Should we try bringing snapshotting back and see if its increases server performance?

robpr

Currently all effects recalculate their value each tick. Buffs or gear change immediately have an effect on the ongoing damage or healing even mid way their durations.

What if we try snapshotting the events again to see if its reduces the lag or not?

Snapshotting: skills and effects 'snapshot' current buffs, stats and gear for their entire duration reducing the need for the server to recalculate hundreds of effects each tick of the dot or hot. Then it recalculates again on new casts only.
Downside: micromanaging buffs will be even more annoying as before as you need to be sure they are on before casting skills.

mdjessup4906

How would this effect backbar dots and set proc like bb crimson, yoln etc? Or stuff that only works while in combat?

MincMincMinc

robpr wrote: »

Currently all effects recalculate their value each tick. Buffs or gear change immediately have an effect on the ongoing damage or healing even mid way their durations.

What if we try snapshotting the events again to see if its reduces the lag or not?

Snapshotting: skills and effects 'snapshot' current buffs, stats and gear for their entire duration reducing the need for the server to recalculate hundreds of effects each tick of the dot or hot. Then it recalculates again on new casts only.
Downside: micromanaging buffs will be even more annoying as before as you need to be sure they are on before casting skills.

Alot of skills do snapshot, but yes this is something that should be considered as the game is inconsistent. For instance vigor snapshots your stats on cast if you have a nirn weapon, but ticks will still get hit with modifiers like powered.....so you can double trait your vigor. Most single target dots/hots snapshot like this

Poison inject doesn't snapshot though so you can use it on a low wd backbar bow and it will update on your frontbar weapon. This is probably due to how they got the execute to work, needing to recalculate your stats each tick. I am unsure if the poison status effect works this way, but status effects as a whole are another performance mess just looking ugly in the corner of the room.

Then you have skills like hurricane, deadly cloak, arctic blast, northern storm all update.......Which sounds scary considering they are all aoe and overtime which is the most prolific distributor of ticks compared to the single targets. Snapshot seems to make sense for these skills especially to cut back on the potential cascade of calcs when running into large fights.

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I doubt snapshot rules alone would fix the game though. At all the levels we see, there are tons of other wasteful calcs going on. Deeper in the code you have other potentially far wasteful performance issues like desyncs and how the server overwrites the users, who knows how much strain that puts on the server. The underlying "boring" issues very well could be just as bad.....but obviously players want to see something change with a flick of a switch.

This goes without saying that if you add up 20 of these rule change concepts maybe you would see a benefit.

Finedaible

Personally I never liked how unfriendly the bar swap mechanics are for the new player, and even for the experienced player there's still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to what set combinations work with the backbar/frontbar interactions or not. It feels kind of dumb that my character just loses power by swapping skill bars honestly. A lot of passive skill line effects will state with "an x ability slotted" or "gain y per z slotted" which is misleading to anyone new because but what they actually mean is that the skill has to be on your CURRENT/ACTIVE skill bar. I'm no English major but I think the term "slotted" is technically correct for anything you slot on the backbar... so they should probably clear up a lot of the language if they want to keep it that way.

Really though, they should have never designed the game this way. I think if we are to see an improvement to calculations needed they would need to simplify the two states of character stats (backbar/frontbar) into one stat sheet which all skills and procs can calculate off of. I'm not certain how to go about doing that without another round of whiplash changes, but they have changed several abilities to grant passive effects on either bar, so I don't think it's impossible, just very messy to untangle.