|
There is a particular instance where a lot of players in the same level dramatically increases the load on the server. This is why the lag gets much worse when an event or such is held.
We do what we can to decrease the stress(making players single-player, avoiding events at peak hours. Railroads were postponed to be released in the middle of the week instead of the weekend), but there's only so much that can be done. We can't single-player individual levels on a gmap, and when you unstick massive groups of players they just go back. Stefan said he's going to try out some other method of communicating player data so it doesn't get so bad when players are in the same level, but I don't know how long that could be. On days like today with the GST and 3000+ playercount, we pretty much have absolutely no power over it.
I'm not even entirely sure if better servers will fix this specific problem.
|
Ah I forgot about this, it's a problem with most mmos with no real solution other than avoiding having a massive amount of players together. On Tera the whole server would lag immensely every night when "nexus invasion" occurs, where hundreds of players work together in the same spot to defend against an invasion. In Guild Wars 2 whole maps would lag up to the point where you can't even cast spells whenever there's a large battle in WvW, even if you aren't near it.
The only real solution is to avoid syncing player data in massive crowds, or avoid creating massive crowds in the first place. The reason lag increases exponentially when players are in one area is because information about all of the players has to be sent to each and every player. Their position, their customization stuff like hats/shield, their name, everything. 10 sets of 10 players(total 100 players across 10 zones) receiving information about 10 players isn't bad, but 100 players having to receive 100 pieces of information each all in 1 zone is a lot worse in bandwidth.