Thank you. I'm sure many of us sincerly appreciate this update as well as the fixes you guys have coming. It is a time of great turmoil for the Old Republic and I'm sure this will be a welcome boost to morale.

Much appreciated. Hopefully you guys can get a fix sooner rather than later, because the performance situation is pretty dire for those of us who are running mid-range computers.

Thank you for the transparency Eric - you and the dev team clearly put a lot of work into this post, and it's much appreciated. I'd give you a heart, but have a rancor with sunglasses instead I know how much you love rancors with sunglasses

It's good that you are working on performance. Maybe one day I will be able to get 30 FPS in 16 man ops while in combat.

Appreciate the post, looking forward to what comes as a result of it game-wise... Edited January 9, 2015 by howieloader

And when will we finally get an option to reduce particle/spell effects to increase raid performance? Edited January 9, 2015 by Sindariel

And when will we finally get an option to reduce particle/spell effects to increase raid performance?

 

I'd like an option to turn them OFF. At least the buffs/debuffs. It's 100% immersion breaking when everyone is glowing, on fire, blinking, oozing and radiating 7 different colours.

 

When everyone looks like a ball of rainbow, it becomes just stupid.l

Well done, Sir Musco. Well done. Thank you for the update.

I believe in 3.0.2

Am i the only one who gets the weird feelin theyre pouring gas all over their desks while writing this.

I knew that it was a bug, although technically a bug is a scripted mistake that repeat itself, this is more like a server bug, that I know is called Hitching, they didn't teach me that in collage as far as I remember but you learn new things everyday.

Thanks for that post Eric. It's much appreciated.

Am i the only one who gets the weird feelin theyre pouring gas all over their desks while writing this.

 

Lol

 

5char

Thanks for the update!

ill echo the thanks...

we as gamers can often be the most critical, but most of us do understand that stuff happens... being straight with us is always gonna be the best course.

bravo

Very thorough reply, thanks guys!

Thank you. Appreciate the update. Any news on getting me a date with Raquel Welch. Opps wrong thread. Never mind.

For the UI component of the problems:

 

How much is contributed from the new proc highlights and the changes to how buffs/debuffs are displayed?

 

I don't think I'm the only one who would rather not have these changes if it contributes heavily to a more laggy experience.

 

The game ran great before 3.0, and a lot of us have been wondering how much the UI changes contribute.

 

Also: do some of the new skill animations contribute significantly? It certainly feels like it in group content, but obviously we don't know what the engineers do.

 

This is a nice post, Eric, but it does not make clear how much change we can expect in the next patch, or how long it will take to get back to pre-3.0 performance (which may very well be unknown currently). It also doesn't explain how this was able to happen in the first place, though many of us assume EA pushed out the expansion for the holiday season without considering the consequences for the game itself.

 

If it hasn't come across clearly, this is the most pressing issue for everyone I know that plays this game.

 

Though people say it often, this time I actually believe them when they claim as players they've kind of had enough of SWTOR. It's an aggregate of factors, but when they can't run the game properly because of what they perceive as a lack of proper testing by EA for a major set of updates in 3.0, it makes these players believe there simply isn't enough interest on EA's part in how well this game does, beyond revenue from the Cartel Market, a short-term outlook when running an MMO. In short, they view this as a symptom of EA not really caring much about the long-term health of the game, and, at that point, as players, they question why they should commit so much time and money (via subs and CC purchases) to it.

 

It's been more than a month since these problems began, and your post basically outlines what we already knew from logging in, and saying some sort of changes will start Tuesday. That is better than not telling the community anything, but it is rather vague for a response to what amounts to a broken game.

Edited January 9, 2015 by arunav

Thanks for the update. We appreciate the detail provided too. Looking forward to the next patch.

Can you explain why lag became so much worse after 3.0?

 

It seems changes were made to make classes more mobile encouraging a more responsive combat experience rather than rooted to the spot, while the actual effect was to have a less responsive experience with people unable to move much at all.

Hey folks,

 

As I mentioned in my post last week, we have been working hard on assessing and figuring out how to address the “lag” issues which have been prominent since Game Update 3.0 went live. After speaking with our engineers, we thought the following would help explain what’s happening and what we are doing to address the issues:

 

What The Problems Are

 

Here are some of the issues that players have been experiencing since the launch of Game Update 3.0:

• Server performance: Ability delay, Latency issues
  
• Client performance: A drop in framerate
  
• The game having a general “laggy” feeling, which is really a mix of the above
  

 

Causes and Their Status

 

As you might expect, when you start to talk about performance, almost every game system has an effect. Once the performance issues with Game Update 3.0 were identified, we needed to isolate what was causing them, and narrowed it down to two main sources:

 

• Server code – There is a whole lot going on behind the scenes to keep the game running. The main symptom of server related issues is something we call “hitching”. Server hitching is the main culprit behind what a lot of you will commonly refer to as lag in SWTOR. The servers are busy processing responses from all the players at once, and sometimes a particular activity on the server can take longer than usual. This is basically the equivalent of a low “framerate” on the server rather than on your client. Server hitching occurs when you issue a command on your client (such as activating an ability, moving your character, opening a vendor) and there is a delay in the server actually performing that command. The server will “hitch” in its response since it is taking a long time to deal with your action or the actions of other players. For the most part, this behavior is responsible for nearly all of the problem areas mentioned above.
   
