Star Trek Online's Lohlunat Festival Now Live | MMORPG.com

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Star Trek Online's Lohlunat Festival Now Live | MMORPG.com

The annual Lohlunat Festival for Star Trek Online is currently underway in the MMORPG until July 31. Take part in the festivities and earn your share of rewards.

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Po_gg

While they say "As for other Risa activities, all of your old favorites from previous years will be returning", they forget to mention there's something new this year... the horrid lag.

I've pretty much participated in every year's Risa since it was introduced, and never had issues with it.

They've seem to wrecked something, as soon as my character sets foot onto the beach of Risa the game starts to stutter, then short freezes, then ultimately crashes to desktop. The whole game is fine and smooth as usual, except that one map.

The new prizes look nice though, and the place is crowded with people - interestingly not everyone has this lag.

There's also a week of Phoenix Prize "event" (one pack for each daily login, the pack has otherwise unavailable items/ships/etc. from previous events.

Also (since most likely won't get an own news piece ), CO has the Patriot event this two weeks.

Unlike the GTA one (which did get an entry...) it covers both, Canada is present in CO as a zone, hence Canada Day, the flag and colors are part of the event and the rewards (vehicles, travel powers, costumes around the two flags).

Sidenote for Mitch (and to the CO ReRoll article), during this event the Tempest Archetype can be unlocked for free. It's electricity-based, with some Thor added into the mix.

foppotee

There's always increased lag during these bigger events every year. The game has been acting up though for the last month or so, as an example, if one is in game & opens up the Zen Store tab the game does stutter about & there has been more disconnects during this last month or so too. Cryptic is pushing out 2 or 3 activities at the same time currently. There's a couple of sales, a zen charge bonus, the super duper vanity shield limited time sale, & Phoenix boxes. STO's economy & currencies are hyper inflated which has only been accentuated by this dilithium exchange market explosion/implosion. STO can still be a fun & good game but troubling times, perhaps depending upon all the gambling that's infested STO is finally catching up.

Po_gg

If only... but that's why I put in there that I've participated in Risa before, actually in most events, and in all 3 games. (sue me, I like in-game events )

It's something beyond the usual lag spikes, SNRs and rubberbanding, also different from the generic crowd-induced lag, sadly.

Smells like one of their annual Risa-related fuckups, you know, like the day/night cycle was, or when they fucked up the entire horizon with the event ship showcase.

This thread might be onto something, since I see the same in the perf logs

https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1262560/unplayable-fps-drops 

Game's running fine everywhere, all CPU cores on equal or similar load, then as soon as I beam down to Risa one core spikes up to 100% while all the rest drop back to about 5% and the lag starts.

If I leave (transwarp to Drozana for instance, to grab the free Phoenix pack ), all cores go back to an evenly shared load.

And it's definitely something new this year, Risa never had this issue in the previous years.

foppotee

I wouldn't be surprised if there was something else besides normal operations with Risa especially with Cryptic. I don't think the servers have been as good every since Cryptic began using that Akamai, misspelled I'm sure, company. Cheapest isn't always best. The day/night thing years ago wasn't a mess-up it was when Cryptic switched it over to Lighting 2.0 & Cryptic said the day/night cycle was a casualty of that "upgrade" but I still wonder if they just didn't want to place the effort since no money in it. It cheapened Risa. I'm definitely getting more lag on Risa, but difficult to evaluate since I only go to Risa once a year lol.

Po_gg

foppotee said:

I wouldn't be surprised if there was something else besides normal operations with Risa especially with Cryptic.

There must be, since it's turned out it ain't even the zone itself (which is available all through the year), it's something they've added with this patch 4 days ago, for the event.

It's mentioned in the thread, and also in chat, but it sounded so stupid I couldn't believe until tested it myself: it's something on the island.

If you look towards the water, no lag, all cores work normally. When you turn around and look towards the island, one core spikes, the rest goes dormant, and slideshow starts. When you turn again towards the water, lag stops and all cores work normally again.

So idiotic it's almost funny...

And yep, Lightning 2.0 adds insult to the injury, since turning it off solves the issue for a lot of people - not to everyone since it's gear dependent, on the single core performance.

With Lightning 2.0 switched off, the idiocy is still there, just with a well enough CPU looking towards the island don't cap out the core (in my case it jumps to about 80-85% while the rest of the cores are almost 0 ), thus at least playable and not a slideshow anymore.

And maybe that's why some players didn't have this issue the first place, their CPUs could handle the single core spike without capping, even with Lightning 2.0 on, so they didn't notice anything.

foppotee

Po_gg said:

foppotee said:

I wouldn't be surprised if there was something else besides normal operations with Risa especially with Cryptic.

There must be, since it's turned out it ain't even the zone itself (which is available all through the year), it's something they've added with this patch 4 days ago, for the event.

It's mentioned in the thread, and also in chat, but it sounded so stupid I couldn't believe until tested it myself: it's something on the island.

If you look towards the water, no lag, all cores work normally. When you turn around and look towards the island, one core spikes, the rest goes dormant, and slideshow starts. When you turn again towards the water, lag stops and all cores work normally again.

So idiotic it's almost funny...

And yep, Lightning 2.0 adds insult to the injury, since turning it off solves the issue for a lot of people - not to everyone since it's gear dependent, on the single core performance.

With Lightning 2.0 switched off, the idiocy is still there, just with a well enough CPU looking towards the island don't cap out the core (in my case it jumps to about 80-85% while the rest of the cores are almost 0 ), thus at least playable and not a slideshow anymore.

And maybe that's why some players didn't have this issue the first place, their CPUs could handle the single core spike without capping, even with Lightning 2.0 on, so they didn't notice anything.

Interesting, I'll have to definitely try-out that looking at the water & looking at the center of the island test. I'll have to check the STO forums too, I'm sure if it's a wide-spread enough issue it will be mentioned there as well.

Po_gg

I tested it after seen the linked video in that linked thread above (fps drop)

It doesn't show the cores just an fps counter. Simply rotating the camera around, fps drops from around 50 to 4 when looking towards the resort, and goes back to 50 as the camera turns away...

(If CPU cores were showing it'd be better, since fps drop can be chalked up simply upon bad GPU or outdated drivers, but that's not the case)