Update on Arcane Legends stability issues

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Hello all - I thought I'd take a moment to let you know what steps we're currently taking in order to address the disconnection issues in Arcane Legends that are impacting players. On one hand, we want to fix these issues to the best of our ability, and as quickly as possible. On the other hand, some of these changes are rather invasive, and we want to make sure that our fixes do not create any unintended side-effects that would impact your play experience further. In addition to the disconnect problem, a number of you have noticed that the overall bandwidth usage of the game has steadily increased over time. As you may suspect, these two problems are not unrelated. So without further ado, here's what we've done and what we're working on.

• Server-to-client message buffering - Until recently, the server would send information to the game client multiple times per server frame (any time a game system decided it needed to send a message). We've switched the server to use a buffered mode, meaning that the server will send out messages to the client once per frame. This is a somewhat temporary fix to prevent a lot of the disconnects that we were originally seeing. The deal was that under certain circumstances, the server would send so many individual messages that the client could not acknowledge them quickly enough, leading to disconnects. We were not able to determine whether this inability to keep up with these ACKs was due to some sort of intermediate throttling or a result of overall bandwidth issues, but the easiest (and quickest) solution was to reduce the number of messages.
• Server-only effects - We've done some analysis on the types and numbers of game messages we're sending from the server to the client. This has lead us to give things a once over to ensure that those effects that are purely "logical" rather than having client-facing effects that are marked as server-only. You may have noticed some of the experiments over the past week - cases that we've had to fix where client effects weren't showing up even though the skills were working correctly on the server. We believe we've ironed out most of those issues at this point.
• Mob clusters - The number of enemies in any given fight tends to be a multiplier on the network traffic that has to be sent from the server to the client. When an enemy is impacted by a skill you use, the server has to notify all observing clients of this effect (so that they can display visual effects or overhead text, etc). This means that if you can group up two dozen enemies and you have a full party, the server has to send down lots of data to every nearby player. A solution we're exploring to this is to prevent mobs from grouping up quite as much. This is accomplished by reducing leash ranges and altering the placement of enemy groups so that their ranges don't overlap quite as much. As you can probably guess, this sort of rearrangement has an impact on gameplay, so we're going to be very careful with it. We're going to start with the reorganization of a couple of zones, and push that change out to you guys after it's been through our internal QA process. Once we've received feedback on those changes, we'll measure their effectiveness and (assuming it's a good effect), start making changes to other zones that experience this problem. This will be an ongoing effort, so don't expect every single zone to change at once. We will maintain open communication with you all during this process to measure its impact on overall gameplay as we go.
• Network traffic compression - One reasonably easy way to reduce bandwidth usage is to compress the outgoing traffic from the server. It's not a magic bullet (at least, we're not expecting it to be one), since compression requires additional processing on both the client and server end. There are, however, lightweight compression mechanisms that we're experimenting with. This sort of change will require a new client and it's something we want to be pretty careful with, so it's going to need a hefty QA pass before we can push it out to you all.

I hope that gives you some insight into what steps we're taking to deal with bandwidth issues in general. The next question you might have is, "so when will it be fixed?" As I've mentioned these are pretty invasive changes that will require time to test and deploy. We don't want to be patching up issues with chewing gum and paper clips. So, we will be rolling out changes incrementally as they are ready to go. The short answer is that we will take as long as we need to make sure we're fixing the issue without any further impact on your gameplay, and will make sure to keep you updated along the way. We appreciate your feedback, and especially the efforts that certain players have made such that the problem was brought to our attention in the first place. I'll keep you updated!