Why do most mmos run like crap?

funcon

Before you say its my pc, I have a GTX 960 card, FX-6100 cpu 8gb ram and win 7. The only smooth running mmo is WoW. SWTOR runs like crap it is not smooth at all and Elder Scrolls Online feels clunky as well. Have you ever tried jumping while mounted in that game? WTF is that? lol

Distopia

TOR can be problematic (due to it's well known engine issues), yet most others don't seem to run poorly to me. ESO runs like butter for the most part on my end. Then again I came up on games like DAOC and pre-cu SWG, now that's clunky ...

Nitth

funcon said:

Before you say its my pc, I have a GTX 960 card, FX-6100 cpu 8gb ram and win 7. The only smooth running mmo is WoW. SWTOR runs like crap it is not smooth at all and Elder Scrolls Online feels clunky as well. Have you ever tried jumping while mounted in that game? WTF is that? lol

Go intel to raise your minimum frame count and reduce frame variance.
It gets rid of the "Choppyness" you can experience on AMD.

funcon

Nitth said:

funcon said:

Before you say its my pc, I have a GTX 960 card, FX-6100 cpu 8gb ram and win 7. The only smooth running mmo is WoW. SWTOR runs like crap it is not smooth at all and Elder Scrolls Online feels clunky as well. Have you ever tried jumping while mounted in that game? WTF is that? lol

Go intel to raise your minimum frame count and reduce frame variance.
It gets rid of the "Choppyness" you can experience on AMD.

Iv'e been thinking of going Intel. I would need a mobo and cpu. What mobo/cpu combo would you recommend me?

FrodoFragins

Companies that try to save money/time by using other peoples engines often run into performance issues.  SWTOR used an early version of the crappy HERO engine.  Marvel Heroes uses the Unreal Engine which was not developed for ARPGs.  Both games gave me terrible performance until I upgraded my machine, while plenty of other games gave my old machine no problems.  Getting an SSD is imperative these days, and making sure you have enough memory and a good processor help.

Games that have homegrown engines often are better able to optimize them since they were designed for the game and they know it intimately.

moosecatlol

One acronym: SSD

Wizardry

Well Wow is pretty much the lowest poly game in the market,so it had better not only run VERY well on your machine but on 10 year old machines as well.

The simple truth is developers are not putting in the proper effort anywhere in their game designs.So to think they would properly design and layout a map and make sure it does not lag anywhere is a very far stretch.

It is not the game engines,it is the developers.You can look no further than FFXIV,matter of fact FFXIV should be the game most look at for various reasons.That game came out of the gate with terrible performance and yes it was RUSHED like most every game is.Well after they put in the proper effort it ran great,my old machine had no business even running that game and yet i could play around 30 fps.

What makes it even more sad is i see almost every game using VERY short view distances,you can really see how low quality the graphics get at a very short distance.Then 90% of these games have no business lagging EVER,they are very low poly games and MOST of the time are single player designs,so yo udon't even have a group of players all clustered together.

Long story short, C rated game developers  pretending to be triple A game designers.

Nitth

Wizardry said:

Well Wow is pretty much the lowest poly game in the market,so it had better not only run VERY well on your machine but on 10 year old machines as well.

The simple truth is developers are not putting in the proper effort anywhere in their game designs.So to think they would properly design and layout a map and make sure it does not lag anywhere is a very far stretch.

It is not the game engines,it is the developers.You can look no further than FFXIV,matter of fact FFXIV should be the game most look at for various reasons.That game came out of the gate with terrible performance and yes it was RUSHED like most every game is.Well after they put in the proper effort it ran great,my old machine had no business even running that game and yet i could play around 30 fps.

What makes it even more sad is i see almost every game using VERY short view distances,you can really see how low quality the graphics get at a very short distance.Then 90% of these games have no business lagging EVER,they are very low poly games and MOST of the time are single player designs,so yo udon't even have a group of players all clustered together.

Long story short, C rated game developers  pretending to be triple A game designers.

I cant agree.

Designers and Developers are not responsible for the performance of "their" game. They are responsible for putting in all the little rocks and plants ect.

