"UH... THAT PATCH SURE SUCKED, DIDN'T IT..."

Krelin, a previously unknown Dev team member, got jiggy wid the Dev Board today. Here’s some highlights.

Wanted to let you guys know that we’re working on the connections problems with the most recent patch. I think we have a solid fix that should go in, within the next couple of days.

Swell. I have only been kicked 4 times on SP today maybe things are getting better.

Thanks for hoping, but things won’t really get better until the next client patch. This is an issue that effects both the client and the server simultaneously, but is revealed only under high-load situations on the server (and usually only if the client has a pretty good link).

Eloquent words for saying, “That patch sure sucked…”

By 1999 standards, maybe 🙂 Certainly this patch was not of the quality you should be able to expect from our team, and while I won’t offer any excuses for it, I also think that it was remarkably successful considering the number of massive changes and additions that went in to it.

I sincerely hope you’ll give us some leeway on this patch while it settles. The next few months should (we all hope) be better. 🙂

What about the massive timewarps?

Believe me, we’re spending every cycle we’ve got on this one, but from-the-hip I think there are several factors contributing to this problem:

1) A large number of people are (for various reasons which I’m sure you well know) generating huge amounts of objects in the world, which cause the worlds to require more memory than they normally would. This is being attacked in the next few days; but it has to be addressed carefully, because we don’t want to injure players that aren’t aggressively attacking the world mechanics.

2) Because of the breadth and depth of what is saved in the world state over the past two years, our world is becoming very large. One of our tasks over the next couple of weeks is to find new ways to shrink this data without losing it. 🙂

3) Some of the new accessibility features and code require more memory than has previously been required. A lot of this new stuff isn’t visible to you guys as it is mostly in place in PREPARATION for things to come. We still need to bring this usage down; because the excessive memory requirements are causing instability in the server (which you experience as crashes and warps).

Why not make multiple piles of gold unstackable? I mean all those people you are talking about are mostly using gold to create those huge item numbers that causes prbs to the shard. If you can’t stack gold piles anymore (and most of the time they are 1gp piles) then it will be a prb. Maybe add that restriction to fish steaks and bandages and that should make things really hard

The reason we haven’t done this yet is because the physics of the world (both client-side and server-side) aren’t defined the way you think they are. 🙂 It’s hard to explain, but a variety of factors contribute to making this a more difficult problem, but I _believe_ the proposed solution is pretty close to this.

Are you a new PR hire?

No, I’ve been on the dev team for a while. Today is the first time I’ve felt the urge to post. I’ve seen some really thoughtful posts today. 🙂 And I fixed the CL problem (I hope). 🙂