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Harbinger server issues being adressed?


Dingoo

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Since start of the first week of 2x XP weekend its been noticeable worse at night for me (eastern time).

It seems to basically start to get a lot of lag around 9-9:30 > 10 pm EST. Affected things are:

 

1. Mail lags out 3-5 min to get items out), gets worse with time

2. GTN Lags out, unable to add items, buying items goes back to the mail issue once bought.

3. PvP que button bugs out, a reset of the UI is needed to re enable it (ctrl+u x2) also gets worse with time

4. PvP matches are FUBAR, been in a few now that's been 8v3, 1v6, 4v4 or worse, won one in 30 sec cause was no other players from opposing team could enter..

5. Login from character screen can take up to 3-5 minutes (server congestion for sure)

 

I am assuming this may have to do with the server shutdowns and transfers to the west coast servers and peak hour for their players mixed with the old west coast ones. This seriously needs to be addressed pronto, my suspicion is that its a server stress test this first weekend to see how much load they can take as a reference on what they need to add/upgrade to accommodate the new transfers, been nice to let your customers know ahead of time if this is the case.

 

Would be nice if Bioware could at least acknowledge that they have a problem and working on it.

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It's just an inconvenience until our raid members start dc'ing regularly on the NiM dreadguards after Heirad is down, that's when it started seriously pissing me off.

 

 

I know right? Like serious business.

Edited by CaptainRod
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We had, what, 5 or 6 dc's tonight in NiM TfB? Good news is that from 33% Heirad can be killed with 3 dps with out hitting the 3rd lighting phase

 

Except that we did hit and survive the 3rd Lightning Field. But you wouldn't know, because you weren't there.

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Hello. It was very laggy indeed.

 

Mailboxes wouldn't send mail out till 2 or 3 mins later.

I couldn't get mail in same fashion. Took few minutes to show up and longer still to get item if at all.

Loading to character select took like 5 times longer than normal.

When getting on ship shuttle etc. I would be able to run around for min before it would actually load.

My companion wasn't showing his buffs (could be another reason like a bug).

GTN I could post for sale one item second would not post.

 

Also I couldn't purchase Improved speeder training III with cartel coins. Kept giving error. I was finally able to however last night.

 

So basically I avoided using the GTN and Mail which kinda sucked since i needed to give my lower lvl alt items money for the double xp weekend.

 

I noticed several posts in customer support all weekend regarding this. Never saw a response from BW. Kinda lamers. They reply to some mundane bs posts but not the important ones.

 

They should extend our double xp ! Alot of peeps got short end of stick. Boooo :D

Edited by OmcBoone
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I agree that Harbinger was just awful in terms of extreme lag on mail, gtn and loading screens in particular for me. So much so that on Sunday at one point I got tired of dealing with it and gave up.

 

They really need to address this and make some accommodations for popular times when lots of people will be on on the popular mega servers.

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Same issue, but during OPS we had people getting delayed interrupts and missing critical timing.

 

This type of game play is TERRIBLE if you are trying to do OPS like Nightmare Pilgrim or Kephess (EC) NiM fights.

 

LAG is already an issue during the normal weeknight, but compounded A LOT during Double XP weekends.

 

BIOWARE - Please feed the server hamsters more food or get another hamster wheel to handle the server load.

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  • Dev Post

Hi there Harbinger residents,

 

I wanted to step in and make sure that you know that we're aware that there were some issues with performance and access on your server over the past couple of nights. We are investigating what's caused this and apologize for the inconvenience; if we're able to provide you with any new information, we'll be sure to post a follow up.

 

Thanks for your understanding!

 

**This is a duplicate of a thread in General Discussion; rather than post twice, this thread's being merged with that one, and we're removing the duplicate post. **

 

Edited by AmberGreen
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Hi there Harbinger residents,

 

I wanted to step in and make sure that you know that we're aware that there were some issues with performance and access on your server over the past couple of nights. We are investigating what's caused this and apologize for the inconvenience; if we're able to provide you with any new information, we'll be sure to post a follow up.

 

Thanks for your understanding!

 

**This is a duplicate of a thread in General Discussion; rather than post twice, this thread's being merged with that one, and we're removing the duplicate post. **

 

 

Awesome! Thanks Amber for giving us a quick heads up it's being looked into. Any updates in the near future would be much appreciated.

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Wouldn't think it would be a long equation to figure out what caused it.. High Capacity and servers unable to cope? How many servers have been merged onto the Harbinger? 7-8? Didn't you just merge 2 or 3 APAC servers with it too?
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Wouldn't think it would be a long equation to figure out what caused it.. High Capacity and servers unable to cope? How many servers have been merged onto the Harbinger? 7-8? Didn't you just merge 2 or 3 APAC servers with it too?

 

The issues run much deeper than that. Rarely is the answer to performance issues "throw some stronger hardware at it". Usually it involves much more time consuming game engine optimizations etc.

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some issues

 

:DSome issues! I lag for fifteen seconds when exiting my ship. Twenty when entering it. Mail takes minutes to load, chat constantly fails to update.

 

"Some issues" indeed. I sincerely hope you fix it soon.

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The issues run much deeper than that. Rarely is the answer to performance issues "throw some stronger hardware at it". Usually it involves much more time consuming game engine optimizations etc.