Engineers are responsible for how well their clients preform. some engineers could just be incompetent but i would speculate that more than likely they are "victims" of complicated, well hidden bugs and software behaviors that were not intended within their engines. 

If you notice the case with FF14, There was a major difference in visual fidelity in their 2.0 relaunch which seems to me their engine couldn't handle those large textures that 1.0 had. so yes there was some incompetence and or bad design decisions done with the engine.


This topic makes me think of wildstar personally, I often think how in the world they could have such a badly preforming engine for "what it is" graphically.

cameltosis

There are two underlying things that are controlled by the developers that have massive influence on game performance:

1) Game Engine - Deals with combat calculations, physics etc etc
2) Graphics Engine - Renders the results of the game engine into something visually pleasing


Developing game engines and graphics engines is extremely difficult. As in, ridiculously difficult. Not only do you have to be able to program the functionality (what happens when you jump etc), it has to be done in the most efficient way possible (i.e. top notch coding standards) and it has to interact with 1000s of possible device drivers to get the best possible performance. 

Given how difficult this task is, most companies can't hire people good enough to build their own engines, so they either have to customise existing engines or use out-of-the-box engines. The result is usually an engine that is functional but inefficiently coded, resulting in reduced performance. With most engines on the market being developed for single player / console games, this means a lot of the engines that get used for MMOs just aren't fit for purpose. 

Then, you have Intel vs AMD. Intel, due to bribing PC makers for decades, have a massive market share. This has resulted in game developers optimising their games for Intel first, then AMD. So, Wildstar at launch for example ran like utter crap on AMD machines but OK on Intel. It took them a few months to get round to optimising for AMD. 

On top of that, you have the added pressure of MMOs themselves. Generally larger worlds with more players and more calculations needed result in reduced performance anyway. 



Finally, theres the cost. It can take millions to improve the efficiency of your game and graphics engines, but its not something you can market easily. So, management usually decide to spend the money on new, marketable features. 



I agree that its frustrating. For me personally, the most frustrating thing about it is that it prevents most MMOs for implementing "massive" features. The never ending drive for better graphics and more complicated systems has resulted in reduced possibility for content design as the engines just can't cope with massive features, such as large scale raids and pvp, truely massive/open worlds etc. 

scorpex-x

Mainly because once the game is out players expect new content and paying for optimization is money wasted.  It is also impossible to get an mmo to run as well as a single player game because they can't limit how many players you see, on a single player game they can control everything.

Once the game is out they make more money by making new content instead of fixing the engine.  As gamers we are to blame for it, an MMO making the game run well leads to less player retention that putting out more new stuff.

From my experience korean MMO titles are the worst for this (blade and soul, black desert and Tera to name a few) because Korea is a market dominated by net cafe gamers and they all have more or less the same builds and parts of PCs in those.  As such they build and optimize the engine mainly for those and so when it comes to the western market where they get a horrible experience, unless its close to what the pc cafe titles have.

makasouleater69

funcon said:

Before you say its my pc, I have a GTX 960 card, FX-6100 cpu 8gb ram and win 7. The only smooth running mmo is WoW. SWTOR runs like crap it is not smooth at all and Elder Scrolls Online feels clunky as well. Have you ever tried jumping while mounted in that game? WTF is that? lol

You do understand that a 960 gtx, and fx 6100 is a low end computer right? The fx 6100, is almost as low end as you can get for gaming, and the 960, is the lowest end new nvidia card you can get, with only 2gbs of v ram, which minus swtor, would be maxed out at 1080. The 960, i doubt would even run skyrim at max settings. 

But, as for those games your talking about, SWTOR, and elderscrolls online, i ran them both with no graphics card, on a intel i5 3570k, so I don't see how you are saying they are clunky. 

Nitth

DMKano said:

Aori said:

Because engineers are young and hired cheap then tossed away like trash. You get what you pay for.

The drivel has no end.

Name one young game server engineer that is a lead for netcode at ANY major game studio?

Heck name one that has less than 5 years of experience.....

People write the sillest of things

Willing to bet there are many engineers on the CLIENT SIDE that are young and inexperienced. Because you know, performance in this context is a client side issue and not latency.

