UPDATED FPS Improvements; Staff replied

[Darkon]

Edit: There is still time before the next patch, and the next Q&A, to try and get some answers. Let’s do this.

It has been a very, very, very long time since IMC has let us know any developments on how they intend to address FPS for Tree of Savior. Even the latest Q&A only pointed to trivial concerns and they avoided the elephant in the room.

I just experienced my FPS dropping into the decimals: In a recent GvG I saw 4 concurrent Ice Walls with nearly the full 30 participating players fitting into the same screen at a bottleneck, all trying to do their thing. This resulted in a FPS that read “0.85” lol

That makes even the normal depressing 2-4 FPS in GvG look amazing.

So, IMC, how much longer are you going to keep the players in silence about your admittedly broken FPS issues?

@hkkim You haven’t said anything on the matter aside from it was being looked at, but, we are customers first and players second. We need information. What have you tried? How successful has it been in a test environment? What kind of time frame are we looking at? Even failing companies make reports to the devaluing of their stocks. Why is IMC content to sweep this issue under the rug when it has persisted since the earliest versions of the game? Aren’t you excited to share what you’ve tried, even if it has failed, so as to keep your customers in the loop? To keep your customers satisfied, even if the issue persists, and let us know that it is being worked on around the clock? We need details.

This Tree of Savior slideshow at WB and GvG is very disheartening. These are such amazing parts of the game though. Between Battle League and GvG’s a lot of players have returned. PvP is an amazing addition to TOS.

But we need updates on what is going on behind the scenes with FPS issues.

So if anyone reads this, please click “Like” or make a comment below, so that we can all add a voice to how disappointed or fed up we are with the FPS issues in GvG and over-populated areas and WB battles. Let’s get at least one thread with enough views/replies on it that IMC can’t ignore it and offers an actual answer. It’s evident at this point that they don’t play in crowded areas and are content to pretend it’s not that serious an issue.

Post your videos (cough, slideshows) of your battles below too! Let’s make it so we can’t be ignored on the matter.

@STAFF_Max @STAFF_John @STAFF_Ines @STAFF_Ethan @STAFF_Amy @GM_Francis @GM_Sebastian

[Magni]

The same points made here can be applied to the cut scene party bug that has been an issue for over a month now.

New players starting the game will encounter the cut scene bug and be discouraged to play or bring friends into the game.

GvG and PvP may bring people back, but the FPS issue will quickly turn them away.

I do not understand how a company can consider this acceptable. You’ve basically shut both doors into and out of your game. Those that are coming in have a very tight squeeze to fit through if they want to play. Those that have quit and want to come back for PvP/GvG also face hardships.

[chillcross]

I’ll say it once, I’ll say it again:

Whoever thought a game this massive could be handled with an engine that runs on ONE, SINGLE, CORE needs to get their heads out of the toaster if they have any brains left from getting roasted alive.

It’s a massive undertaking to completely attach a new engine to an already made game, but quite honestly I’m not sure the thought processes? How did the optimization get so bad? The game itself struggles to even utilize what computers hand out in spades, which severely limits what honestly should be an easy game to run.

Respectfully, I know IMC is a smaller developer, but quite honestly: ToS even without the Ragnarok homages could be a pretty good game. But right now it can’t even stand on it’s feet because we want to know what’s going on in there.

[_DrRM_]

Lack of actual communication is always a bad thing

[Darkon]

Very well said, all of you. My thoughts exactly.

We can’t even commission a programmer to create a modified client with dumbed-down effects like in RO where their magic circles turned into color coded tiles because modifying the client would result in an immediate ban. TOS’ code is so poor that even a spammer can cause an entire server to stutter and suffer massive FPS losses.

We can’t filter out packets that we don’t need during GvG’s or WB’s even.

We don’t have a lot of options on our end that we can safely employ to help with the FPS issues we have. So we need IMC to step up to the plate.

The closest thing I could think of that may work, on our end, is if someone codes a “smart” packet filter that cuts out over half of the actor position update packets and replaces it with client-side math and predictions. I.e. The enemy player is running X direction at Y speed; currently the game notifies us of every single pixel the actor budges to, and does so for every single player and enemy on the screen at any given time. What we could have instead is dropping 75% of those updates and just having the client say “Well, he was running X direction at Y speed so that would put him at running toward a predicted location of Z” and the client then simulates faux updates to make it appear the enemy is moving to that location. Once a new update packet is received though it may cause actors to stutter or rubber band about 1/10 an inch on-screen if the player changed course between packets. But this is trivial and, across 29 other players being updated, could help greatly increase our FPS at the sacrifice of a few pixels of accuracy.