 

Just my own personal observation here but I noticed more slowness happening after the Collections feature was added than I had noticed before. Things like the quest boxes taking a long time to load on fleet never happened to me prior to 2.1 which was when Collections hit.

 

The last go round of double XP certainly didn't have all these issues for me and I was playing on The Harbinger then too. However at that time we did not have the collections feature nor did we have to bear the load of extra players from the APAC server shutdown so one or both of those may be playing a factor.

 

I'd imagine Collections eats up a lot of processing power checking every item on every player. I believe that was the reason given why it wasn't feasible to have every single piece of armor add to collections separately rather than the sets, because all the checks for all those items would just slow things down too much. Still, even as it stands I suspect it's contributing to some of the slowness.

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What others have said was noticed by me; ~6pm (west coast/pacific) Fri, Sat and Sun mail would start lagging by 1-5+ minutes. I didn't bother with GTN but the /general spam and guild complaints were numerous.

 

Outside of leveling an alt the game was unplayable for what I wanted to do during the peak times.

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Hi there Harbinger residents,

 

I wanted to step in and make sure that you know that we're aware that there were some issues with performance and access on your server over the past couple of nights. We are investigating what's caused this and apologize for the inconvenience; if we're able to provide you with any new information, we'll be sure to post a follow up.

 

Thanks for your understanding!

 

**This is a duplicate of a thread in General Discussion; rather than post twice, this thread's being merged with that one, and we're removing the duplicate post. **

 

 

I appreciate the post Amber.

 

I think it is important though to note that this is a recurring issue with Harbinger. Every time something goes live that draws high player populations into the server, it begins a slow death spiral of progressively greater issues (as listed above). It happened during the earlier double XP weekends, it happened with a fair amount of regularity once ROTHC went live (for several weeks) and it happened several times this last double XP weekend.

 

The server does not even hit FULL status before this chronic debilitating performance degradation sets in.

 

Based on other comments I have read in community support forum, it's also not just Harbinger.

 

A true root cause analysis and remedy is required because it is clear that the server is not able to manage the population loading allowed into it.

Edited by Andryah
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I've mentioned it elsewhere, but a possible reason for the extreme mail lag, gtn lag, and loading time lag, is that so many people are on and sending credits and gear via mail back and forth between lowbie alts which also requires a lot of logging in and out between characters.

 

1. Make a single wallet for all characters on an account per server and you will drop a big chunk of mail and logging in and out of characters. This would make the game less annoying as well.

 

2. With the current UI there is space for two more cargo bay tabs. Make one more tab for each character and then make a legacy cargo bay tab. In the legacy tab you can only put unbound and legacy bound items. Players could put buffs, xp boosts, lowbie gear/mods/etc, and other leveling items in the legacy tab. This would again save a lot of mail usage and logging in and out.

 

3. There is no where near enough room in one cargo bay for all the crafting materials you need for even just one crafting skill. So using the legacy tab for crafting materials wouldn't be that helpful. Make it so crafting materials on all characters can be used while crafting on any one character. Again, this will result in much less mail usage and logging in and out of characters.

 

4. Remove the mail step from the GTN. If you buy something, it goes directly into your inventory. If someone purchases an item before you, you don't have to go all the way over to the mailbox to find out your purchase was unsuccessful. Just create a pop-up that says the item has already been purchased and remove it from the gtn search results. This will result in less mail load.

 

5a. Reduce the amount of time people spend on the GTN. Intended result of idea: If I search for armor > medium, I only want to see a single listing for each unique item, and that listing should be the cheapest currently on the GTN. For many items there might be 10 or 15 pages of mostly duplicate items. With this feature those 10-15 pages could be reduced to 1-3 item listings. If there are multiple items at the same lowest price they could all be listed, but this would still reduce the results considerably. Items at different quantities could be treated as unique, but they should display the cost per item so we don't have to tab out to use a calculator, e.g, if the quantity is 34 and the price is 53,950, it should note the per item cost is 1587 (rounded up). Method: add a checkbox filter that says something like, "[x] Show only cheapest unique items".

 

5b. Make companion gifts easier to search for with a dropdown search filter for type, e.g., weapon or technology.

 

5c. Make crafting missions easier to search for by making a level search filter, e.g., 450.

 

6. Find ways to reduce load time on particularly bad planets like Tatooine.

 

7. If load times are lagging and you try to enter an op instance, there is no indication that you are loading. You can still move around. Make some immediate indication that you are transitioning into the instance, even if it is going to take 2 minutes to begin.

Edited by Puja
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I had issues with the GTN and mail on fleet aswell.

 

Seems to work well on my ship though so I've just been hanging out there. For those without these items on their ships then the GTN terminals and mailboxes work pretty well on the Makeb Orbital station.

 

If you don't have Makeb... Then find a terminal elsewhere.

 

Hopefully this should help some of you with a workaround until it's fixed.

 

Enjoy!

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Mail on Harbinger is hosed again right now.

 

I crafted some stuff for a guild mate and was unable to get it to him do to the mail servers being down so I just logged out and called it quits for the night after trying multiple times and sitting and waiting with the mail open for 10 minutes at a time while it sat blank and nothing happened. I also apparently have mail that I can't access including some GTN purchases.

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