Bug Description :
Loading screens have some problems:
- They take much longer if you have a lot of items in your inventory.
- They take longer if the game has been running for a while.
- If you’re loading into an area with a large number of players fighting, such as a world boss or GvG battle, the loading screen will freeze, requiring the user to ctl-alt-delete quit the game and load into a different channel.
(3) The permanent frozen loading screen issue has been confirmed by many players with many different computers, some of them very fast. World pvp battles were known to include over 20 players trying to change channels as a group, only to have the entire group freeze at loading screens at once. Other players have told me they have a 100% chance to freeze while loading into the middle of world boss fights, and I’ve had GBL loading screens get stuck many times, both playing and spectating. This makes GBL unplayable when heavy fighting is happening at your spawn point.
As for the first two bugs, I timed some loading screens and made charts.
(1) The character with a large inventory has very long loading times (31 seconds average in Klaipeda with a freshly restarted client), the one with a moderate inventory has faster times (20 seconds), and the one with hardly any items has the fastest of all (14 seconds).
(2) Restarting the game reduced times from 35 seconds to 31 with a large inventory and 18.8 to 14 with a small inventory. The pre-restart uptime was only an hour or two, and I believe a long-term stress test would produce a much bigger gap, but haven’t tested it yet.
Screenshots / Video :
The new alt used Klaipeda channel 1, while other characters used channels 2 and 5. Channel populations had no noticeable impact on times, which is expected since zoning happened at the entrance to the Bokor Master’s House, far away from where other players would be. Loading near other players hasn’t been timed yet because conditions can’t be controlled.
The first loading screen after starting the game took longer (16.1 seconds for the new alt into Klaipeda versus 14.2 for subsequent loading screens) so the charts didn’t include data from the first loading screen after a restart. The averages were based on between 3 and 7 trials each, which is a small sample, but variation between trials was always less than human measurement error. For example, the numbers for the main entering Klaipeda after restarting were 31.0, 31.2, 31.5, and 31.1 seconds.
Some miner vubbe moving to the right bars are missing because the vubbe stayed in the middle of the screen until the last instant before the screen ended.
The “light ping” used to time the purple bar is a sound that played during the loading screens, which is not the rough click sound that plays earlier. Restarting the game did not affect the time until the ping, but the number of items in the inventory did.
The dark red-orange bars showing the time for the miner vubbe to reach the right were about the same regardless of conditions.
The pink total bars were affected most heavily by inventory load, but also by restarting the client and reducing the resources used by background applications. One result that really stands out is the fact that running a bunch of background apps filing up all RAM and burdening the CPU had only a small effect on loading times, much smaller than the effect of a large inventory.
Furthermore, I’d like to point out how it’s silly to have to spend all this time reloading the same things when you’re going into zones you’ve already loaded before.
Steps to reproduce the issue :
- Go into a loading screen
- It takes too long especially if you have a big inventory or left the game open a long time
- Get a bunch of players to fight where you’re going to load
- Get stuck forever
System
- CPU : AMD Phenom II X4 965 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
- RAM : 8190MB RAM
- Graphics Card : Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4830 DirectX 9.0c
- Mainboard : MSI MS-7641
- Storage : Western Digital Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200RPM 64MB Cache WD10EZEX, 813GB Free of 931 total formatted GB
- OS : Windows 8.1
- Internet Connection : Cable, 16MB download, business class. Ping time to Amazon’s AWS Ashburn datacenter: 21ms avg (range 17-31ms, 0% loss) In game //ping times: variable from 0.06 to 0.290, usually in the 0.1 to 0.15 range
- Country, Region : Eastern US
Game Control Mode (Keyboard/Joypad/Mouse) : Mouse for Main and New Alt, Keyboard for Middle Alt
Team Name: Triela Character Name: Vianne (Main), Vere (Middle), Venefica (New)
Date and Time(Please, specify the timezone) : Around midnight at the end of 1/31/17 US Eastern
Server Name: Klaipeda
Channels: 1, 2, and 5
Location: The entrance to the Bokor Master’s House
Before you ask whether I have a lot of free time on my hands, just look at how long these loading screens are and that should answer your question.