[Reported] Game becomes briefly unresponsive after almost any action

Bug Reports
41

With release of 6.1.5 last night, the situation has changed. Instead of getting the soulforge info twice every time you exit a screen, now it’s being requested once on entering certain screens. For some cases, e.g. getting into the guild menu, it still increases loading times significantly (below example goes up from 1.8 seconds to 2.3 seconds; plus client processing time:

[2022-01-12 07:47:52,529] [1284 ms] get_guild_data
[2022-01-12 07:47:53,259] [ 507 ms] get_guild_scores
[2022-01-12 07:47:53,944] [ 534 ms] soulforge_get_info

I will investigate further and reply in this very thread.

Cheers, Gary.

14 Likes
42

There is more weird stuff happening. I waited until after reset, and waited until tributes popped up. this is what happened then (collect_gold is getting tributes, and check_maintenance usually goes together with the login. do_daily_bonus shows the daily reset splash screen):

[2022-01-12 08:32:25,551] [ 775 ms] collect_gold
[2022-01-12 08:32:26,370] [ 680 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-12 08:32:27,960] [ 499 ms] check_maintenance
[2022-01-12 08:32:30,651] [2118 ms] login_user
[2022-01-12 08:32:33,778] [1822 ms] login_user
[2022-01-12 08:32:34,868] [ 516 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-12 08:32:35,538] [ 547 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-12 08:32:36,508] [ 831 ms] get_store_data
[2022-01-12 08:32:37,176] [ 532 ms] get_store_data
[2022-01-12 08:32:38,674] [1360 ms] do_daily_bonus
[2022-01-12 08:32:39,347] [ 540 ms] soulforge_get_info

I don’t even know where to start here :see_no_evil:

Cheers, Gary.

15 Likes
43

Since 6.1.5 dropped, the delay when returning to the map screen has gone, but a whole bunch of new delays seem to have appeared.

In particular, I’m often having to wait 10 seconds or more after selecting an Explore difficulty, and much the same at the end of each battle. In fact, the Skip button doesn’t become clickable until a few Victory cards have already appeared, where previously you could click to speed things up as soon as the win graphic started to appear; and the Skip button was instantly usable.

It’s really disturbing that these systems, which have worked perfectly well for a very long time, and now being broken by the programmers, to every player’s detriment. :frowning:

16 Likes
44

This is not broken, working as intended!
Their intention is to slow players down to get less resources from time gated events like GAP, but even in simple game mode like explore during vault weekend.
A determined player does a 1000 battles a day, 1000 battles x 10 sec delay = 10k seconds stolen time, 2.7 hours. Either you play longer or get less done in the same time frame. The less you can achieve the more you need buy.
Disgusting strategy but this the F2P world.

1 Like
45

I wouldn’t go so far as to assume the intent of increased delay here. From what I see, the soulforge now needs to be checked more frequently as there might be a level up available after each battle. To properly display the green exclamation mark, there needs to be an additional check.
There were quite a few complaints (also by myself) about not having enough / proper checks on different occasions, so it appears that the devs wanted to play safe - and add an additional request everywhere. They overshot, which led to repeated requests, which was clearly a bug - acknowledged, and fixed. Now there is still some additional requests left, which are not as easily identified as buggy behaviour.
Still, implicitly the general gaming speed has gone down, as this series of requests show:

[2022-01-13 11:02:02,108][ 703 ms] start_battle
[2022-01-13 11:02:02,770][ 489 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-13 11:02:18,518][ 825 ms] submit_result
[2022-01-13 11:02:19,356][ 686 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-13 11:03:21,098][ 800 ms] start_battle
[2022-01-13 11:03:22,116][ 863 ms] soulforge_get_info
[2022-01-13 11:07:32,530][ 769 ms] submit_result
[2022-01-13 11:07:33,181][ 513 ms] soulforge_get_info

The above shows the requests for two consecutive adventure board battles. They are initiated with a start_battle and then finished with submit_result. So without the Soulforge requests, we would have 703+825+800+769 = 3.1 seconds of loading time, including the added requests it’s 5.6 seconds, which is an increase of 82% (all of it considering the servers are running fine, which they kinda are in this case). This comparison is not fair though, as some added requests needs to be there, so I think that the additional ones at starting the battle could be removed, resulting in only 41% added delay.

