, claiming active bars are the cause of this problem as well. This server we were on had a LOT of them. There was at least 2 by each obelisk, and the more popular Obelisks (Sink Hole, Sulphur Pools, and Mounds) would have more like 4. Plus each player had there own Active bar at their own base. Of course this was all speculation until my Husband and I decided to try a different server, because the lag and floor bug was just horrible.

So, we tried a Siptah map. It was equally populated, but the players were more responsible with their active bars, and they seemed to only be at their main bases. Likely since Siptah does not have Teleport locations for people to easily congregate to. On this server, there was rarely any major lag, and the floor bug happened maybe twice.

Their bases were also smaller, there were only a few colossal builds. After a while, my husband wanted to try a RP server for some PVP stuff. These servers did not allow Bar Tenders, and they implemented Block limits. There was nearly no lag at all unless more than 1 person was doing a Purge, and there were no floor bugs ever.

Despite being against ToS, people continue to build giant bases on Official servers. Not just that, but they will build several. I am currently playing on a server, where at least 3 clans each have about 6 massive bases spread across the map. Some of them are really huge, and cause my game to stop for about 10 to 30 seconds while they load in.

My suggestion is this:
First: Since giant bases are already against the ToS, and can be reported. A block limit should be put in place for Official Servers, say 5000 blocks or something. We made a small to medium base using 2100 blocks, so I think 5000 would be plenty enough to have a decent base, purge base, and outposts. It would also prevent people from building several giant bases all over the map.

Second: After studying 6 different servers, both official and not, active Taverns are definitely contributing to the problem. If you could some how limit CLAN use to ONE Bar Keeper, this would help greatly with lag and floor bugs. This would prevent players from making several active bars. Which mean less NPCs wondering around chewing up resources. This is even more important come your AoH patch, which will bring in even more NPC wondering.

If you want to help with lag, and the floor bug that’s been plaguing the game, and thousands of people are complaining about, you could try implementing those suggestions. This is of course my opinion, and I’m sure some people will object, but it’s what I learned, and think would actually make a difference.

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This was studied extensively on private servers. It appears that the Tavernkeepers are (in fact) not at all optimized. Our private server admin grepping the logs - it seems that the Tavernkeeper system would “keep track” of a thrall that came into the Tavern, sat down, and then left… for up to 3 hours AFTER that particular thrall had left the scene.

Much trial and error was performed. The private server staff eventually decided to COMPLETELY ban active Tavernkeepers. This enhanced the performance significantly.

Of course - no one at Funcom will address or speak to the poor optimization of the Tavernkeeper system. I still have not seen any sort of acknowledgement from them that they are even aware that there’s an issue.

You can bet that this will get much, much worse when the Active Settlement planned in the Age of Heros goes live. :rage:

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I’m an efficiency over aesthetics base builder myself and while i do know the pain of dealing with silly large bases on official i will play a bit of devils advocate here against some of the build limit suggestions.

Limiting a clans number of bases will only result in people not clanning up.
that would mean overall more thrall slots and more idle thralls on a server.

it would likely have a negative impact on the teleport networks people have built, making it much more tedious to get around the map.

the map rooms some kind souls maintain around obelisks would be at risk of disappearing.

Some people build beautiful medium sized bases with lots of small intricate details, should they be treated the same as someone who makes a massive foundation floor and wall base?

I could go on but i think that makes a point.
Any potential limits on the game have just as much a chance to make things worse as they do to make it better, food for thought.

one thing for certain that could make the game better would be some bugfixing and optimization. just ask any experienced private server owner how many warnings and errors they have to suppress in the log files to keep a server running.

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You can make nice public map rooms and teleports with less than 100 blocks each. They don’t require giant bases around them. There has got to be a way to passively enforce the prevention of people making giant bases. A clan having 1 giant base is one thing, but there are some that have several. The example I listed above, with the server I’m on now, there are at least two clans with a least 6 bases spread across the map each. And each of those bases is easily 4000 blocks. It is completely unnecessary to require so many large bases for a clan. Outposts need not be giant, public transportation need not be giant. You just need your own base, and maybe a Purge base, and even then they don’t have to be massive.

I get it, people who have been on a singular server for a long time get bored, and they want to put their resources to use, but it’s getting ridiculous.

2 things I’m going to point out here that needs to be said.

