5o4f27
As promised last week, the SWTOR team is releasing more details on the ability delay and server lag, we all have been experiencing since game update 3.0 . Below wall of text is a good example of being transparent and informative without going overboard. Thank you Eric, now let’s keep it up all year.
EricMusco 46132y
Performance Status Update | 01.09.2015, 04:11 PM
Hey folks,
As I mentioned in my post last week, we have been working hard on assessing and figuring out how to address the “lag” issues which have been prominent since address the issues:
What The Problems Are t2r5
Here are some of the issues that players have been experiencing since the launch of Game Update 3.0:
- Server performance: Ability delay, Latency issues
- Client performance: A drop in framerate
- The game having a general “laggy” feeling, which is really a mix of the above
Causes and Their Status 5q6o63
As you might expect, when you start to talk about performance, issues with Game Update 3.0 were identified, we needed to isolate what was causing them, and narrowed it down to two main sources:
- Server code – There is a whole lot going on behind the scenes to action or the actions of other players. For the most part, this behavior is responsible for nearly all of the problem areas mentioned above.
- continue to monitor and adjust this number as needed.
- Status: We’ve implemented changes in Patch 3.0.2 to address some of these issues. We will continue to monitor and make additional adjustments, as needed.
- The Game Update 3.0, we noticed a large spike in time spent rendering our UI. This caused a lot of the framerate issues many of you reported. Keep in mind that the UI will always have some performance impact versus having it turned off—it’s busy doing something, after all. The question is how much time is acceptable to spend rendering the UI, and what can we do to improve it.
- Status: Several changes have been made for 3.0.2 to address the UI’s performance issues.
I learned a few other things while Customer Service, and information from the Forums helped isolate the major focus areas. After reviewing all our performance data, we were able to pinpoint some pretty critical areas. The engineers informed me that any code change will have a profound impact regardless of the change, so they consider them very high risk. That means extensive testing! A bad change could take down the entire service, or at least cause some surprising bugs.
Second is how performance is adjusted – think of it as a sliding scale. Our engineers will constantly make optimizations where we can to help move that slider in the direction of best performance. When we implement new features, or new systems, typically they require Game Update 3.0 moved the slider in the wrong direction, but we fully intend to get to back to pre-3.0 performance and improve it even more.
I know performance is far from perfect and that changes aren’t coming quite as fast as we wish they were. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused many of you. Please know that we are working on them and will get performance back to a better place!
