Tedious Doff Mission Wait Times

raeat

I am typing this while I wait for Doff/R&D missions to "Finish."

Is there any particular reason why we are forced to endure these ridiculous wait times? Does it save on processing power or something, or is this just another example of a "feature" no one can get to or a determination to force us to waste time watching absolutely nothing happen on our screens and keeping us from the real content?

There is a lot of player-hostile stuff in this game (such as relentless confirmation messages for trivia - where else am I going to dock in earth orbit?) that really should be seen to.

How a bout an option to double click as an auto-confirm to any command, at least?

Does anyone remember any of the captains in Star Trek having to endure these harassments? Does anyone remember any captain having to constantly tell their officers, "Yes, I do want to beam up now. That's why I gave the gorram order to beam up!"
This post has been edited to remove content which violates the Perfect World Entertainment Community Rules and Policies. ~Askray

rattler2

Yea... I kinda agree. Waiting for each one to finish individually is a pain. Might cut down on the "Wall of Text" if you have a full run of 20 DOff assignments, but as it is now... its ridiculus. Its you get one... wait a few seconds, get another, wait a few seconds, get another...

Its slow.

captainmal3

They want to cut down on people using alts to just run doff missions for dil in the hopes it'll convince you to buy it with zen instead. It won't of course, but that won't stop cryptic.

thutmosis85

Good Thing they "fixed" Doffing in 9.5 ... oh wait ... sad part being I doubt they'll be able fix it without Heretic, and just keep throwing fecies at it ...

szim

I'm almost sure this was introduced intentionally. It keeps people longer in-game and prevents. veterans from doffing on too many alts. Yes it's just 2-3 minutes you have to wait for 20 assignments and 5 R&D projects to complete but if you multiply this by say 15 chars it's 30-45 minutes per day !! It's incredibly tedious! :mad:

daniela1055

Yes its a shame like it is now - and the many missing flavour texts also took a lot of immersion out of doffing.

colonelchenchuan

ive found that I can combine going AFK in Mirror and waiting for all those to process! Efficent use of downtime!

raeat

If they don't want us using alts, they shouldn't sell us alt-slots, so I'm not buying that excuse.
This post has been edited to remove content which violates the Perfect World Entertainment Community Rules and Policies. ~Askray

omgbamf00

colonelchenchuan wrote: »

ive found that I can combine going AFK in Mirror and waiting for all those to process! Efficent use of downtime!

After reading multiple posts from you, I'm going to say that 100% of your play time is "downtime".

gavinruneblade

My search skills are very weak, but as I recall it was originally introduced as a fix for some broken doff missions that could not resolve and alsomcould not be abandoned so impacted players were just permanently reduced in available mission slots.

There has been complete silence to every request I've seen for acknowledgement of the issue and/or an improvement. It was even ported over to neverwinter and implemented there.

raeat

Hey, Askray. Instead of editing my posts because of a few copied lines, why don't you do something semi-useful, like fix the problem my repeated lines were intended to illustrate?

After all, unlike in the game, I didn't repeat the same nonsense interminably.

omgbamf00

raeat wrote: »

Hey, Askray. Instead of editing my posts because of a few copied lines, why don't you do something semi-useful, like fix the problem my repeated lines were intended to illustrate?

After all, unlike in the game, I didn't repeat the same nonsense interminably.

Oh, I don't know... perhaps because Askray is a forum moderator and not a game developer.

raeat

Clearly, I intended that Askray communicate the issue to his (or her) masters, not personally do the coding. I don't ask the marketing bean counters to code either. Are you so helplessly oblivious that you do and project that expectation on to others?

You, sir, are an idiot. If you cannot discern and understand the purpose and intent of a post, do not comment upon it. A grade 5 reading level might serve you well in future.

borticuscryptic

I checked with our software engineers to see if this behavior was a bug, or intended. What I learned was that this new behavior was introduced as a means to improve server stability for all players on a map.

Without this delay, we found that having a single player container load the completion data for as many as 30 or so different Assignments (including R&D) put a noteworthy strain on the map they were loaded into. If you had multiple players doing this at the same time, that load became concerning very quickly.

So, it is an intended feature, and currently working as intended.

