Since many of you do not leave the WvW specific forums, figured I’d post this here as well. So debate, agree, disagree go at it friends!
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Hello again!
I disappeared into my Bat-Cave again and finally emerged, and with some good news to share. I’ll start off with what exactly that is.
Since my last updates, we’ve been hard at work prepping some serious server-side optimizations to relieve the bottle-necks during heavy combat. We’ve made some large steps and are almost ready to start rolling out these changes. The first batch of changes have been in testing and we hope to have them start trickling in as soon as the release on Nov. 12th. We’ll know for sure once we’re closer to that date, and so will you.
I can’t stress enough how dangerous it is to optimize a live game. I know how upsetting it can be to be in the thick of a choppy battle, but things are going to be getting better, and soon. We’ve done some temporary things on the back-end to try to ease the influx of players in Wvw, but those changes only go so far.
On to answering some of the common questions.
A lot of you have noticed what seems like an increase in skill-lag in Wvw since the beginning of Season 1. Really, this is just a large influx of players playing Wvw, mostly in servers that usually don’t have queues to get into the map. A lot of the higher tiered servers are pretty used to large battles running into this issue, but obviously that isn’t a valid excuse for it happening. We’ve only increased the focus on relieving this since the season start, and rest-assured, its a top priority.
Some other common suggestions/questions is about a method other games used, which is known as “time-dilation” or “time-scaling”. Well, for starters, this method is extremely risky. We’ve discussed this, among quite a few other alternatives, and it has boiled down to causing more problems than it’ll solve. I know you might ask, “but the current experience is bad enough, how could it be worse?”. Well, to be completely honest, it would just open another can of worms that would end up breaking the game and causing things much worse than a couple seconds of input delay. We opted instead to focus on fixing the issue by simply making the game run better, instead of sweeping it under the rug by watering down the experience. Internally we have the ability to slow down time-scale of the game, and it just feels terrible. Not to mention breaks key mechanics of the game, such as the physics simulation.
Some other assumptions I’m seeing is about our server hardware and inefficient use of communication between them and the game’s database. I’ll go ahead and put these assumptions to rest. Our server hardware was actually purchased new right around the launch of the game, rest assured its not out-dated. And you can sleep at night knowing that our combat doesn’t connect out to the database for information. All of the information it needs is already loaded into memory. The game database is simply for storing persistent character and account information, which is for the most part only accessed when loading in/out of a map or periodic saves which are handled asynchronously. I suggest checking out the links below for more information on our servers.
As far as skills just not executing (noticed some people claiming utilities are more susceptible to this), its mostly just a race-condition as far as processing on the server. You’ll notice that your auto-attack skill seems to process more reliably than other skills. This is mostly due to the fact that we process things like auto-attack timers before player input. Obviously that sounds like a bug (and honestly now that I think about it, I want to look into doing something about it), but the reality is that under normal circumstances, the player input would process before the auto-attack timer triggers. Something you can try to verify this is disabling your auto-attack and see if your other skills become more responsive.
For you tech savvy folks, here’s some good links to help understand our server infrastruture and some other pretty neat things: Link – Another Link!
Well, that’s it for today. I’ll be sure to update you all on our progress and when you can start looking for major improvements. Like I mentioned above, we’re pretty optimistic that this could be as early as our next release. Have a good weekend!
-Bill
(edited by Banzie.5248)