I was in the Bandit Caves in the western part of Queensdale on Tarnished Coast last night, and I noticed my frame rate had dropped by about 2/3 once I was in the open part of the cavern. This wasn’t an area where I’d seen much of a fps problem before, so I looked around.
I immediately noticed that the ground-object “bombs” that are left behind after we break the bandit supplies barrels were -very- sparkly. The have the usual “usable object” particle effects; but in this case it was a brilliantly glowing halo, not just a few sparkles. I decided to pick one up, and set it off. After doing so, the bomb was still there. I picked it up again, and detonated it. I did this over and over, and I never ran out of bombs. Since the server had been up for many days, I’m guessing there were hundreds of bombs in that one spot.
Last night, the servers were restarted, so I went to check again — fps was fairly decent. I went to find a bomb, and picked it up and detonated it. Still a bomb there. I repeated this a few times, and after about ten or twenty tries, the bombs were gone.
Now, if in just a few hours ten or more bombs are there from light over-night player traffic; I can only guess that the “bomb-count” becomes huge over a few days of traffic, and may be the cause of the huge performance problem I saw.
I think the developers should find a way to have the bombs quietly despawn after they’ve been there for a little while — having objects which have a visual effect of sparkly particles piling up on top of each other without limit as the server is up can’t be a good thing for many reasons.
