Feed back on the current Blighted Treants -UPDATED-

[Aamer Khan]

This is some honest feedback, that will probably get me flamed, but here goes...

I know these raids are happing randomly, and was not suprised to port to mahagra as a low level spiritist, and die on the pad. No prob. So I decide to try and take part in this "event".

I switch to scout quickly, and port to bristugo, to about a 4 minute port. Once I could actually move, fps was around 1. Well, this aint gonna work so I port to aug to try there... Much better fps 4.2. I see PJ fighting some treants and start attacking. I do a bit of damage, the treants rush forward, my fps drops to .3 and I cant even heal myself or move backwards. Deathpoint #2. So at this point I realize that things are WORSE now than ever before.

Now before the regulars chime in and say they have NO problems, let me say that what concerns me is that too many times enough say that its not all that bad and NOTHING changes.

The lag makes the "fun" more frustrating than its worth. I really wonder why TG does this close to towns in the first place. It only add to the lag that is already there. And to raid bristugo, with mobs that have spell effects sparkling around them, moving all around makes this worthless to almost all players except a small fraction of the player base. Something that will NOT add to good word of mouth.

I can normally fight out on saritova with 15 mobs and still have 20+ fps the entire time. I have 1 gig of memory and 256 mb video card. No shadows, and everything else set as good as I can. I am on a cable connections that has 3mb dl speeds and 1mb up.

Until something improves, I will not bother with this "fun" addition to the game.

[Helcat]

Have to agree here... lag was HORRENDOUS.

I love the raids on towns, always have. However it's a bit
disheartening to realize that since Launch so much else has
improved, but the lag issue during town raids remains just
as bad as it was two years ago.

[neural_hoax]

Agreed, normally i dont have much of a problem with lag either, but the lag during these treant raids takes me back to the days of the satyr island machine raids.

[Tantalyr]

Is there any reason why the blighted treants have to be WM-spawned, and not put on a regular spawn timer like other critters?

[Doombreak]

Us poor ppl on unity will prolly neva eva get many blighted treants cause our raids tart off good but then GN 4get to do it in a few weeks..our last raid woz on bristugo i think last year sometime..so maybe it would b best having them regular spawn in the appropriate blighted areas

[PJ]

If it makes you feel any better, that treant that got you immediately multistriked me to death after you died [:P]

But I won't say I don't get any lag, but there are some ways to deal with it to an extent.

When you ported in to Aug, I was the only PC there killing treants. But there were in addition to the regular assortment of strucutes, npcs, plots, etc, ~50 treants.

Alot of the lag you were probably experiencing was not coming from Aug itself, but the game stuttering as it loads all the mobs.But alot of that lag is transitory and will go away if wait for the mobs to load.

[Aamer Khan]

Aye, what you say PJ is for the most part true for some.

Those with dual/64bit processors, and 2-4 GB of memory can probably hang well.

However, therein lies the problem. Most of us don't have rigs like that. Nor should we NEED them just to play a game. If this issue is still with us, and if the client really can't handle the load, then, what I would suggest is as follows...

Spawn these raid mobs away from towns, and have them march on a town. Build up the number of mobs over time not all at once. There are plenty of portals all over, so that finding these mobs will be no problem. Lots of DP's are fun for the WM to create, but not fun for us to have to deal with. Especially since I currently have no idea what collecting the treant parts will do or if it's even worth doing.

Either improve the raid setup to compensate for the massive lag they generate, or just stop doing them and do something else. I would safely say 80% of my friends and guildmates won't go to these raid because of the lag. And I hear constant complaints across the board from all levels of players on Chaos about this problem. Of my guild, I and possibly one of our dragons players are the only ones that even try to tke part anymore.

[PJ]

My suggestion is comp independent. People with super rigs have complained about this sort of lag also. My rig is average at best. But the important thing is that it is transitory. Waiting for the mobs to load, helps substantially.

[imported_Frith-Rae]

I agree with you Aamer...

I too am one of those players who gave up on world events (via mob attacks). The last one I attended and was able to take part in was the "big baddie" right before the servers' merged. I turned off all the effects I could think of, and then was able to play with everyone else OUTSIDE of any towns.

I agree that they need to be spawned outside of towns - lag is a big enough issue for enough players that they need to take this into account.

Since then I've been online during several WA attacks that I decided to just "not even bother trying" because I didn't want to lagout/CTD. I'd probably have tried if it was somewhere away from towns, but the idea of porting to a place and being dead before my screen becomes clear...*chuckles*

I really wish I had a system where it was some other way, because the few world mob attacks I"ve attended were great fun - even with 5 or 6 Dps or whatever.

