[2020] Whatever causes the frame loss in the latest update, its not worth it.

We're looking into the framerate issues. One thing we've noticed are certain particle effects looping infinitely (even if you don't see them,) instead of expiring like they're supposed to. This can cause your client to hold onto 1000 particles (real example during a session a couple of days ago) that aren't even on the screen any more, which causes your framerates to plummet for the remainder of your session.

This is not a new issue, but we've recently expanded our ability to find and diagnose where the problems occur, and are addressing the problems where we can find them. Pillager is a good example of the on-demand FPS issues you can create due to this problem. That one, and a few others, are fixed internally already.

Unfortunately, there's nothing we can point to right now as the sole cause of the problems (Ordnance Dampener uses a mesh with a texture on it, it doesn't use particles,) but we're doing what we can to diagnose them as a priority.

Don't believe so. Punisher effects aren't triggering alerts for looping, and the model isn't abnormally impacting framerates either.

Very likely, yes. That doesn't necessarily mean that it was the stuff that was added in the last update though.

We continually optimize code, make updates to cheat detection, have integrated new crash reporting pipelines, modify code to support new features, and make loads of other behind-the-scenes changes during an update, so while players tend to see the shiny new things and think that must be the source of the problem, that's not always the case. We gather data, find the sticking points, and address them that way.

This is a game with millions of lines of code and a lot of interconnected systems mean that sometimes things fall over, or sometimes we optimize an area that runs better in one place, but has knock-on effects in another.

Yeah, we can definitely make the visuals less intrusive.