That said, we will investigate if it can at least be tuned a bit. The current wait time is, I believe, 5 seconds between processing each completion. There is a chance that we can reduce that window. I can't make any promises, but it will be investigated.

dragonsbrethren

Knowing that, I'm perfectly okay with this delay being in place. It's frustrating, but understandable and acceptable. Thanks for letting us know.

zeuxidemus001

borticuscryptic wrote: »

I checked with our software engineers to see if this behavior was a bug, or intended. What I learned was that this new behavior was introduced as a means to improve server stability for all players on a map.

Without this delay, we found that having a single player container load the completion data for as many as 30 or so different Assignments (including R&D) put a noteworthy strain on the map they were loaded into. If you had multiple players doing this at the same time, that load became concerning very quickly.

So, it is an intended feature, and currently working as intended.

That said, we will investigate if it can at least be tuned a bit. The current wait time is, I believe, 5 seconds between processing each completion. There is a chance that we can reduce that window. I can't make any promises, but it will be investigated.

ROFL... working as intended.

Yeah its not 5 seconds its more like 30-50 seconds. Yeah I'm pretty much done with this game if it doesn't get put back the way it was being that I am usually doing 18-24 characters with maxed assignments being its take more than an hour to collect them all. DR was indeed a failure.

dragonsbrethren

Can I have your stuff?

He said 5 seconds per assignment -- that's consistent with what I see.

raeat

Thank you for the information, Borticuscryptic.

I'll still be frustrated by this, but at least now I know there is a reason.

generator88

5 seconds is also consistent with what I've always seems; made the complaints seem silly and petulant, tbh. Borticus, if you'rebstill reading, is there any way to see if there are circumstances that could jack that number up for some people?

Generator

mightybobcnc

borticuscryptic wrote: »

I checked with our software engineers to see if this behavior was a bug, or intended. What I learned was that this new behavior was introduced as a means to improve server stability for all players on a map.

Without this delay, we found that having a single player container load the completion data for as many as 30 or so different Assignments (including R&D) put a noteworthy strain on the map they were loaded into. If you had multiple players doing this at the same time, that load became concerning very quickly.

So, it is an intended feature, and currently working as intended.

That said, we will investigate if it can at least be tuned a bit. The current wait time is, I believe, 5 seconds between processing each completion. There is a chance that we can reduce that window. I can't make any promises, but it will be investigated.

I'm guessing that for technical/architecture (or even data integrity) reasons it cannot be made so that these projects are processed as they complete when the player is offline eh?

lucho80

borticuscryptic wrote: »

I checked with our software engineers to see if this behavior was a bug, or intended. What I learned was that this new behavior was introduced as a means to improve server stability for all players on a map.

Without this delay, we found that having a single player container load the completion data for as many as 30 or so different Assignments (including R&D) put a noteworthy strain on the map they were loaded into. If you had multiple players doing this at the same time, that load became concerning very quickly.

So, it is an intended feature, and currently working as intended.

That said, we will investigate if it can at least be tuned a bit. The current wait time is, I believe, 5 seconds between processing each completion. There is a chance that we can reduce that window. I can't make any promises, but it will be investigated.

As someone who was kicking up 23 doff assignments and 5 R&D ones every day before this dumb change, I never noticed any problem. Now waiting for:

28 * 5 secs = 140 secs = 2 min 20 seconds

for everything complete is ridiculous.

Kick it down to a second or less each, and we'll all be happy.

Frankly, they probably couldn't figure out the frozen R&D assignments problem and wanted to seem as if the server delay in assignments got fixed and implemented this badly done patch to compensate.

generator88 wrote: »

5 seconds is also consistent with what I've always seems; made the complaints seem silly and petulant, tbh. Borticus, if you'rebstill reading, is there any way to see if there are circumstances that could jack that number up for some people?

Generator

I had to switch maps to space for my KDF toon because kicking off the 5 R&D assignments in Qo'nos was taking me 2 minutes while I waited for the button to be clickable in each school. Once in space, problem solved.

colonelchenchuan

dragonsbrethren wrote: »

Knowing that, I'm perfectly okay with this delay being in place. It's frustrating, but understandable and acceptable. Thanks for letting us know.

no its not acceptable.

the new interface made doffing tedious enough. Now I log into the game and go smoke for 5 minutes while all that TRIBBLE processes. And it had to do it in a ceartain order so if you just want to deal with R&D you have to wait until it gets to those

colonelchenchuan

raeat wrote: »

Hey, Askray. Instead of editing my posts because of a few copied lines, why don't you do something semi-useful, like fix the problem my repeated lines were intended to illustrate?

