Asherons Call: I Want My Platinum Golems Back!

If you've been reading the boards today you know that players are generally unhappy at the reduction in the spawn time of the golems. Reactions range from disappointed to angry to downright hostile with disbelief.

srand was kind enough to stop buy our Game Issues forum and clarify further what exactly the golems were doing to the servers:

Q. Was it the rate of spawn of the golems that caused the load? the players, the loot? And how exactly is this different than a tusker camp or a BSD/OHN?

A. srand: It's all of these things together, really. The players are probably the biggest load -- players are HUGE compared to monsters. The loot is also quite a strain on the servers, because for the most part its been heavily mutated by the treasure system.

If no one was killing these golems they'd never be respawning and it wouldn't be an issue -- but people were killing them, and so you had lots of frantic activity -- lots of monsters being created, trying to fight, dying, and being replaced with corpses; lots of loot being generated; lots of loot being kept track of, first in the corpses and then on the ground; lots of loot being cleaned up by housekeeping; lots of players, with their own tremendous inventories, portaling or running in and out; lots of combat message flying back and forth; lots of local broadcasts as the bloody golems emoted ... lots of frantic activity.

On a small scale, the servers can keep up with this pretty nicely. But we were seeing this on a large scale -- spread across a large number of landblocks, and all on the landscape. Landscape in general does not handle this situation as well as dungeons, for several reasons. The load-balancing algorithm for landscape is slightly different than for dungeons, because dungeons were meant to have faster, thicker spawns. Dungeons are contained -- which helps a lot with visibility -- and are generally able to load-balance more quickly than landscape. What we were seeing here was that we went from normal load to highly abnormal load very quickly, and the landscape servers couldn't shift load fast enough to make up for it.