Is the ToK hurting WAR?
Posted by: Snafzg
On: May 27, 2009 at 09:38am
Ahh, the Tome of Knowledge. Such a cool feature with loads of groovy information. Unfortunately, the more unlocks you have, the longer it takes for you to log in.I have determined that the cause of my extremely long load times is linked to Tome of Knowledge unlocks. I performed the following tests on a fresh install of the game at default settings by loading into Altdorf from the load screen.Here's what Carrie Gouskos, Tome Producer, had to say:
40 Engineer (~2600 unlocks) - 135 seconds
40 Swordmaster (~1200 unlocks) - 34 seconds
5 Warrior Priest (~120 unlcoks) - 17 seconds
I have seen similar results on other PCs. The bulk of the load time is spent with the animation on the loading screen frozen. The zone loads quickly once the game stops being frozen.
Hello all,I always wondered if the ToK was actually responsible for many of WAR's performance issues as well. Let's face it, the book is filled with tons of information that is constantly server-checked after nearly every action you do or is done to you. It tracks your critical hits, the number of High Elves you've killed, your fall damage, and even whether or not you perform a crafting action in water. Those few examples are like half of a half a percent of what this thing tracks.Sorry to hear about how much trouble the tome is causing your loading times, believe me it is in no way our intent to make you not want tome unlocks. That being said, we've tracked down a fix and are attempting to expedite it.
You should hear more soon.
-Carrie
Can it actually be causing more problems than just load time lag?
Let's pretend the answer is yes for the sake of argument. What would you do? Obviously, the Tome is a huuuuge part of WAR, ingrained in almost every facet of the game from live events to influence to titles and much more. Would they actually disable it? Hell no. Should they? I don't think so, because it would feel like WAR was missing something without the ToK.
So what option does that leave? Fix it, duh. Do I have much faith that they actually can fix it? That's another "Hell no" unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure they'll get the load times under control, but that's very minor compared to the issue of it possibly causing poor performance while you're playing. There are simply too many pieces of data flying around for them to get this under control without completely disabling it.
If this is the case, I wonder if Mythic actually knew about this beforehand. Performance was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better in beta and that's when the Tome wasn't fully fleshed out or really activated. They must have done a cost-benefit analysis against this and figured the Tome brings more to the game than the issues it causes (if it is in fact causing issues, and I truly believe it is).
How do you feel about that? Would you rather have better performance or more unlocks and number tracking?
Sooooo..... I'm sure Mythic can iron the performance problems out with time - I've seen it done. =)
Yes, given some of the ways Mythic has said one thing and done another leads to major skepticism on whether they can fix it properly or not, but we need to try to give them the benefit to make the attempt.
I'd say the majority of the issues in the game are not directly tied to the Tome...but if they were and the fix solves a lot of the problems...would you play again?
But let's put aside my opinion of your opinion, hehe.
With the ToK causing a performance issue as was confirmed by Carrie, the good thing is, and the difference between it and the other achievement systems in other MMOs such as WoW, is that it was in the code from the very beginning. Because it's not a recent addition or a hang-on, it can be dealt with in an easier way (as you saw, they've highlighted a fix already). The UI has had one of the more smoother roads with regards to WAR, so seeing as this isn't a class balance or play system issue (far harder to deal with), I have more faith than you that it'll be dealt with properly and quickly.
Since it is apparently causing longer load times, it triggered that thought again, which is why I wrote this. If it's negatively affecting one area, it isn't too far a stretch to hypothesize that it is negatively affecting another. Given the nature of the ToK, it wouldn't shock me if it was a large contributor to poor game/server performance.
One person making numerous checks to their ToK may not be an issue but when you have 200-300 of them pinging the server during a fort raid, maybe there's something to this...
There are two separate issues here:
1) Loading taking longer because the game is trying to do something silly with the ToK on loading. This can be addressed by loading data smarter, or on-demand. When we open up the ToK, we don't see every single Tome Unlock all at once. The ToK should only be loading things that we will see. Besides, browsing the ToK is a read-only operation. They could store the ToK data on multiple servers to distribute the load, so that reads are ultra fast. Fast enough that they can even delay the loading of ToK data until you turn the page, for instance.
2) Collecting ToK data. Collecting data is something that they should be doing anyway, whether or not they have the ToK, so as to have their finger on the pulse of the people who play the game. Getting the data is free (the server has to process every event in the game anyway), but saving it is what's expensive. It will be slow if they try saving every little piece of data that comes in, as it comes in. The smarter thing to do would be again, to offload and delay the expensive operations of saving ToK data so that they do not become a bottleneck of RVR performance.
"With the ToK causing a performance issue as was confirmed by Carrie, the good thing is, and the difference between it and the other achievement systems in other MMOs such as WoW, is that it was in the code from the very beginning. Because it's not a recent addition or a hang-on, it can be dealt with in an easier way (as you saw, they've highlighted a fix already)."
That's a pretty sketchy assumption to make. It could very well be that because the ToK *IS* a core component of WAR then changing it is MUCH harder than changing a bolted-on system. For example, there is a higher chance that there are more core systems assuming the existence and functionality of the ToK is a certain way.
It all comes down to how the various companies engineered their games.
@monkey:
If you have 200 emails in your gmail inbox it'll load much slower than if you have 7. More data is fetched from the server, and then sent over the pipe, and then rendered in your browser. It totally makes sense and is valid.
Now, that said I agree that the loading of data should be streamlined using some sort of on-demand system.
Similarly, it should not matter if someone has 500,000 tome unlocks, or 200. The main reason why WAR's ToK is slow is because it spends time doing work it doesn't have to, and the users pay the price for it.