64 player cap = dead towns

The funny thing was, people were having performance problems even with 10 players in the instance, and not all 10 players were even on their screen. On my setup, which is a high end rig with 100mbps connection, my FPS felt like it was capped and was hovering around 18 FPS regardless if there was 1 player or 64 players all onscreen. There seems to be some thread or game logic/netcode that is amiss here and really degrading performance. Whereas in SPO with the same R3 build, I max out at 60 FPS.

But I agree, they definitely should work on client performance issues since it's prohibiting play testing and server-side stress testing.

As I mentioned above, they definitely should scale the cap based on the size of the social space, be it a tiny dungeon or a massive cavern, or a tiny village or a massive city. The main point was the 64 limit was an artificial cap that was not context sensitive, but we all knew that. It was just glaringly obvious when running around even the existing towns how empty they felt. It was like playing SPO again.

Difficulty scaling can be considered but that's a whole different thing. But in regards to instance limits, perhaps with playtesting that dungeon we can find the right minimum balance and what the max it should hold, whether that's 8 or 64 or whatever. As the max limit is approached, the difficulty scale could go up, or the number of MOBs goes up. But I digress, let's start a new topic on difficulty scaling.

 

How are you measuring/monitoring FPS?

 

I used FRAPS.

 

I'm guessing they're getting valuable feedback on the server load at this point. If we are relying on clients to provide performance, I'd hope that the clients chosen are the best ones. you know the 16 GB, SSD, Geforce 90000 BFG or whatever the best currently is.

 

This makes me feel a lot better. There is definitely an impact of players, though. Braemar empty for me runs 100% smooth, Braemar the other day with the devs and 30 other people was a bit slower. It was nowhere near as bad as Owl's Head or KP though.

Also true.
I *really* didn't get this issue with towns feeling empty though, that's an issue with number of PLAYERS right now, not instance caps. There's only one or two instances, according to the hangout most times, which means there's probably 70-80 people in each town. You could just be getting unlocky and going to the overflow. Also, right now nobody is playing because it's noon. Did you see ~64 people? If not, you were likely in the overflow instance.

Do eet