But even that could likely get someone banned.

I don’t know. It’s not my job though to come up to solutions for their problems. We need communication on the matter so we don’t have to sit back and try to think of these things ourselves as customers.

[haukinyau]

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[nuclearmissile]

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[mystletainn]

weekly patch.
game got more broken.

[sttr413]

And also the GvG time. And trade restrictions. Maybe secretly IMC is making a social experiment by presenting a game targeted at masochists.

The FPS got a bit better at some point… then after a few patches it’s even worse then it was before.

And hey, still don’t want to manage identical repositories, no, how about we make iToS a couple of weeks back just for lulz, with it’s own unique bugs. Tho given the quality of patch implementation I’m almost happy.

Guys, I came here for GvG. I can’t GvG cuz it’s 7 am and 2 FPS. Hell, I play 5x5 on Arena where there is literally nothing on the map, and I still avg. of 10 FPS… And then there are lags, and post-cc positioning bugs. I’m tired of trying to hit ppl who are not even there. This is not a game. My guildmates returned to look into TBL and GvG and walked away again because of how disgusting they are.

I honestly want to play your game. But your game won’t let me! Please, do something! And right now, tell us what is it you are doing.

@hkkim @STAFF_Max

[Nekorin]

I sincerely hope that the weekly developer Q&A address questions such as these rather than other problems which many of us are not even asking for. The Q&A just seems getting shorter and shorter with the less important questions answered than the real important ones.

Can we have this week’s Q&A just entirely dedicated to the game’s optimization issues? IMC you can lump the server issues along with it too like the recent instance exceeds too.

[haukinyau]

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[dect22inj]

Just imagine you play turn-based strategy. Not a bug but feature. Will be improved.

[Marad]

Still waiting for something to happen…

[dehrox123]

Bump. Every bug they fix they create another 3 and the FPS problems gets worse every maintenance.

[Darkon]

Rank 8 hype is real, but, what about the underlying issues? Adding more content is great, of course, but it’s like spending $100 on wrapping paper for a $1 gift. Core issues need to be addressed and FPS is at the top of the list along with countless neglected bugs and issues. We need word on this.

[Altariel]

IMC software engineers don’t even have basic knowledge of data structures imo. I bet some of the tech-savvy forumers around here can actually do better than IMC.

[Darkon]

Let’s push this hard.

[kyokahn]

Bump! Let’s keep tagging the staff so we can at least have an answer/have this included in the Q&A @STAFF_Max @STAFF_John @STAFF_Ethan @STAFF_Ines @STAFF_Amy

[Sayurichan]

The closest thing I could think of that may work, on our end, is if someone codes a “smart” packet filter that cuts out over half of the actor position update packets and replaces it with client-side math and predictions. I.e. The enemy player is running X direction at Y speed; currently the game notifies us of every single pixel the actor budges to, and does so for every single player and enemy on the screen at any given time. What we could have instead is dropping 75% of those updates and just having the client say “Well, he was running X direction at Y speed so that would put him at running toward a predicted location of Z” and the client then simulates faux updates to make it appear the enemy is moving to that location.

Aion had such a position update system and it was absolutely horrible for melee classes because of server delay. If you see a person in Aion running you’ll see his position where this person was half a second ago. Especially if you had 100~200+ ping it was quite stupid and unfair for melee classes.

Also, TOS does not fully update player positions all the time. In party play it happens quite often that on my screen party members get stuck on terrain and their character model stays behind, due to the position not getting updated properly, while in reality they are right next to me, i just can’t see them.

If bot spam is the problem that’s causing the server lag, one solition would be to have all the cities on a completely different zone server, so the server that has to deal with bot spam is independent from the servers for the field/dungeon/pvp maps
.
That being said : does TOS even have a RO-like auto-silence if you spam messages too fast? In RO you got chat-silenced for 1, 2, 5, 30, 60, etc minutes if you spam messages too fast in public chat, the duration would go up the more often you try to spam. Or can bots bombard the server thousands of messages per second without the server doing anything about it?

[eralp96]

I think even if they were to undergo a 1 month maintenance to fix this issue, so be it.

There is still hope for this game. I have many friends that stopped playing just because of fps issues. They would gladly come back if the issues were solved.

Better late than never.