I am playing on a
potato by current standards.
On medium settings i have 40ish FPS so quite often I am playing on "low" (where EU looks ALOT like old Torque PE especially the landscapes, which I love).
My net is a flying piece of dung, as is usually the case in Germany if you don't go for serious broadband. As such, my ms are all over the place, from 20 to 1400
However, the problem is not at me, as funny as it might sound. Lag means your sequence of actions is received and registered with delay. What happens is that the server delays the actions between them.
If I have: shoot 3 times, fap, shoot 4 times, even with lag, what should happen is to have the damage to mob and heal itself with delay (while damage by mob should happen instant because is a client-side function it seems), but the server-side processing of shoot 3 times, fap, shoot 4 times should happen with same speed I asked them. It doesn't.
If I have shoot 3 times with (say) 1 seconds inbetween, fap (for, say, 3 seconds), shoot 4 times again 1 second between each shot (at presumed 60 apm), what will actually happen ingame will be shoot 3 or maybe 4 times with distance between them of fuck knows what, 1 to 3 seconds, fap for7 seconds while reloading only once and item is stuck and busy, shoot 4 times with, again, whatever interval between them.
The only place where MY connection plays a decissive role is the auction. But then, once loaded, it should go smoothly. It doesn't. Whatever the server used to calculate instantly on auction for years, it doesn't anymore. Distribution of acution fees maybe? No idea.
And I
know what all this is coming from and I am very suprised MA doesn't. And I know precisely becaue I am playing and always played on a potato (at home I was on a nvidia 6600 for years).
All this started with reload buffs, back in 2013 or 14 when they were added. And because I have a potato, is sensible and I can see what and when affects.
I love to play with extremely fast guns, such as PLP 27, 85 attacks per minute. When I started iron on wombana, it was fine. The minute I started to use Ares (L), (of which PLP 27 gains, I think, 1 or 2 apm), the botch became visible. In first stages, the server couldn't cope with the extra shots and were simply not executed. Then they botched again and it was gaining too much. Then something done to regulate this, but the primary botch remained. To this day, since introduction of buffs, a weapon at 70+ attacks/min, will cough at least 1 time each 2-3 minutes, regulating, I would guess, the fractions from low% buff to high apm.
Nowadays the cause is simple. Armour decay, fap cost, missed shots and so on are factored in real-time, both to increase the short term ROI and to build real-time the bonus pool, which gives the second set of shrapnel.
Is obvious and I am not some techie genius.
MA, please redesign this. While the intention is good and I honestly appreciate it, your servers cannot carry it. And I doubt there are too many server parks in the world to carry it, as is designed.
For mining, I am clueless, because nothing changed much in terms of buffs, only reload on excavators but at 20-30 rpm shouldn't be a problem. I would guess both mining and hunting are part of same thread and simply hunting is eating away computational resources. Same for crafting which has 0 effects from buffs.
May I suggest a couple of things:
- temporary remove the bonus shrapnel mechanism, revert to the old status of a direct cut for you without redistribution, but just lower the threshold. So you won't have anymore personal armour and healing accounted for, because is
killing the bloody game. Every f*er in a pixie with 20 punies on his ass is calculated for 5 mins as much as someone hunting spiders for 20 mins maybe.
- rework from the ground up the buff mechanism and pay more attention to bloody fractions and their interaction with your core mechanism // maybe replace buffs with a sort of a mission/ adjusting item mechanism which creates a new state of the item instead of an attachement which can be moved left and right from a 20apm weapon to a 80 apm weapon - I don't mean phyisically to change the rings, I mean as programming aspect. So the calculation happens once when the item is defined and not at each action
- if need be, wipe out parts of the game which needlessly pressure the database. Old items, old blueprints, old resources, anything which has 0 point nowadays ingame but is still there in the database taking up vital space.
- get together with planet partners and rework the balance of resources and blueprints, such as all of them to use a generic set of ores, enmatters and looted stackables, with only a handful, literally, planet-specific, so to keep planet-specific lore. You don't need finders and excavators specific for Cyrene, Toulan, RT and Ark, seriously. Neither 40 potential type of mining amps when only like 6-7 of them are used.
- do something with the graphic loading, I have been to bloody Celeste on Ark, respectively Omegation about a bazillion time, why does the computer need to redraw them each damn time?
A sign that you are reading this thread and you are aware of our concerns would be great.
P.S.: A good sign I am right is that at the times when there is not much activity, the "lag" vanishes. Because is not damn lag, is clutter.