1: there is nothing in the ToC that states that huge bases are not allowed. The language is about impact to others; performance, blocking and walling in. It is an important distinction because you can have a gigantic base while not impacting other players. When those bases start preventing passage, getting extremely laggy or blocking unique POIs, then it becomes a problem.

2: no matter how much a block limit might sound great, it’s not going to prevent abuse (you might want to do a search for the many past discussions about it on here, dig deeper)

Inasmuch as your findings might lead to the conclusions you’ve drawn, no one truly knows what causes the floor bug. There are multiple possible causes and even multiple bugs happening.

As for lag, most of the leading causes are a mixture of thralls/placeables/inventory. Animated placeables and loading of inventory being heavy hitters.

Official servers run on Gportal which is notorious for being a poor provider, add in bad QA and a variety of performance affecting bugs, it’s going to be the shitshow it is.

I would suggest instead of looking for ways to limit or punish players, demand better from the ones who created the problem in the first place.

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The base it’s self no. 5 tons of ornaments, mega watts of torches, and hundreds of chest/crates will. And that is the issue, no mega base is just building pieces. It’s a package deal.

I’ve seen what happens when one person on a public server thinks there are no limits so build as much.
funcom needs to implement an automated system because zendesk simple fails at all levels.

:100:

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Exactly!

Me too and way worse than your most important example. Should have seen what I saw 3 years ago O.O But this was just a cheat sheet on the package-deal+


I get it, everyone is fed up, frustrated and at their wits end. It’s not other players’ fault for falling through foundations though :frowning:

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So if i intentionally run a 12 year old CPU And play conan exiles and go near folks bases and lag? it’s their fault not mine?

No.

If funcom add any type of limite of structure peoples will quit the game or abuse the system making many accounts holding one base in every account and nothing will be fixed…

Funcom shall take a break and make a huge update just to fixes all bugs and optimize the game.

Floor falling its a bug and it come with the AOW update.

From experience on a private server, I’ve seen those instances where thralls drop down into the mesh of a “solid” floor", and I’ve seen those same thralls suddenly pop back up to their original position several seconds later.
But they all didn’t drop at the same time. It came across them like a wave and without fail: it was a consistent occurrence. You could actually time it.
That was telling me the problem is in “position polling” by the game engine to verify whether or not a thrall has moved. It also does the exact same thing for players. But it’s not just limited to that aspect. If some of you ever happen to notice, sometimes we’re traversing across a floor (either ceiling or foundations) and suddenly we find ourselves dropping down as if the part has “ghosted” even though we still see it. That’s the physics engine trying to keep track of us and missing it. (It happens more often in larger builds).
It has to continuously monitor where the player is on the map. This is especially true for anything that moves; whether it’s the player or an NPC.
That IS a problem for a single threaded database manager where so many other things have to be “tracked”. The more you have on the map (especially resource intensive objects), the worse the “glitch” occurs.
I remember this problem in the early stages of the Early Release where the engine would lose track of where I was on the map. (Believe it or not, that’s a database management issue). I’d get a “lost connection” error and when I managed to log back in, I often found myself somewhere else on the map as if I never stopped running. Then the game engine finally caught up to where I was.

The problem really isn’t a new one. It’s been around a long time. It has been bypassed before and most of us had some relief from the grief of the tracking loss.
But as things go, very often “old bugs” will pop back up with each new update.

It seems to be the nature of games developed with “inefficient” DBMs.
Now, I’m not suggesting in any way to just quit. The fix is going to take time and from the way things are with a game of this complexity, it’s not going to be that easy (as we would hope). But hang in there and don’t give up hope. I understand the frustration. This new “thing” coming, I’m sure it’s going to be a nightmare, but I hope they (the programmers) can get to the bottom of the issue and eliminate it for all of our sanities. (It’s disheartening to say, but this may be a near impossible task ahead of them considering the current DBM).

For those who are on officials (hosted by you know who), I really feel your anguish. I had a dislike of them ever since my first help ticket submission and it is why I went to a different provider to host a private server for me.

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The downside of the merges is that most likely the neo-alphas will have the resources to remove the alpha clan (from the game server). The merges, otherwise, have worked almost without hiccups.

So when is the floor bug getting fixed? It’s been a known issue since April of 24.

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Post of the Year!!! :joy: love it

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