https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/446997-A-hopeful-request-Turbine-Mabar...

Quote:

FakeStrake wrote on Sep 12^th, 2014 at 3:35pm:

What was the hint in the July letter?

Was it those multiplying little things that spawned in house k and made people dc if you got close to them?

Finally, the end of the FUBAR festival.

About damn time...

Werebadger wrote on Sep 12^th, 2014 at 3:43pm:


Blasphemy! Not true! Pinhead would do a much better job




_{Since I am always ask where images come from later... This is Pinhead, a character from the horror film series Hellraiser.}

the items however were good. at least when the cap was 20 and 25. i still use the cloak on almost all my toons. i hope the new one will keep them and advance them to higher level (28 or 30).

Doggydaddy wrote on Sep 12^th, 2014 at 4:42pm:


Many instances of the dragon raid would experience poor performance and eventually freeze up, is probably the main reason.  There were many FU turbines as a result of this.

There were other problems with it, but not worth bringing up.  In the end, the new devs pretty much probably don't know what the old devs did and how it worked, so scrapping it is probably the way to go from a business view.

But I will miss it, as I liked it for the creepy atmosphere that it provided.  Was pretty cool in that regard.

Doggydaddy wrote on Sep 12^th, 2014 at 4:42pm:


Server wide crippling lag when the spectral dragon was up.
Most believed it was due to shadow creature spawns in every room.

My observations.
I believe the main issue was that every instance of the dragon (possible to have multiple at each level range depending on player population) all started at the same time.
A logical step would have been to stagger the starts of the different level ranges at least, and even offset the Epic dragon by 10-15 secs to smooth the load.
Turbine's concern was that players might be able to complete multiple dragons by jumping instances.
Soln: use a lockout or cooldown timer.

There were lots of theories on causes like persistent AOE's, buffs and even flashy effect spells.  An interesting observation was that the mobs had no trouble moving and attacking, so lag only affected players.  You could see this as you spammed the heal button, whilst nothing happened, and then 30 secs later you just several thousand points of damage roll in over a few seconds as the game re-sync'd.

I believe this tied the problem to comms, not server load.
With each instance having up to 24-30 players, plus lots of mobs - this means an enormous amount of positional and action data has to be passed to each connected client.
In a normal quest, your client has to sync comms with the server that then sends that to 5 other clients.  In Mabar this could be up to 30 odd clients at a time.  That is an exponential increase in instantaneous comms that are very time dependent.
I think the soln would have been smaller groups - say max of 16 or less if the challenge was modified.  Get it back to 12 like a raid.
I suspect the client just was not written with up to 30 simultaneous players in mind.  Can't fault that, as DDO would not have envisioned that.  But they should have done a Lamm version with 12 players and change the requirements for levers/altars/rooms.
Furthermore a max number of groups to balance server load.

Then change the startup requirement so it runs more frequently.
You get the same number of people through, but spread the load.
These seem pretty obvious, so maybe they didn't work or they didn't try.

Ultimately there were lots of options suggested, but I think it fell in the too hard basket.

People were pulling levers like crazy when they didnt need to and that was causing lag.

Gargs may have been some problem, but certainly not the only problem in the dragon raid.  Because although some instances of the event would grind to a halt, other instances were entirely successful without the bad performance issues.

Could be a combination of events, who knows, and we'll never really know.  All that matters really is that the event has been snuffed probably due to the performance issues.

Um, we can't code, the lag is bad, and everybody and their dog has bags full of duped Mabar ingredients so we decided to trash it.

Sincerely,

Turbine

Yuda wrote on Sep 12^th, 2014 at 4:17pm:


FTFY

I never had problems with mabar but that's because I always ran with a level 10-11 character.