That’s about it. The servers cannot support the current amount of players all cluttered in a small area, such as what happened in the Halloween events, and now the Lost Shores event.
Many players, including myself, are virtually unable to do anything due to lag. The character models won’t load, the skills will take 10 to 30 seconds to respond. If you try to walk away, you will find your self teleporting back to where you were 15 seconds ago.
I believe everyone has experienced this at some points, which makes the gaming experience completely unenjoyable. And this happens to happen exactly in such “world changing” events (which for obvious reasons everyone want to take part, and even though it can also happen in some zergs).
Consequence: the world does change… but most players do not have the opportunity take part in the process. Or the do but at the cost of a painfully laggy experience and mostly unenjoyable.
I would like to point something out. We did have some large scale events in all BWEs:
In BWE1, the amount of lag made the game barely playable. And the finale was much like what we see in large events today.
In BWE2, with the addition of many extra servers, I for one haven’t experienced any lag at all. And although lot of people still went through connectivity issues, as I far as can remember, there was very few complaining in the Finale event with the spreading corruption stuff.
Finally, in BWE3, most issues were back, and they remain now that the game has gone live.
So, whatever it was decided to be done with the extra servers, it was not an improvement at all (it did improve from BWE1, but not from BWE2).
Some are going to reply that “I can’t compare the number of players in the Beta weekends with the number of players now.” That is correct. In this case, if the game couldn’t even hold the number of players in BWE3, it is rather obvious that it won’t hold now.
(At last, the suggestion. People too lazy to read can skip right to this part.)
It is for these reasons that I urge the developers to consider some of the following:
- Reduce the player limit within a map, and start sending them earlier to the overflow servers.
- Overflow server are currently suffering from the same issues, so also reduce the limit of players in each overflow server.
I’d also like to invite everyone to post out their own suggestions for improving performance, since in its current state, the game turns out to be unplayable in these large events.
Thank you.