Asherons Call: Q&A with srand

Eolorian asks: Will more apartments ever open? I know people that still want housing but cant get it
srand: We're currently investing most of our energy into monster rebalancing and stabilizing the servers. When we are satisfied that the servers are stable and able to cope with more housing, and we have the content resources to plunk some more housing down, then we will certainly consider doing so. We know how important housing is to many of our players.

Eolorian asks: I do have one question for you about apartments if you have time? There seems to be a lot of places to sit and relax in the apartments that could be called common areas. Is it possible to downsize those areas out altogether and there by downsizing apartment load?
srand: The *vast* majority of server load in RQ blocks comes from the storage chests. (Some is also from hooks, but less than with other houses since there are many fewer hooks per chest in an apartment.) The common areas add negligible load. In fact, they in effect lessen load, since they are taking up space that might otherwise house more chests (and therefore vastly more load). At any rate, removing the common areas would not increase server performance appreciably. As for villas, remember that the above ground bits and the below ground bits are in different landblocks, and usually reside on different servers within the server farm when they are loaded. Because we balance load by landblock, not by villa, we can't really trade off load below ground for load above ground. (And if we could, removing the space still wouldn't help you at all, since again almost all of the load comes from the storage chests and hooks.)

Solpel asks: So thats why the cottages all create so much lag when you hit a cottage area on the map? All the chests are the killer? It's to the point that, on Darktide, it's not very fun trying to chase people when in eastern dereth because of all the housing area's you'll come across. You usually get hit with a major slingshot, to the point that the character stops for a few seconds or more before finally shooting forward. Would changing cottages somewhat, when there's time in the future, so that the cottage basement is accessed through a portal like Villa/Mansion, help get rid of a lot of the load issues?
srand: Yes and no. Storage chests and hooks both cause server load. In RQs, storage chests are more of a factor because there are relatively few hooks per chest, but in cottages there are enough hooks to be significant. However, the lag you hit when you run into a cottage area is more likely to be due to client load than it is to be due to server load. When you enter such an area, your client receives information about the visible objects -- including things on hooks. If there's a lot of hooked items, this may cause some lag on your client. Some players have suggested that we change the way our visibility model works so that your client doesn't find out about items on hooks until it enters the house's boundaries. Unfortunately, this is completely infeasible in our engine at this time. This issue is, however, one reason that we are cautious about adding more landscape housing to the world.