Phry

Nitth said:

DMKano said:

Aori said:

Because engineers are young and hired cheap then tossed away like trash. You get what you pay for.

The drivel has no end.

Name one young game server engineer that is a lead for netcode at ANY major game studio?

Heck name one that has less than 5 years of experience.....

People write the sillest of things

Willing to bet there are many engineers on the CLIENT SIDE that are young and inexperienced. Because you know, performance in this context is a client side issue and not latency.

No, i think DMKano pretty much called it.
But this thread reminds me of an age old programming quote, 'Garbage in Garbage out'.

Axehilt

scorpex-x said:

Mainly because once the game is out players expect new content and paying for optimization is money wasted.  It is also impossible to get an mmo to run as well as a single player game because they can't limit how many players you see, on a single player game they can control everything.

From personal experience in non-MMO development, paying for optimization improvements is actually fairly lucrative.  It raises the quality bar on the overall experience for everyone, and allows lower-end systems to be capable of playing the game, and these things translate into player retention, which usually means higher revenue.

It's not something you can implement instantly, and there are diminishing returns to it (and depending on your overall architecture you might hit those sooner than you'd like) but it was definitely seen as worth it from a monetary standpoint on the teams I've worked on.

carotid

moosecatlol said:

One acronym: SSD

That's only for loading faster. SSD's have nothing to do with video FPS.

Avanah

funcon said:

Nitth said:

funcon said:

Before you say its my pc, I have a GTX 960 card, FX-6100 cpu 8gb ram and win 7. The only smooth running mmo is WoW. SWTOR runs like crap it is not smooth at all and Elder Scrolls Online feels clunky as well. Have you ever tried jumping while mounted in that game? WTF is that? lol

Go intel to raise your minimum frame count and reduce frame variance.
It gets rid of the "Choppyness" you can experience on AMD.

Iv'e been thinking of going Intel. I would need a mobo and cpu. What mobo/cpu combo would you recommend me?

My BF and I just built me a new PC....

NOTE: I did not get the parts from site listed in Links. It's just a great site to compare builds and compatabilities. Prices differ from place to place.

1. CPU: i5 6600k (Does not come with stock cooler) See # 2.
2. CPU Cooler: Hyper EVO 212 
3. Motherboard: Gigabyte Z170 UD5
4. RAM: Crucial 16Gb DDR4 2133
5. Boot/OS Drive: Samsung EVO 850 250GB
6. Data/Games Drive: Samsung EVO 850 500GB
7. GPU: EVGA GTX 980ti DDR5 
8. Case: Fractal Design R5
9. PSU: Corsair 750W CX750M 
10. Fans: 2x Noctua Fans 120mm (One for CPU cooler, other to add to front of Case)
11. Monitor: Acer 1440p 25" (First time ever trying out anything past 1080p).
12. Windows 7 64

Playing The Witcher 3 atm on Ultra @1440p without a hint of slowdown.
Love my new PC.

Edit: Back on topic....I don't play MMOs atm. Too many hateful, entitled, immature people and repetition and the Single player games that are coming out are great. 

I still need to play GTA5, Assassins Creed Syndicate (Came free with GPU), Fallout 4 soon.
And I just started Witcher 3 yesterday so I have lots to play.

Flyte27

Windows is a quirky operating system.  Dealing with open hardware can also be an issue.  One GTX 960 may not work as well as another.  One motherboard, CPU, or RAM might not work as well as another. 

Using Windows for more than just gaming can have an impact.  So can all the different directx and C++ runtime software that install when you launch a game for the first time.  The drivers for you various hardware can all have an impact.

I usually do a clean install of Windows every once if things start to slow down or act weird.  It often helps if you can afford to do so.

I've used all variants of Windows to this point and am currently using Windows 10 for gaming.  So far it's been fairly good to me.  I haven't really had any major issues since Windows 7.  I find Windows 7 actually seems to be by far the slowest of the three in terms of downloading and installing updates.  It has the cleanest and simplest interface though and that's why people like it.  Windows 10 has better support for new hardware IMO.  It also has much better DPI scaling if you have your computer hooked up to a TV.

Most MMOs should run fine on your setup.  They generally don't take a lot of power to run aside from internet bandwidth.