But that is all not really adressing the core issue here: the actual server performance. In the above list, only one request (second line) is below the 500 milliseconds magical threshold of slowliness, and really only barely makes it there. The game would benefit drastically from server optimisations; aiming below 200 milliseconds response times for each request would be something every player would notice without measuring it. The game would feel better, much smoother, and as an added bonus, server load would decrease as well, making the whole operation cheaper, too.

Hope I could shed some light on the situation, at least from my point of view.

Cheers, Gary.

18 Likes
46

This part seriously annoys me. Ever since the introduction of campaigns, the skip button has NEVER worked on the Campaign Pass rewards screen for me. So every single time I collect a reward there, I have to watch the full pointless annoying card spin animation. As someone with ADHD, it seriously triggers my nerves.
Game should be relaxing and not stress/anxiety inducing due to “minor” issues that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

4 Likes
47

Game speed was normal before the daily reset.
After reset, it’s super slow again…

1 Like
48

It’s the end of new mythic week. Lots of people opening chests now they can pull other cards

1 Like
49

This hasn’t been fixed. Game lag is still as bad as ever today. Please come back when it has actually been fixed

2 Likes
50

Yep, visibly more waiting time from enemies killed to victory screen and then to the next battle…

And did it all start with ridiculous constant Soulforge checks?
There should’ve been two conditions implemented - Soulforge check only triggers if there was Cursed Gnome in the battle and all Soulforge checks stop when Soulforge is upgraded to 20.

7 Likes
51

Is it just getting worse and worse all the time or am I losing my mind?? As that 1% has their gap rewards nerfed I’m really not sure if I deserve it after having to watch that gem roulette after fights and those multiple loading bars before fights…

1 Like
52

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329110_20220115134812_11155×784 126 KB

Also, skip button is currently useless since I’m not able to click it until half of the treasures popped up anyway. :woman_shrugging:

2 Likes
53

how are you measuring these?

And i agree with you, requests should not take more than 150ms. However, their database is probably centralized into 1 location. What they need is to spend some money and create load balancers across multiple zones, closer to users and route the traffic through aws internal network, not the user network, as the latest is slower and adds even more delay

Another thing they must do is optimize the logic on some of these requests. For instance, i don’t care if my soulforge notification is delayed 1hour. So maybe check that once an hour. Checking every time is insane and provides no real value. I’m sure the same can be said about other actions.
And i would go further to even think some of these requests can be async, aka non blocking.

Another nice optimization would be to preload data while playing. Ex: you start a pvp battle, try to load in the background the next 3 possible players that you can go against, so everything will be smooth.

One can dream i guess…

6 Likes
54

Before the fix it was mostly limited to when you returned to th world map. Now delays after every action. Shorter delays but numerous.
Skip button is not clickable immediately, same with the continue button. Short lags everywhere.
It just got worse and not fixed!

2 Likes
55

It takes money and effort to fix this. We’ll see if they want to dedicate both of these to make us happy.

2 Likes
56

This game has kept their studio afloat for 5 years. You’d think they’d take some pride in it…

1 Like
57

I haven’t noticed the constant server lag talked about here until this weekend. I’ve had period where it was annoying but overall it was fine. However, EVERY time I activated a gap it was made worse by huge amounts. I had the spinning gems loading bar ON THE LOADING BATTLE PAGE. And then magically once gap was over? Back to “normal” again which was still slow compared to pre 6.1. I’m on the US east coast so I may just be lucky in regard to server location and the lag that can be noticed.

58

Hey everyone,

This is still on our radar, I’ve raised it with the team again this morning.

Also, the team did implement some database and server optimisations recently and these changes are being monitored as well.

5 Likes
59

Thanks, @Kafka. When no-one from Inf+2 posted, I assumed you may not be aware of the issue, so I created a new bug report. You might find some of my thoughts in that thread – about when these sorts of client queries are actually necessary – interesting/useful.

Please do also take the Shrine reward card issue seriously, as it’s almost as problematic (and hence likely to lose you players) as the delays. It certainly annoys me no end!

2 Likes
60

as far as I’m concerned, this is now fixed with 6.2.0.

Cheers, Gary.

4 Likes