  
  • Note: Many of you noticed that shortly after Game Update 3.0 we made a quick change to limit the amount of players in each planetary instance. This was an interim solution to this problem as lowering the number players in a specific area reduces the impact of server hitching to the player. We’ll continue to monitor and adjust this number as needed.
    
  • Status: We’ve implemented changes in Patch 3.0.2 to address some of these issues. We will continue to monitor and make additional adjustments, as needed.

 

• The User Interface – Next up is our game’s UI. Following Game Update 3.0, we noticed a large spike in time spent rendering our UI. This caused a lot of the framerate issues many of you reported. Keep in mind that the UI will always have some performance impact versus having it turned off—it’s busy doing something, after all. The question is how much time is acceptable to spend rendering the UI, and what can we do to improve it.
   
  
  • Status: Several changes have been made for 3.0.2 to address the UI’s performance issues.

 

I learned a few other things while talking with the development team. First is our data tracking around performance. We are constantly monitoring the performance of the game to determine when things have gotten worse and to find ways to address it. That data, as well as your feedback, reports to Customer Service, and information from the Forums helped isolate the major focus areas. After reviewing all our performance data, we were able to pinpoint some pretty critical areas. The engineers informed me that any code change will have a profound impact regardless of the change, so they consider them very high risk. That means extensive testing! A bad change could take down the entire service, or at least cause some surprising bugs.

 

Second is how performance is adjusted - think of it as a sliding scale. Our engineers will constantly make optimizations where we can to help move that slider in the direction of best performance. When we implement new features, or new systems, typically they require additional game resources and impact our overall performance and the slider moves away from “best”. For example, last year we made substantial changes to the way our chat systems worked and it had a dramatic and positive impact on performance. In fact, performance for the chat system has never been better. Each time we patch the game, it typically includes slider performance adjustments of some type, even if they have a very small impact. We know Game Update 3.0 moved the slider in the wrong direction, but we fully intend to get to back to pre-3.0 performance and improve it even more.

 

I know performance is far from perfect and that changes aren’t coming quite as fast as we wish they were. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused many of you. Please know that we are working on them and will get performance back to a better place!

 

-eric

 

I see that my fellow players (on the forum) are appreciative of this update.

 

Perhaps I am a malcontent, but what I am getting from this "update" is that the game is not working to any acceptable standard because it is broken. They are messing around with "stuff" to make it less broken because they really have no idea how they broke it with 3.0 and no real idea how to fix what is going on. They will take a shot of some of the "stuff" in 3.02 and see if actually helped and monitor results to se how broken the game still is.

 

I would rather be playing today, but am on the forum because Shadowlands is unplayable at the moment.

 

Gads, is this any way to run an airline?

• [*]Note: Many of you noticed that shortly after Game Update 3.0 we made a quick change to limit the amount of players in each planetary instance. This was an interim solution to this problem as lowering the number players in a specific area reduces the impact of server hitching to the player. We’ll continue to monitor and adjust this number as needed.

 

Wonderful, except that it hasn't accomplished anything from this user's point of view.

 

I was on Makeb last night, only a single instance, only about 15 people on the planet, and the combat was almost silly. There were times that the delay was 2 to 3 seconds between clicking something and something happening, sometimes it took up to 5 seconds for the server to catch up.

 

Now this is not the Internet and it is not my computer. Out of combat, I could run around at full speed, even use combat abilities such as sweeping blasters, no problem. No lag, no delays, nothing. Game running at 70fps, smooth as silk.

 

Start combat with a week mob of NPCs and the game acts as if it is running on a 10 year old computer over dialup.

 

This started when 3.0 launched and it hasn't changed one bit since.

 

You need to start handing out refunds or sub extensions if this isn't fixed in a week, it has been a month, enough is enough.

 

Stop saying you're sorry, put your money where your mouth is (or Bioware's money that is).

Thank you for the update. Appreciate this allot.

Yay, would be nice to go back to the old performance. Should've waited to resub, I guess I'll just have to make due.