Mini's in Account Wardrobe lower framerate?
I tend to think this HAS to effect server performance and would think Anet has put something in place to mitigate this. The only thing I can envision is some sort of resource “weighting” between characters that display minis and those that do not in conjunction with some intelligent routing of players to different megaserver instances based on that weighting (they are already doing something like this based on friends lists, guild rep setting, etc.).
On the other hand, they may just be putting it in place and collecting data to see how it effects performance in general (before seeing if anything NEEDS to be done to mitigate any potential performance issues introduced by the change).
This is a pretty much a “wait and see” kind of thing.
Just to add, I’m one of those that care nothing for minis and will be quite vocal if they turn out to be annoying little resource hogs that effect my game play. If they don’t cause any issues, my only hope is that I could in some way stomp them on occasion if they get in my way.
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That’s the way that lady luck dances
So stomping my Mini Candy Corn Elemental would undoubtedly yield a Grimm Orange Boot of Sugary Goodness. Ahhh my first hidden collection item, thank you.
So any other informed souls have any thoughts?
Well since the servers can’t handle an individual addition/multiplication problem for each person on the map, i’m not sure how they are going to handle rendering a complex animation…
Maybe the server improvements they mentioned 2 weeks ago are enough to offset the extra load.
Minis are entirely non-interactive and as such they could be kept entirely on your end except their position on the map. This would make them easy to be hacked, but honestly what could you do with a hacked mini? Nothing, you could change its looks and animations but so long as there is no server side functionality to mess with it would have no affect on anyone else and a cosmetic affect only on you.