Whats with the lag?

#16 - Nov. 12, 2025, 8:46 p.m.

Thanks for the reports here, this is a top priority for us today now that we’ve cleaned up most of the DB load from yesterday afternoon and evening.

We believe we’ve identified the cause and are exploring fixes that can be deployed in a timely manner. This is a problem with the World Servers so adding more Realms wouldn’t help (and adding more world servers won’t help either, this is a code issue and not a hardware issue). We’ll get to the bottom of it.

#57 - Nov. 13, 2025, 2:29 a.m.

As an update as we head into the evening hours, we’ve pushed out a number of both code and data fixes throughout the day, and we just did another round of restarts to pick those up to try to increase stability and reduce spell and loot lag. Sadly, they have not had the desired effect so far.

This remains a high priority for the team, and I’m sorry that we haven’t fully squashed this problem yet. Digging into the most recent perf reports our team has revealed a few more problem areas we can hit related to zone auras (which were fine with lower player populations but are non-performant with the many players of beta triggering them). We’re going to throw one more fix out tonight to see if it helps, and keep digging into it more tomorrow.

The joys of beta! Thanks for helping us find and fix these problem areas.

#112 - Nov. 14, 2025, 3:11 a.m.

So as a few of you have noted, we’ve done a few restarts today and made a few changes, and while performance looked a little better for a while, it eventually got back into a degraded state. The tricky thing here is it hasn’t been one single problem, but a collection of things causing degraded server perf and increased memory usage on the world servers. We’ve fixed a few things, and then we find a few more, etc.

We’re still plugging away at this but we think we found a new problem. FISH! We’ve made a lot of improvements to NPC behavior, having them react to players and the environment in a more natural way, as opposed to just a general “wander around” creature flag. And that’s largely working fine in many places, but we have a lot of coastline in Midnight and that means a lot of wildlife like fish get spawned. And that would probably be fine, but once enough players get close enough to the fish this advanced NPC behavior turned on for them and, well…. something smells fishy.

Again, this might not be a magic bullet, or “The Thing” causing all of the problems, but we’re going to do some mad science tomorrow to scale things a little differently. And if that doesn’t help, we’re going to have to do some more fishing. Either way, I’m hooked!

#126 - Nov. 15, 2025, 1:21 a.m.

Sadly, the Fish might have been a red herring after all. We did see some overall better perf for the first hour or so after restarts but memory usage has continued to creep up as more players and instances/copies of zones spun up so we definitely haven’t found our silver bullet here.

We have a few code hotfixes in test but we’ll need to keep chipping away at this and maybe run some more experiments to try to narrow down what’s happening here.

Thanks for sticking with us in the meantime! We really appreciate all the testing and feedback!