[Guaran]

I was thinking the same thing last night. Spawn the mobs in the blighted areas, (away from towns or portal pads) like just south of floating city, south of cobalt theres a little spot,south of travertine, festival grounds, north of chiconis, Feledans blight portal, draak, lesser aradoth deadlands, trandalar, western deadlans, other blighted areas, and/or areas with snow. Just make the mobs a regular spawn. If they need a 1 or 2 hour respawn so be it.


When 6 of them spawn at once, all on top of each other, it gets laggy, and hard to survive.

[Helcat]

see, I don't see the solution as being "spawn event MOBs out
in the wilderness where there is less lag." I would much rather
see WA attacks on towns... the real solution is to fix the lag.

[Guaran]

Perhaps. But how realistic is for 6 to just appear out of nowhere.

They can spawn out of town and march into towns, if a war on the towns is what you want.

I just thought they had gone crazy from the blight. The druid said try not to kill them. These aren't normal raid mobs.

[UlteriorModem]

Oh thank goodness....

I currently have a modest machine by todays standards and I thought I was the only one that dropped down to about a frame every two seconds.

What is weird was when I first saw them everything seemed fine. Its when the melee broke out I ground to a halt.

It was so bad I decided to reboot.

On the bright side I just got me a new machine [:D]

[Fiko]

The issue I have with this particular event is that I was not arround the couple nights it happened and everything was all taken care of by the time I showed up on Thursday night. I have more than the average players time to waste waiting for something to happen. What about those with limited play time? I have a friend who spends 2 hours every weekday morning in game, and I am sure that he's not the only devoted player who will entirely miss out on this event due to play times. All tiers of treants are represented to make it something even the new folks can enjoy, as long as they are arround while there are still treants left to kill. I know some were spawned in odd places in the wilderness across Istaria, but once those places become known I don't expect the treants to be there for very long.

A variety of places for each tier with a regular spawn would be a better solution in my opinion. This doesn't have to exclude the WM's from participating and making it into an attack on the towns. Sure a few high levelers are gunna swing through the lower areas even then, but they'll be just as willing to swap parts with any low levelers in the area as anyone else, and likely move on once they get thier set(unlike the halloween spider/zombie kill stealing festival of idiocy).

Fiko

[Imayo]

I certainly won't get to participate. More than a little disappointed at that fact too. WMs don't get on during the week until I am going to bed and by the time I get off work and back on the game, there are none of the blighted treants left ot kill. The only time I have any serious block of time is on Saturday and guess what? No WM login. Really kinda blows. Events such as this really should not depend on you being in a certain time zone to be able to participate.

[imported_Lycaunoss]

Aye, what you say PJ is for the most part true for some.

Those with dual/64bit processors, and 2-4 GB of memory can probably hang well.

Ok I'm one of those lucky people who has a dual 64 bit processor and 2GB or ram. Anytime that there are tons of mobs I actually see a huge performance hit just and like PJ is saying it doesn't last. Let's say I'm running around 50 fps and a whole field of mobs spawns around me. As they spawn my fps will actually drop to around 12ish until they've finished loading and once finished I usually bounce back up to high 40's low 50's. I'm not sure if the actual mob model has any effect on this but I'd think that a more complex one would hit performance harder. I suspect that at an event attack situation where you were porting into an area with buildings and mobs you will see a more drastic hit on your framerate. I also suspect that if you lag out and the mobs are continuously spawning that you will never recover until they have stopped. Finally I suspect that players porting in will have a similar effect to a mob spawning and hit your framerate that way as well.

The thing about the faster machines with more memory seems to be that they recover faster from the lag spikes. On my old system I'd port into an event attack and my hard drive would start thrashing and my system would be begging for mercy. Once I started hitting the paging file it was all over for me.

[Aamer Khan]

And by that post you illustrate once again why these events are problematic.

If even your machine takes a hit down to 12 fps, what about all those players that have 12 fps at best? And your on the money when you say that mobs with more complex appearance ( i.e. moving blight halo ) will create an even greater hit on fps. In town or out, if spawning 50 mobs lags most players this bad, then something needs to be done.

I was chatting with another player about some help this player gave to the dev's in adressing the current issues many have with fps lower than 5 causing the renderer to stop updating. It occurs to me that TG tests playability on a closed lan with virtually no latency, and a hop of 1. Of course, it plays well for them. Of course, they never see the same issues we do. Of course they can't reproduce the problems we are having. Blight shard is supposed to compensate for this. BUT... not enough of us "real world" players play there.

