[2023] Why is every networking actions taking so long?

Very valid question and observation. The short answer is that we’re working/iterating on it and they’ll be improving before 1.0. But, who likes short answers…

When it comes to the social features being a bit slower to update it is because we’re currently using a system that is not completely ideal where we’re polling for changes to many social interactions/statuses and we’re being a bit conservative with the poll rate as we evaluate the impacts on cost this has to us. We’re essentially querying a database for updates and upon those queries were fetching other associated data from multiple sources. We have identified things that we’ll be doing for social features that will make this feel much less sluggish but in the future we’re very interested in a slightly larger system rework that can make these updates happen near instantaneously. We want to make sure by 1.0 these updates are at least drastically improved.

As far as “lag” in terms of network lag, there are some areas where the networking library we are completely replacing is sending too much data back and forth - much more than necessary and we’ve been working for the last 8 months on removing the remaining areas where this library is holding us back and making some interactions feel sluggish. That’s at least the main part that I believe is being felt on live while there is more that is being done on a per individual instance of problematic areas to improve that. The good news is that we are looking to replace this problematic library with our new lower level, much more optimized, solution possibly even before 0.9.2. We are merging it into our main development branch for wider internal team testing this week.

For zone transitions there are additional optimizations we’re making for matchmaking to those servers that will help, especially while in parties where the transition time is currently the worst. You can actually see how much faster zone transitioning is in the offline client which is external proof that it’s a server matchmaking slow down. There is actually a much larger project underway to improve this, but to the end user it will just result in you noticing that speeding up.

I suppose the biggest thing to say here is that we are well aware of and actively working to improve those things and you’re not alone in seeing those as areas that need improvement. The exciting thing is that we’re far in the process of making those improvements.

Thanks for your enthusiasm for the game - we’re hard at work!