Customer support the right way.

The performance issue on Karak Norn has spawned a lot of angst.

It is reassuring to see a response to us the customer that begins to tick the right boxes.

Magnus writes,

Good day all!

Thanks for the great patience you've shown through these admittedly frustrating times. The feedback you've shared here and via other channels has been invaluable. In return, I'll share our current understanding of the issue and further explain our motivations for merging servers in the first place.

A curious aspect of the Norn issue is that whereas it's now our largest server, we've got several European servers which are almost as large and because of this, we wanted to exclude the possibility that a hardware issue was at fault. A rigorous analyze by our SysAdmins revealed that the Norn hardware is in good condition and running well within acceptable limits. Consequently, we've now ruled out insufficient or malfunctioning hardware as a possible cause for these problems. For good measure though, we've applied additional monitoring software to stay informed and in order to provide Mythic with more data.

In our correspondence with Mythic, it's become clear that the root to these problems is directly linked with the Tier 4 population and, to some extent, its activity. There seems to be a threshold that - when exceeded - cause a strong performance decrease. This would explain why servers only marginally smaller than Norn doesn't don't share its issues. Seen in this light, one is tempted to conclude that the recent server transfers were a mistake. However, there are two factors which must be mentioned which demand a re-evaluation of this conclusion:

* Mythic have had Norn-size servers for some time
* These servers began showing Norn-type problems after Patch 1.2


Since the transfers were activated only days after Patch 1.2 went live, this issue was not identified quickly enough for us to react and do something about it. In hindsight, it was somewhat unfortunate that the transfers and Patch 1.2 would go live so close to each other. That said, there's a silver lining to this cloud. We know from Mythic's previous experience that Norn-size servers are viable, only that this was - for some reason - changed with Patch 1.2. Mythic are keenly aware of this and redeeming this situation is a top priority. Fixes are en route, and the only question is how soon and how tangible improvements they'll bring.

We're very sorry about all of this and we'll do what we can to make it up for you. Top GOA and Mythic technicians are on top of this and we're all doing what we can to bring about a solution as soon as possible.

I had suggested that we need to see a few things, amongst them an apology and some concrete information. Kudos to Magnus for giving us most of those.

Of course the proof in this pudding will be useful fixes being patched in as soon as possible but I think we can give Magnus some credit.

Community time again

Its that time of the week again where we highlight other blogs.

This week its Evan Sims.

Evan is a game designer so I was very interested in his advice on tweaking performance in Warhammer.

His ingame tweaks include.

Lightmaps & Specular — By far the biggest performance booster. Disable these options and restart the game client. You will notice a drop in visual quality, but get a huge boost to your FPS in return. This impacts the lighting quality of the game.

Shadows — I recommend setting this to Balanced. This will set all NPC and PC (including yourself) shadows to simpler, non-dynamic textures. They still look pretty decent, and this tweak can help a lot in crowded areas like Altdorf or Inevitable City, or during keep, fortress or city raids. I haven’t noticed a huge performance difference disabling them completely, and I think the effect they give is worth the few frames.

Disable EAX — If you have a Creative card that supports EAX, I don’t recommend using it. Especially if you’re an unfortunate soul running Vista.