After all, unlike in the game, I didn't repeat the same nonsense interminably.

does he even have a real day job or is he a professional forum nit picker?

bones1970

Yes 23 doff-jobs + 5 r&d x 14 alts is a pain (140 x 14 = 1960 sec waiting)

decker73a

If the delay is to improve server stability for all players on a map then perhaps the delay could scale with the number of players. That way a player could load into a starship interior or fleet star base and speed up assignment completion.

gulberat

borticuscryptic wrote: »

I checked with our software engineers to see if this behavior was a bug, or intended. What I learned was that this new behavior was introduced as a means to improve server stability for all players on a map.

Without this delay, we found that having a single player container load the completion data for as many as 30 or so different Assignments (including R&D) put a noteworthy strain on the map they were loaded into. If you had multiple players doing this at the same time, that load became concerning very quickly.

So, it is an intended feature, and currently working as intended.

That said, we will investigate if it can at least be tuned a bit. The current wait time is, I believe, 5 seconds between processing each completion. There is a chance that we can reduce that window. I can't make any promises, but it will be investigated.

I can attest to having had severe problems *before* the new DOFF interface came into play. I would also get hit with the same server disconnects in the Exchange before the DOFF fix as well. These problems came to a near stop when the delay was implemented.



I have to say, to the people who are upset, yes, it is a long delay--but I think there are much bigger things that should be attended to first, before messing with this. It's doing its job, unlike some of the loadout, upgrade, Mac client, and controller problems that are directly impacting playability.

raeat

Perhaps it might be possible to set the R&D projects to complete before the other doff missions? Would that have any deleterious effect, because it would sure be helpful?

About confirmation messages, it would be very helpful to to put a setting to skip confirmation messages in the options or even a "double click to auto-confirm" basic setting in the options. I understand that much of this is promoting the background setting, but after the 500th time of that guy asking if you really want to dock as ESD, or (even worse) the Defera Basecamp message, it can be, shall we say, emotionally tasking...

mightybobcnc

raeat wrote: »

Perhaps it might be possible to set the R&D projects to complete before the other doff missions? Would that have any deleterious effect, because it would sure be helpful?

About confirmation messages, it would be very helpful to to put a setting to skip confirmation messages in the options or even a "double click to auto-confirm" basic setting in the options. I understand that much of this is promoting the background setting, but after the 500th time of that guy asking if you really want to dock as ESD, or (even worse) the Defera Basecamp message, it can be, shall we say, emotionally tasking...

Unfortunately they've decided that distinguishing a double click from a single click, or a single click from a ctrl+click, is unimportant for anything other than interacting with inventory/bank items.

welcome2earf

FINALLY A DEV POPPED IN AND SPOKE TO THIS!!! WOOP WOOP!!!!! :P

That said, I think it's time to tone it down; its super niggling and all to often when I'm trying to finish a mission, another completed mission pops up and I end up finishing THAT on me....that may not be an issue, but it is REALLY annoying when I don't want to trigger any of my buffs yet...

Could we try a test of 3 seconds and see how it holds up? Adjust from there?

lucho80

gulberat wrote: »

I can attest to having had severe problems *before* the new DOFF interface came into play. I would also get hit with the same server disconnects in the Exchange before the DOFF fix as well. These problems came to a near stop when the delay was implemented.



I have to say, to the people who are upset, yes, it is a long delay--but I think there are much bigger things that should be attended to first, before messing with this. It's doing its job, unlike some of the loadout, upgrade, Mac client, and controller problems that are directly impacting playability.

I got hit with those when S9 came out. Disabled on demand patching and the game ran smoothly from then on. Frankly, hiking the delay that high was too much and everyone hated it from day 1. A 2 sec or less delay would be better.

abystander0

decker73a wrote: »

If the delay is to improve server stability for all players on a map then perhaps the delay could scale with the number of players. That way a player could load into a starship interior or fleet star base and speed up assignment completion.

I like this idea.

If the issue is the load it puts on a map due to multiple players, then what about instant or quick resolution being enabled for starship interiors or fleet holdings where that shouldn't be an issue? Is that possible? It would make starship interiors more useful in one respect.