1:04 pm, March 28, 2018
503
TrionBrasse: Dev Update Note 03/27 (Ability Lag, Souls, PvP)
Quote:
Hi folks,While there are events, content, and soul-work going on in development for both Live and Prime right now, we wanted to address a handful of priorities after this past weekend’s play experiences. (Yes, we all play, usually anonymously - we may have been in your group!)Here’s a quick update on what we’ve got cooking this week. *We are doing a long restart tomorrow (Wednesday 03/28) and pushing the weekly patch update to Thursday (03/29) instead, in order to get more adjustments in as fast as possible.Let’s talk ability lag, which usually happens when there’s a large zone event going on. This affects both Live and Prime:
- This may come as a surprise:* Some of the zone events on Prime are bigger than even the biggest, record setting events RIFT had during its beta and original launch.* *
- Since then, souls and abilities have gotten more numerous, more complicated, and more resource intensive, primarily in their use of server CPU.
- Even with the newer hardware that the Prime cluster is running on (it’s a beast – the newest in the company), we’ve all experienced that at times it is not always able to keep up with the mass of data.
- The reason this may affect you even when you’re personally not in a big zone event is because large numbers of people sharing your “player service” are.
- Last week: We made some adjustments and undertook diagnostics of the causes.* While we haven't seen a huge benefit yet, we certainly gained more info to work from as we move forward.
- This week: We’re dedicating more server cores to player ability processing in this week’s update.*
- After that: we’ll see if we also need to bring even more hardware into the cluster to help.
- As the more significant, longer term fix, we’ll dive into the specific souls abilities that are the biggest CPU eaters, and the way they’re built internally.* This isn’t about rebalancing, it’s about making sure that they perform and respond well.*
- Both Live and Prime will benefit from the work being done here.* More details here as we have them.
- Yes, we agree there are many thoughts on abilities that we should take a pass at on Live as well...*
- However, nothing on Live compares to the crazy things that a couple of abilities were doing on Prime. (We're looking at YOU, Elemental Barrage and Wrathful Exuberance!)
- Prime has a very differently tuned challenge curve for both PCs and NPCs.
- We do NOT want to impact Live with Prime tweaks.* We had to add some new tuning capacity to the ability system to make sure we could do that, and we’ll be rolling out Prime-only changes to these abilities this week.
- We are definitely sorry we had to leave an ability disabled for longer than a week – but we didn’t want to correct a Prime issue and have it negatively impact Live.
- Expect Prime-only adjustments to those this week and for the abilities to return shortly following, should all the fixes prove out.
- Following this weekend’s play, we came to the same conclusion that a number of you did, now that the higher end PvP ranks are beginning to fill out more.*
- Low end PvP was a blast, mid range is plenty fun. *
- At the high end though, wow, healing is way too much of a thing.
- We’d have liked to have had a more complete answer for this week’s update, but anything we did on this that quickly would have negative side effects.
- For now, please know that we’re moving on the best solution for this next.