Even beyond the current lag issues, this last client update has worsened the situation for me and many other players. Even set on good performance, I still continue to see naken players, and extreame graphics update laging, even though the lagwindow says I have 16+fps. Moonwalking mobs, mobs that visually are 10 meters away report being 200 meters when attacked, and invisible mobs able to follow you 1000's of meters, and attack and kill you, even after sprinting away and never stopping.

What is truly odd about all this, is that after 2 years of playing, my FPS report higher then the first few months in game, but the lag now is actually worse. I laud the dev's for thier continuing efforts to improve performance, but have to wonder if tweeking so much has actually made things worse.

[Guaran]

Thats why the mobs can auto spawn in various places outside of populated areas (spawn WITHOUT the presence of a player required), and then march around, perhaps head towards towns, etc.

When they are not right on top of the pad, and can come into view more gradually, it helps alot.

[Goriax]

The issue I have with this particular event is that I was not arround the couple nights it happened and everything was all taken care of by the time I showed up on Thursday night. I have more than the average players time to waste waiting for something to happen. What about those with limited play time? I have a friend who spends 2 hours every weekday morning in game, and I am sure that he's not the only devoted player who will entirely miss out on this event due to play times. All tiers of treants are represented to make it something even the new folks can enjoy, as long as they are arround while there are still treants left to kill. I know some were spawned in odd places in the wilderness across Istaria, but once those places become known I don't expect the treants to be there for very long.

A variety of places for each tier with a regular spawn would be a better solution in my opinion. This doesn't have to exclude the WM's from participating and making it into an attack on the towns. Sure a few high levelers are gunna swing through the lower areas even then, but they'll be just as willing to swap parts with any low levelers in the area as anyone else, and likely move on once they get thier set(unlike the halloween spider/zombie kill stealing festival of idiocy).

Fiko

I've got to agree with you. I've only heard about these raids by hearsay even though I play 1-2 hours a day on the weekdays and 5-10 hours a day on weekends. By the time I was able to log on Thursday it was all over. This isn't the first time something like that has happened. Luckily, near as I can tell, the prize is cosmetic only. If it has any real impact on gameplay they need to work a lot harder at accomdating those with a variety of schedules.

[imported_Lycaunoss]

And by that post you illustrate once again why these events are problematic.

If even your machine takes a hit down to 12 fps, what about all those players that have 12 fps at best? And your on the money when you say that mobs with more complex appearance ( i.e. moving blight halo ) will create an even greater hit on fps. In town or out, if spawning 50 mobs lags most players this bad, then something needs to be done.

I was chatting with another player about some help this player gave to the dev's in adressing the current issues many have with fps lower than 5 causing the renderer to stop updating. It occurs to me that TG tests playability on a closed lan with virtually no latency, and a hop of 1. Of course, it plays well for them. Of course, they never see the same issues we do. Of course they can't reproduce the problems we are having. Blight shard is supposed to compensate for this. BUT... not enough of us "real world" players play there.

Even beyond the current lag issues, this last client update has worsened the situation for me and many other players. Even set on good performance, I still continue to see naken players, and extreame graphics update laging, even though the lagwindow says I have 16+fps. Moonwalking mobs, mobs that visually are 10 meters away report being 200 meters when attacked, and invisible mobs able to follow you 1000's of meters, and attack and kill you, even after sprinting away and never stopping.

What is truly odd about all this, is that after 2 years of playing, my FPS report higher then the first few months in game, but the lag now is actually worse. I laud the dev's for thier continuing efforts to improve performance, but have to wonder if tweeking so much has actually made things worse.

Well for me the client changes have been making things faster and that was true even before I got my new machine running. Not a lot faster but faster nonetheless. I saw something on the community site explaining the naked players that you've been seeing though. That's something that the devs have done to improve preformance. I can't say how successful that is because I havn't dropped below 10 fps since I got the new computer.

I don't think that there's much data being transferred so I'm thinking that latency can't be that big of a deal. After all people play on dial up and it would be totally unplayable if too much data was required. This is all local to your own pc. People who have fast pc's are going to render the mobs faster.

One thing that actually shocked me with my upgrade is how long portalling takes me now. Actually I should say how short portalling takes me as that is the most dramatic change that I've seen. It's under ten seconds for me to portal to a place I've been before. When I'm bouncing between Parsinia and Grayling working on my lair I portal so fast I don't see the loading screen. I don't fully understand why that is.

If I'm lucky enough to be around for the next town attack I will go and see what happens to my frame rate and let everyone know.