At this point. All this lag that’s slowing the game down has to be either the lowest priority to fix (when it should be the highest) or it’s by design to slow down a majority of the player base.
I mean, just because Australia is used to these shitty speeds doesn’t mean the rest of the world is.
And if you’re not experiencing any lag then cool story bro. 
Well sometimes if you are lucky you can restart game and it goes away but eventually folks are going to get tired of having to do that and instead just play another game perhaps.
Lag/loading is my only complaint I have about this game. Seems like servers are adjusted to average amount of playing but can’t handle peaktimes (vault weekends, new delves, new mythic days, mondays after reset).
Also I feel like Gnome a paloozas cause extra loadingtimes
Bean counter found opportunity to save $209.34 / month for servers, bean counter took opportunity.
Bean counter says: Just doing what a bean counter does. I don’t even like games. 
Agreed 1000%, there are like a million words in the English language and not one of them can accurately describe how frustrated I am with server lag right now. And while it is true that restarting the game can sometimes put you on a lag-free server, having to restart over and over again just to be put on a good server is NOT fun at all.
Yes, especially during vault weekends
Please enhance the capacity of the gaming server. It’s no fun to be late and slow to answer.
This was supposed to be fixed a long time ago.
Agree. Spinning gems and loading times are a drag, and take far too long.
I used to average 260 gnomes/Palooza, now I can’t even reach 200 because of massive waiting times after winning a match, after choosing difficulty in explore, and after pressing the green “To Battle!”-button…
I really like this game, but it is getting increasingly annoying to play, especially when starting a timed game mode like the Palooza, just to see the time fly by on spinning gems instead of actually killing gnomes.
And no, it is not a matter of just reinstalling or turning the switch on and off.
Disclaimer: I am not saying what they are doing is correct or customer-friendly just want to provide perspective on how companies optimize for operational cost.
Traffic at peak hours (which is generally weekly reset, new mythic, gnome weekend, faction events etc.) does not necessarily make the company gain more money. They make money from micro transactions not through (directly) when people are playing the game more. One could argue that new mythic makes them money since people are using keys and gems, but I would be highly surprised if people are paying real money to get the new mythic rather than using what they saved.
So, they optimize for average / regular traffic. This way, they can approximate their operation cost better.
Also some others pointed that they use Amazon services. I would imagine they are using some auto-scaling; but it likely takes time for servers to scale once the usage peaks. This is likely the reason that things get better in an hour or so in these cases.
Of course they could also optimize based on historical patterns or pre-defined rules (such as scale before faction resets, new mythic releases etc.), however we see how many bugs can get in due to manual configuration related stuff, so this would make things even more complicated and error prone.
All in all, from an operational perspective, experiencing server degradation is completely normal, especially for non-time sensitive things (yes, I consider the game as non-time sensitive 
)
You’re forgetting that things have never been as bad as the last couple months. Something changed a couple months back and the lag has been almost continuously bad since. I’m betting it was some kind of cost cutting change they made server side. This is infuriating because the game is literally making more money than ever before thanks to subs. Yet they still penny pinch on vital things like servers.
Good point and I agree. I would say that new mythic releases and new faction releases always had lag, but I also agree that Tuesday factions are new-ish same with gnome events. Gnome events might have received this as part of GaP introduction but I have no explanation for Tuesday factions. I also agree that the lag was better previously and it got worse in the last months.
My guess on this is one of the following: either Amazon increased the cost for hosting and therefore they are willing to permit more lag to keep operation cost within their budget or they are close to some threshold where if they pass this threshold the cost will increase an order. This generally happens when you need to use better machine, tolerate a higher throughput range etc. for many cloud services the cost between these ranges are pretty steep, it would be at least and order of magnitude. You are right that the game is making more money than ever and this also comes with increased throughout demand (due to increased play time by users), but maybe they are not yet approved for higher operation budget cost? Again, these are all hypothesis, so take it with a grain of salt.
I guess part of my point is that, the devs might not even be in a position to do anything on this until higher operation budget is approved from the parent company. And the bigger the companies are, the harder and longer this gets, especially when you don’t have hard proof that not increasing this budget has a direct impact on your income.
It may not be a server issue at all. We know that when they introduced the new levels of soulforge they put in a crazy bit of code that checked multiple times if the Soulforge had upgraded, which slowed everything down. They amended it in the last update and some stuff speeded up whereas other parts slowed down. They probably moved rather than removed the server calls so it’s doing a huge amount of unnecessary work and slowing everything down
That’d require them to write better code.
I think the chances of that happening are rather slim, considering we’ve been unsuccessfully petitioning them to start using a spellchecker for the better part of a decade.
At this point, it’s just open defiance.
Look at what we can get away with, lol!
It is never been so bad as it is now, and all that money that they get from this game.
I wonder if they even bother to spend it on a decent server or they have the cheapest ones.
There’s (probably) no logical explanation and no excuse that you have to wait several seconds after each battle, opening chests, etc. It’s offensive and disruptive to have such servers. It’s the year 2022!
A bit of both, is my guess? The Soulforge update added a bunch of extra (and unnecessary) server calls; the subsequent patch only partially fixed that. The resulting additional aggregate load on the servers makes it worse for everyone; but for whatever reason they’re unwilling to scale up to more server capacity.
(Maybe there are further client-side fixes to come? although the last few releases don’t give much confidence in their ability to write efficient netcode.)
You missed the number one response: it’s working as intended
Loading is in every part of the game now. New Faction Assaults, Vault Weekends (even GaP), New mythic release, Mondays - all these had existed without this loading issue too. So I agree with the OP’s opinion that this “spinning gems” animation OR loading issue is absolutely by design. It could have been done deliberately to slow us down and therefore reduce the load on the servers.
I doubt it was done deliberately. More likely they did some sloppy code, didn’t test it properly, and didn’t think too much about the potential consequences.
And then it gets launched on live servers, when they have this annoying sync problem with console/mobile versions that drastically delay and make all updates far slower than should be needed, especially for those of us who don’t play on those.
Are you saying that Deafs (Devs) are incompetent? I always think there is a purpose and it is by design. Same reason why we had a crasher with more hp at times during vault event.
I’m saying they are human and can make mistakes, just like anyone else.